It's irrelevant because it's not the WT's presentation that I was talking about. It's the logic of the relationship between the options that is convoluted. The WT simply confirmed it.
That has nothing to do with my criticism at all though. Trying to be realistic with the personalities/agenda is not something that means it must be presented in a convoluted way.
For example, to get the boxing invite by Chris, you must pick "Make smalltalk" during her free time. But the way the options are presented it's in the order of "Complain about the crew", "Ask about the mission", "Make smalltalk", "Nothing" in which that if you don't pick "Make smalltalk" first, then it's gone. But if you pick "Make smalltalk" first, then the other options are still available. The way it's presented simply doesn't make sense.
Looks like we'll agree to disagree, then.
When you mention Chris' options "Ask about the mission" and "Make smalltalk", did you tell Chris things she might not like to hear? Our skipper can be quite the petulant child, and if you did scorn her in any way, she'll just treat you as hostile and refuse to talk things further. If you were nice to her, you get the option to make small talk with the lady. That's why I said it was trying to feel "real", people don't like it when you badmouth them or their friends.
I know, I know, you said it seems convoluted, and I tend to agree with you that when I tried the game at first, I thought so as well. The point I'm merely trying to make is, once I tried to think of the characters as real people, I stopped clicking on dialog options just to advance in the story and instead started to take their feelings into account. The game became a lot easier to follow afterward.
Of course, it's not perfect, as there's only a handful of choices, so it's far from realistic, but I'd rather play games like this one that other games I won't name where you can have the same bit of badly written dialog again and again until your roommate starts to munch on your dick.
Let's take a look at the very first options in the game, when meeting Sarah. The choices are meant to show what kind of character the MC is. But for some reason, it already somehow affected Sarah's points. This is done blindly without knowing what kind of character Sarah is. If she's too casual, is it really bad to be more firm with her? If I play along, is that something that will make her have no respect to me? We simply don't know. And ultimately, we have no idea either how big those choices affected things.
Well, this example actually works in favor of my point. The MC can either be a dick or a smooth guy. This is your choice as a player to make a good or bad first impression, and of course Sarah will judge the MC in consequence. IRL, when you act like a dick the first time you see someone, it will impact the way they see you, independently of the reason behind your behaviour. I dare say the lack of foreseeable consequences is a gamedesign point.
Just like the others I replied to, you are missing the point of my criticism. Yes choices matter. My criticism is that the choices are presented in a convoluted way that the game simply lacks clarity. It's great for "choose whatever you want and roll with it" (which is my original playstyle) but it's bad for "oh damn I missed something, and now I have no idea how to find it without looking at walkthrough" (which is my criticism).
(...)
Basically my criticism is about the lack of clarity in design. If you bake a cake and it came out wrong, you'd know what to fix. Cake is too sweet? Use less sugar next time. Cake is burnt? Take it out of the oven earlier or lower the temperature of the oven. And so on. With this game, if you miss something at the end of the chapter, you might not know how to fix it without consulting the walkthrough.
Well my friend, this might be where the problem resides. The player is not meant to discover EVERYTHING during the first playthrough. It's perfectly normal not to see all the scenes, and most big scenes are mutually exclusive anyway (go with Chris' or Annie's plan in the first chapter, go see Sarah or Annie in the second, etc.). Nottravis wanted the player to experiment as the MC lives things instead of just giving you evident choices. And the MC, as well as the player, does not have every bit of information about the other characters. I would go as far as
decided to use even go want to do look more like saying the "convoluted" choices are a core part of the game design.
tl;dr you make valid points, but if you try playing the game not as a porn game but a visual novel, it does get better
