Hi there folks,
I just wanted to clarify a couple of points in case they weren't clear in the review. I'm not looking for a lot of back-and-forth here. I wrote the review after putting in a lot of time to work through it. I perhaps should have spent more time writing it but I was fresh off a 16 hour session with it where I finally tried to edit the files.
First clarification: I played the first 35 or so hours vanilla. I added the cheats in the last few hours to try to find some content I hadn't seen before.
Second: I read the help screen/tutorial. I read the Discord info and I read the (outdated) walkthrough. I appeciated what info I could get from those. I know people like to say RTFM. Honestly, I tried. I think I understand the game ok now but there's so much hidden information from the player that it is difficult to really get a good strategy for how to attack it.
Third: I know it's in development. I know it has promise. I'm reviewing the current state. If everything I wrote is different in the future... I'll happily delete or update the review. On F95, all reviews have to be of current state. How can I review that which does not exist?
Minor Quibble: One can't 'admit' to using a cheat on a personal non-competitive game. One can cheat on a test but this is really not the same.
So, I'll accept a little ad hominem from the responses as... being pretty tired... I was probably too harsh with some of my word choices. For example, I forgot to say... the developer is responsive and his work is great and his game concepts a break from the repetitive stuff out there. I wouldn't be doing the Patreon thing otherwise.
But I was reviewing the game, as it stands along with a pattern of grindy design decisions by this particular dev.
I've just read a review of this and while I agree with certain parts, the rest of it seems to mewling for a super easy mode.
Mewling? Ouch. I mean... There is a happy middle between easy mode and holy crap these women are simply slow on the uptake. I mean... This obviously isn't reality and most games tend to be too low effort on the players part. But this is the other extreme. If a son had 30-50 different conversations with mom where they brought up incest, porn, nude photography, etc... you'd think at some point mom would realize there was a message here.
I think we can agree that 1 bullet in a magazine is too low a limit and a million bullets in a civilian magazine is too many. I'm looking for something significantly lower than the developer is currently targeting.
... Again, mewling for easy mode.
Am I asking for more reward for along the progression path? Yes. How to do this? I made suggestions. Easy mode? Come on. Interaction values could be doubled or more and the game would still be grindy as I see it.
Also complains about how hard money is to come by in this game. He should work on the tree that gets him the Streamer job. Much better than mowing the grass one day per week.
I'm going to suggest you search up YouTube
Magic: the Gathering: Twenty Years, Twenty Lessons Learned. It's a good discussion of game design. In specific, I want to point out lesson 13: Make the fun part also the correct strategy to win.
"It's not the players job to find the fun it is your job as a game designer to put the fun where they can't help but find it because when players sit down to a game there's an implied promise from the game designer the game designer says if you do what the game tells you to do it will be an enjoyable experience so the players will do whatever the game tells them to achieve the desired goal usually to win even if that isn't fun they'll do it and when the game is done if the players didn't have fun they will blame the game and rightfully so because you the designer have messed up you have not delivered on the promise
... fun cannot be tangental it has to be the core component of your game experience ...
you see how your audience is playing the game and sometimes they go the wrong path they don't do what you expect them to do well guess what if they find unfun parts of your game you put them there"
Then complains about how the controls are split between sides. If you ask me having half on one side and half on the other is preferable to having the all down one side.
This is really a quality of life issue. It's more about the way controls are grouped, how they shift around the screen, how they interact. So, i'll give you an example of what I am referring to. In the bedroom, the sleep button (which has a confirmation page) is in the same location on the screen as the clean button for many of the rooms. When you are grinding for hours and hours, it is very easy to try to hit the sleep button and instead accidentally clean a room. This type of UI issue causes me to a lot more reloading than I would like to... not because I made a strategic mistake, but because I fumbled on the UI. I already covered the issues with lack of quick save/load and putting the option in an awkward location.
I'd advise everybody read the latest review. By the end I was laughing about how much whining he does in favour of making the game super easy. He doesn't actually say this, but that's basically what it all amounts to. And seems to think everybody plays this with their wrists and elbows.
Hmm... I'm not sure what that means. Do most people not use mice? I could use any number of input devices.... but the
point was the game is requiring simply too many actions.
You can laugh if you'd like. I really wanted to like this game and put in a lot of effort to try to find the fun.
Criticising the UI holds no weight when he proposes something infinitely uglier which would cause the player to misclick far more than they do now.
Whinges about how Save/Load is buried under two menus. Click phone, click Save/Load, click save or load. What's the problem here? He's right on the number of clicks but he's wrong about it being a problem.
Display delays, he says, should be user-configurable. Not bad, but he says that a forced delay of 1 second is a problem. 1 fucking second is a problem. Riiiiiiiiiiiight.
Now you've just lost me. So, my opinion is laughable and whiny... but your opinion about how you might misclick is not?
PS: Those one second delays are multiplied thousands of times in the game. They add up to huge amounts of real time where I am only seeing the exact same cut scene or wose... continue button. Every second I am bored or frustrated is another second that I'm not having fun. I'm surprised you could read my entire review and not understand I'm saying there's too many little things and a huge multiplier of the amount of grind.
He admits to expecting some grind but goes on to complain about HOW MUCH grind there is. And admits to cheating all skills up to 600.
What is with this "admits" thing? Its a game not a trial. I tried to explain my expectations and how the game isn't meeting them. You're basically making assumptions about my intelligence and understanding of software development, UI design and game theory. I'm trying to help the developer make a better game or inform other people of what is in it so they can make informed choices about what they are getting into.
FFS, I wish people would stop reviewing things when it's basically just started.
You'd have to take that up with F95 I guess. There's a review feature. We obviously can only review a game that is and not a game that will be. I have to ask this question though; If you think alpha games shouldn't be reviewed... then why in the world would you go into that section to read them? That seems kind of silly to me.
I have made the conscious choice not to edit the review in response to this post. I will update it when I next look at the game. It wouldn't change anything anyway.. if you look at the reviews : all of the 5 stars are short and about the games potential. The other reviews contain more substantive opinions. And for the record... I'm not the first person to mention the grind, the UI issues or the lack of findable content. I just documented (I hope) to be other aspects with some ideas to improve it.
