Who in the hell thought that using Dollar Store Geralt of Rivia for multiple voice-over narration was a good idea?
What was the thinking there? That 'quality' is a transitive property, and if you can get someone to gargle hot asphalt for your narration, they'd somehow transfer the audience's positive association of The Witcher III to this game? Instead, every time I hear that voice, I'm just remined how much worse this is than any of The Witcher games. If you don't have the actual chops to stand on your own, it is a terrible idea to invite such association, because you will only end up seemingly like the lesser of the two in that comparison.
Not that it's the only thing wrong, not by a long shot. Seeing the main menu, I suspected I was in for a mess of atrocious graphic design; and I was not wrong. Someone who thinks that gothic/old-English lettering made out of liquid mercury and sprinkled with random sparkles is clearly just more fascinated with using dumb overlays and filters in Photoshop, than they are in making anything that is actually aesthetically pleasing or even legible. There is exactly one instance where you can get away with that shit, and it is for the name/logo of a certain stripe of metal bands. So unless this game is a secret death-metal album, knock that shit out.
That is doubled down when you start the game and the first screen you see that isn't just a blank background, where you see black text with a white outline is then shown overtop an ugly and visually busy 'logo' screen. Not only that, but the text we are meant to be reading overlays other text in the background logo, making it an absolute shit-show for readability. This could have been fixed with a less awful and textless background image or use of a shaded text-box to help isolate the text from the background noise. But no, they cared more about showing off the ugly logo and cursive text rather than presenting something you could read without eye-strain.
Then the Wish.com Geralt narration starts, and right there it nearly had me quit out. I really should have, it would have saved me some time.
The first time the audience is presented with a character who is actually talking (to themselves, or in their own head), there is no punctuation. Outside the occasional comma or question mark, you never get any; periods are for the weak. This entire game is seemingly one long run-on sentence. Also the text has inverted, being now white with a black outline over a largely white background, because again readability is for losers. Also random and entirely inappropriate lens flares, because fuck it, why not? Again, it speaks to a very immature development mentality, one where they're tossing in random things because they can and not because they should or because they are appropriate.
We're literally introduced to a character, they wax poetic about the 'meaning of life' (cause that's what smart people do, right?), then BAM! Black screen with text, telling us explicitly that what we are about to see is not just a flashback, but the specific flashback of the death of this character's parents (the narration literally refers to the flashback as a 'scene'). Way to torpedo any suspense, and undermine the point of the whole flashback, by just giving away the conclusion before you've even started. Bravo. Marvelously bad storytelling. Also, hot asphalt gargling man makes his third narrative return and I want to die...
It never stops. The lighting is awful. Every scene is blown out and over exposed. Every room seemingly has no roof or is all skylights. The protagonist is the exact same model and hair as the mother in Milfy City from over 5 years ago, making this look like a game frozen in time. I'm left wondering if they picked that model, much like their narrator, seemingly again with the hope that quality and success are transitive properties (I personally think that game was crap, but it does have a lot of patrons). The posing is bad, with characters 'grabbing' stuff with the flat of their hands, or frequently staring off into the middle distance with a blank expression. Excessive use of those flat cut-out 'pre-rendered' background extras, that are used so often and close to the camera they're super easy to spot; their mismatched pre-baked lighting only further emphasizing how much they don't actually belong in any scene they show up in.
Guess what? Their use of music isn't any better. Getting the 'shut up, and sit down' drop for the track used to great effect in Our Red String for highlighting and contextualizing the super kinky dom/sub sex scenes, is here being used over a boring exposition dump about the city (including 3 sentences in a row that literally start with 'The city is') and it is fucking surreal.
Then you learn that the family is independently wealthy through cryptocurrency. That's not how that works. The people who actually made money on crypto are those who already had it, the venture capitalist whales who could buy in early and hard with the express purpose of getting a return on their investment, getting their money out and back into real currency. Nobody who was living a paycheck-to-paycheck subsistence and tossed all of their remaining funds into crypto during the boom as a means to escape poverty actually did so. Those are the kind of people who were the 'dump' part of uncounted 'pump & dump' scams. They were the ones holding out for their lambo as their coin of choice went 'to the moon'. They were the ones on countless Discords telling each other they're all going to make it so long as they all had 'diamond hands'. They were the serial bag holders, who were left with worthless coins when the bubble burst. If you don't want money to ever be a problem, just make them rich. If you want them to have been formerly poor, just say they won the lottery; it would better explain incredulous people with no financial sense bumbling into wealth.
Then Maive gets home and it's more white text overtop of a white carpet and a white tile floor! Remember folks: legibility is for the weak. At that point I was just skipping through the rest, seeing if it ever got better. Nope. It's super contrived and cliché scenes (masturbation 'help', touchy gym instructor, rub on sunscreen, strip poker, etc.), all involving women with bimbo proportions. The only choice is 'yes' to see content, or no to skip it, but skip enough times and then you're effectively locked out as you fall behind the required amount of points. There aren't alternate scenes or paths (past the card game, seemingly the only time you're actually given any meaningful choice for content), just needlessly skipping the only content that is there; making every choice a false choice. The option is not A or B, it is A or Not A; there is no B.
It's not offensively bad, but it's still bad. From what I saw, it's not AI generated (at least the renders, don't know about the voice overs). It didn't appear to be overtly racist or click-baity, nor does MTL seem to be involved. But what is there, still isn't very good. I'd give it a D, because while it might cover the bare minimum needed to pass the class, it is still so bafflingly bad only a mother could care to hang it up on their fridge.
