Let's start at the beginning, the game is bad. Not awful, not terrible, just bad.
The story is simple enough. A workaholic woman meets a free spirited one, they fall in love, they have some adventures together, the both grow as people a bit an they live happily ever after, or at least until they die. Well, at least that's what I expected from premise, but no this game has bigger ambitions.
But first lets talk about the general stuff. The visuals are, well, cheap. The backgrounds are all stock photos scrubbed clean from any copyrighted or trademarked material, which is, to be honest, kind of funny. The original art assets are simple, but competent professional works, nothing that really sticks out. The voice work is actually the beast aspect of the game, the voices are well chosen, the performances are solid and the emotions seem to mach the text. And the music is, again, competent, it serves it's purpose, but not something I would listen to on it's own. And I'm not sure it's counts as country, even though most of the tracks are guitar driven.
Now lets get back to the important part, the writing. The writing is bad, on occasion really bad. In general the game filled with tiny little problems. Momentary inconsistencies, like we're told one thing in dialog and right after that we're told another, contradictory, thing in the narration. Translation issues like weird sentence structure, questionable word choice, and, at times, the translator trying to communicate something that just doesn't exist in US culture or in the english language. And I didn't even talked about the metaphors. Oh my god, the metaphors. There are too many of them to begin with, most of them are slightly off, and the rest is just overused. And we didn't talked about the plot yet, where the really big issues lie.
The plot, for the first half, follows the beats I laid out previously, but about halfway through the game introduces another character. And with that character some heavy topics, like child abuse, domestic violence and homophobia. An the game just could not handle them. Characters behaving unrealistically considering that background. They are making terribly decisions, and those decisions are framed very positively. And if this wouldn't be enough, all the plot points are contrived as hell. For example, and we are in spoiler territory, so be warned. So, for example, after they met and the free spirited on suggest that they hitchhike together the workaholic one doesn't want to, but she has to because the previous night she spent all her cash and burnt her credit cards in a drunken frenzy. And every plot point is like that. The characters are taking the action that the plot requires regardless of, and sometimes despite of clearly stated motivations. Most of the time it's not even justified by external circumstances. And when they are the justification is like the one I mentioned, very lazy.
The story is simple enough. A workaholic woman meets a free spirited one, they fall in love, they have some adventures together, the both grow as people a bit an they live happily ever after, or at least until they die. Well, at least that's what I expected from premise, but no this game has bigger ambitions.
But first lets talk about the general stuff. The visuals are, well, cheap. The backgrounds are all stock photos scrubbed clean from any copyrighted or trademarked material, which is, to be honest, kind of funny. The original art assets are simple, but competent professional works, nothing that really sticks out. The voice work is actually the beast aspect of the game, the voices are well chosen, the performances are solid and the emotions seem to mach the text. And the music is, again, competent, it serves it's purpose, but not something I would listen to on it's own. And I'm not sure it's counts as country, even though most of the tracks are guitar driven.
Now lets get back to the important part, the writing. The writing is bad, on occasion really bad. In general the game filled with tiny little problems. Momentary inconsistencies, like we're told one thing in dialog and right after that we're told another, contradictory, thing in the narration. Translation issues like weird sentence structure, questionable word choice, and, at times, the translator trying to communicate something that just doesn't exist in US culture or in the english language. And I didn't even talked about the metaphors. Oh my god, the metaphors. There are too many of them to begin with, most of them are slightly off, and the rest is just overused. And we didn't talked about the plot yet, where the really big issues lie.
The plot, for the first half, follows the beats I laid out previously, but about halfway through the game introduces another character. And with that character some heavy topics, like child abuse, domestic violence and homophobia. An the game just could not handle them. Characters behaving unrealistically considering that background. They are making terribly decisions, and those decisions are framed very positively. And if this wouldn't be enough, all the plot points are contrived as hell. For example, and we are in spoiler territory, so be warned. So, for example, after they met and the free spirited on suggest that they hitchhike together the workaholic one doesn't want to, but she has to because the previous night she spent all her cash and burnt her credit cards in a drunken frenzy. And every plot point is like that. The characters are taking the action that the plot requires regardless of, and sometimes despite of clearly stated motivations. Most of the time it's not even justified by external circumstances. And when they are the justification is like the one I mentioned, very lazy.