Reviewed Dec 17 2021 : Version 0.8
A college-aged guy heads to his grandfather's cabin in the woods to get away from it all for a couple of days, and he definitely manages to do that. Almost as soon as he arrives, fog covers the entire county, causes all of the men in the world to turn into specters, and society completely collapses. The MC has some touches of Mary Sue, as his flaws are minor and largely inconsequential, but they do exist and show up from time to time.
The renders are strange. They're exceptionally high quality, and the constant well-made animations definitely add to the sex scenes, but the stylization of the characters is distinctive. The high res texture but low poly count models reminds me of stop motion claymation like Wallace and Gromit, and also some early 2010s mobile 3d like Clash of Clans. It's definitely not bad, but there are times where no matter how undeniably high the quality is, the girls still aren't sexy because of the cartoonish style.
The writing is not good. It isn't terrible, but it isn't good either. The overall plot and story arc are actually fine to pretty good, that's not the issue. It feels like the writer isn't a native English speaker. It's definitely not as bad as some games that are clearly just machine translated and not double-checked, but at the same time, the clunkiness of the dialogue and the lack of polish is apparent. On top of that, there are constant spelling mistakes, typos, and relatively major grammatical errors. The absolute worst is that ‘life’ and ‘live’ are constantly used in the wrong place. The pluralization of many nouns is frequently off, as well. Honestly, if the dev hires a native English writer to go through the entire script with a comb and polish everything, the game would move up a letter grade. It's by far the biggest issue.
There is a lot of gameplay here. Even if you pick the option at the start that means you have functionally infinite food, you spend a lot of time traversing areas outside in a light point and click adventure system. I wouldn't have an issue with this, except that the many high-quality animations are actually a negative here. The constant switch to video after every click, where I am unsure if I can skip this one because I'm just walking down a hallway or if there's going to be something actually shown to me at the end gets fatiguing after the thirtieth time this in-game day. Some of the scenes devolve into quick-time events. I'm not complaining about that per se, because they aren't overused and are actually placed well; I’m merely warning you that you will encounter them.
Finally, the dev starts the game off with a note about heavy, dark content. I honestly don't think it's necessary. I understand placing it there in 2021 because people in certain circles are oversensitive and unable to decide for themselves if they're mature enough for anything even remotely real. Honestly though, the mental health issues discussed are lightly brushed against and then moved past, and the gore is really just some blood decals. Is this happy-go-lucky harem collectathon? No. But it's not as grim as the warnings would imply. There are also warnings for jumpscares throughout the game. I would recommend moving that choice to the start of the game, perhaps right after the food option, because clicking "yes give me a jumpscare" makes the following animation about as impactful as clicking no anyways.
My comments here have had a lot of complaints. I want to end this by saying I absolutely would recommend playing MIST, even in its current incomplete state. There is a lot of high-quality content here, and it is absolutely worth a download. This is not a case of several major flaws making an average game unplayable. This is a case of a couple of issues making an absolutely amazing game fall to only pretty good.
Rating: B+ (4/5 here on F95)