I figured out the game is only really playable with cheats and even WITH cheats it's more tedious and buggy than other games.
I've got no idea why so many quests don't progress in their stages even if one has done everything that's listed under requirements. Yesterday I started using cheats and just upped the progression manually when something wouldn't climb after I've done it.
I find the game's quest design really bad, unnecessarily over-complicated and not much fun. There's so much repetition, one rarely knows what to do next. Good game design lets you explore the world organically, with ingame hints, things that naturally make sense and just connect.
In this game you're basically just going back and forth between your phone and the progress list, in order to figure out what to do next, it feels more like working off a list of chores instead of just enjoying a game.
I mean after all, this is not a professional game designer, so mistakes happen and they need to learn things with their games. Not blaming them for it. The art is wonderful. But the vehicle for the game is terrible, and it doesn't even add something nice in return for its overcomplicated setup. It's just annoying without any benefit.
I'm inclined to agree, this game was a hassle and a half to grind up the affection points and progress each stage of each character. Without any guidance other than the phone menu, most people would get completely lost because there's few hints (or only one hint that you can easily skip over and can't go back and read) or, most of the time, no hints whatsoever about what to do next with a character without needing to refer to a guide. For the flags that give no hints, it requires the player to visit each area at every hour and pray there is a cutscene trigger; for example, it took me a long while to figure out the River Peeping scene, even with help from the Phone's Events page. Throwing everything into the phone in such a convoluted format is simply terrible, I really don't know how anyone can defend this aspect.
It honestly wouldn't be
that bad if:
a) scenes can be skipped if they were already viewed (preferred solution) OR the transition delay between each scene could be heavily reduced with a hotkey (for example: holding space already speeds up the animation, but it's not by much and some animation loops take "forever and some change" before moving to the next scene, like Elphaba's final scene as of v0.2.7.1 Bugfix),
b) movement speed was much faster; make walking speed = current running speed, and running speed = 300% current running speed -- necessitating the need for the teleport via the cheat menu is just a large annoyance,
c) get rid of flag requirements where cutscenes/triggers need to be viewed on specific days (with exception to weekdays vs. weekends); a minor nuisance but it's just a very unnecessary complexity
d) make characters more available in general, there absolutely shouldn't be a need for me to create an abomination like this just to keep track of everything:
That's kinda why I like the ebb and flow of Bones' Tales and Urban Demons where there's only a handful of time periods that make up a day, it's just a very simple design.
Anyway, my game is stuck here after Pixie's Morning Wrath and I don't have a clue what's causing it or how to get around it (I've done everything I could think of) and I've run out of patience because it's blocking a Pixie flag for me so it's impossible for me to progress. I haven't seen anyone reply with a fix in this thread when other people ran into the same issue, so I guess I'm S.O.L. until the dev bugfixes this (assuming they know about it, of course).
