9.7 hours played
Written 6 years ago
Update:
Kept playing and luckily the game got a bit better as it progressed beyond half-way point. Certain parts of the story were fun to play, but as a whole it seemed to be a bit all over the place at times. I was impressed by the arkwork from start to finish, and some of the added characters later in the story were very amusing. I never had any bugs or technical issues which is always good.
The only real dissapointment was the user interface which felt polished yet lacking in many ways. The fact that there's no highlighting or cursor indication of interactable objects is so frustrating since you have to click on literally everything to find something that you can pick-up. And to make matters worse on that point, it's one of those point&clicks where you can unsuccessfully attempt to pick-up an item, but after reaching a certain point in the game then it's suddenly interactable so lots of re-clicking lots of things. In general I found the interactions to be very lacking in quality/polish compared to the rest of the game, particularly from a user feedback perspective. There were also other minor annoyances like not being able to skip dialog or thought bubbles (in particular when too many thought bubbles only say "..." or "?").
I'd try to get it on sale but it's worth giving a try so long as the above issues don't bother you.
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So I love point&click games, but this one feels like it's missing a lot of polish in certain areas; perhaps rather than "polish", it's closer to lacking certain depth to prevent the game from becoming dull/bothersome. It's actually an alright game so far, primarily due to the graphics design which feels very fresh (enough for brief periods where i'll forget the cons). It uses some short cutscenes spliced in here and there which have nice animation and sound. Also, I haven't noticed any bugs with the game which is always nice; it seems to work as intended without issue.
The reason that I can't enjoy this game is the interactions are severely lacking and the user interface leaves much to be desired. There's almost no visual/audible cues when interacting with the environment; for example, when picking up an item, it's usually dead silent with instantaneous moving of the item to inventory so there was a few brief times where I wasn't even sure if I picked-up something. There's no cursor changes for anything in the environment (no icon to indicate that you can talk to someone, interact with an object, etc) so you have a normal pointer cursor the entire time while clicking wildly to find items which feels like macro pixel hunting. When attempting to find a clickable/interactable object, your character walks to every item you click as if nothing is there so you're constantly forced to walk around back and forth. There's no normal point&click interactions like hovering your items to see descriptions which is a typical example of the kinds of functionality missing from this game. Another small annoying is the fact that you have to click your inventory menu to open it and it's a bit slow on the animation too.
Honestly though for $10, especially if on sale, it may be something worth picking up to you if the above cons don't bother you in these kind of games. There's definitely a lot of work that went into the game, and what features it does have are as polished as they can be for what it is.