TLDR: 2 stars instead of one because the bulk of the story, the characters and their relationships is really, and I mean really, good. But the minority of choices, especially in the altered ending is such a massive disservice to them it ruins virtually the whole thing.
I mean A for effort and good intentions I guess with this attempt at refining the original Calisto
But F- for being in any way on the same page with players as to what actually needed improved and what constituted improvement vs a degradation of the original.
Biggest plus, dev eventually added a walkthrough toggle for the right choices to be highlighted but it isn’t comprehensibly implemented and is notably missing from a notorious mini game choice sequence on a central plot line.
The next noteworthy improvement is a partial remedy of what many saw as a problem with the original in that the standard game play format comes after a lengthy prologue and is an abrupt shift in mechanics and game play that leaves many feeling they are playing something different than what they signed up for. This one gets to the standard game more quickly, but the shift is no less abrupt and comes through a choice game that completely fucks with the players (if you played the original you know that right choice already but you aren’t allowed to make it until you make all the wrong choices) and a minigame that purportedly makes sense if you race bikes but otherwise is unsolvable without a walkthrough or much frustration.
After that there are a mixed mostly negative bag of minor differences in plot. Again, I could applaud this effort. It adds a different beginning, rounds out a couple of minor interactions that originally never progressed, adds one scene that feels appropriate to the game and totally changes the ending.
But apart from the minor rounding out character interactions, every one of these goes awry and in multiple confounding and counterproductive ways that more than offset any benefit.
Take the alternate beginning. It relies on some ginned up Frankenstein animation with a character named Tiffany because dev says he didn’t have access to all of the original resources. That’s forgivable until you see that he later pulls a quality animation from further on in the game and pastes it into a different context. Similar animations of Tiffany are available to be used in the same way for the beginning scene, but update after update even as he tries to improve the original scene he never takes the same approach. So it not only negatively represents the later quality of the game it does so needlessly and at the cost of greater effort.
The scene he adds in the middle is in line with what players clearly wanted, but, apart from being a valiant but wanting effort to match the technical and aesthetic quality of the original, he chooses to follow it up by having the characters drone on about how it was a terrible idea, that everyone regrets it, and how nothing like that could ever happen again, and continues this dogged assertion across multiple discontinuous settings.
Or the altered ending, where his response to players vocalizing dissatisfaction with the available choices of ending in the original, is to provide zero choice and force an ending that comes out of left field and is worse for almost every character, especially MC.
The original had a lot of untapped potential, neglecting many threads while adding spurious new ones and had and ending options that frustrated fans. This one doesn't martially improve any of that and most noticeable changes just make it worse.
I mean A for effort and good intentions I guess with this attempt at refining the original Calisto
But F- for being in any way on the same page with players as to what actually needed improved and what constituted improvement vs a degradation of the original.
Biggest plus, dev eventually added a walkthrough toggle for the right choices to be highlighted but it isn’t comprehensibly implemented and is notably missing from a notorious mini game choice sequence on a central plot line.
The next noteworthy improvement is a partial remedy of what many saw as a problem with the original in that the standard game play format comes after a lengthy prologue and is an abrupt shift in mechanics and game play that leaves many feeling they are playing something different than what they signed up for. This one gets to the standard game more quickly, but the shift is no less abrupt and comes through a choice game that completely fucks with the players (if you played the original you know that right choice already but you aren’t allowed to make it until you make all the wrong choices) and a minigame that purportedly makes sense if you race bikes but otherwise is unsolvable without a walkthrough or much frustration.
After that there are a mixed mostly negative bag of minor differences in plot. Again, I could applaud this effort. It adds a different beginning, rounds out a couple of minor interactions that originally never progressed, adds one scene that feels appropriate to the game and totally changes the ending.
But apart from the minor rounding out character interactions, every one of these goes awry and in multiple confounding and counterproductive ways that more than offset any benefit.
Take the alternate beginning. It relies on some ginned up Frankenstein animation with a character named Tiffany because dev says he didn’t have access to all of the original resources. That’s forgivable until you see that he later pulls a quality animation from further on in the game and pastes it into a different context. Similar animations of Tiffany are available to be used in the same way for the beginning scene, but update after update even as he tries to improve the original scene he never takes the same approach. So it not only negatively represents the later quality of the game it does so needlessly and at the cost of greater effort.
The scene he adds in the middle is in line with what players clearly wanted, but, apart from being a valiant but wanting effort to match the technical and aesthetic quality of the original, he chooses to follow it up by having the characters drone on about how it was a terrible idea, that everyone regrets it, and how nothing like that could ever happen again, and continues this dogged assertion across multiple discontinuous settings.
Or the altered ending, where his response to players vocalizing dissatisfaction with the available choices of ending in the original, is to provide zero choice and force an ending that comes out of left field and is worse for almost every character, especially MC.
The original had a lot of untapped potential, neglecting many threads while adding spurious new ones and had and ending options that frustrated fans. This one doesn't martially improve any of that and most noticeable changes just make it worse.
