Review for 0.7.2b
How do you usually rate games? You have in mind some "average" performance in certain aspect, some "lowest viable" and some "ideal". Certainly, if the game matches what you call ideal, you rate it as the max.
But what if the game actually surpasses your previous "ideal" measurement? What if it is so good that it drags the "ideal" beyond the previous level, so good that all other games pale in comparisson? How do you rate those other games now and how do you rate this one?
Here is an example of such rare thing happening. The game pushing the quality beyond previously set limits, the game so over-the-top that it amazes you not by something in particular, but rather by a combination of all parts and how they are delivered to the player.
This is what you call "exceptional".
Mist is clearly a visual novel, despite for some reasons not having been labeled as such, and should be rated by the RenPy VN standarts.
Good points:
The plot is incredibly well made. Most of the times it is either pale due to the dev focusing on other aspects of the game, or it is generic to the point of absurdity. A teen returns back from uni after his father died, a teen goes in the university, dude moves to a new town - you name it. Here the entire plot is built around some strange event, which can be labeled as dark fantasy, but somehow still holds the grounds of being realistic and down-to-earth. All this is if not believable, at least interesting. The plot building is such that the new information appears and covers previous plot holes, and slowly builds the entire image of what is happening.
The characters - no generic models are used here. This is 3DCG, so everything is rendered. The model detail level is low, but this is compensated by how good the quality is. I could not care less about the hair being one stationary object instead of 10 000 independent hairs, if the girl it is attached to looks beautiful. Hyperrealism is not the goal of the dev - well, why would it be, if the game is dark fantasy?
The dialogues - after reading them, I feel like we have taken the wrong turn in the game developement somewhere and this game is trying to compensate for this. I read about character lore - it is interesting. I read about feelings, about emotions, about experienced traumas - it is believable. I read about characters explaining they had to spoonfeed disabled person and change sheets - this is realistic beyond measure. With most of the games all the dialogues are somewhere around sex or can be skipped entirely. Here you are finally given the variety of dialogues which together with their quality allows you to immerse yourself into the story, into playing your character, into this masterfully crafted world.
The graphics is what I was amazed with since the first minutes of playing and until the very end of current content. The renders are incredibly high quality, the lighting, the lumination, reflections, quality of textures - this pleases my eye more than some recent AAA titles could. Everything is clearly made with passion, with love - and it shows so! Every static render, every image, every animation is so vibrant with colors, so "living" that you can just press H to hide all text and sit for a while enjoying it on its own.
The animations - I know myself how hard they are, how difficult it is to model everything, to avoid texture clippings, avoid mesh issues, avoid lighting bugs and screwed camera angles. And here it seems that the dev is the literal god of them. So far the most I could expect is the animated sex scene - I mean, this is the point, right? But would you make the animation for just moving enemy grunt? For walking in the forest? For climbing? This game has so much of unnecessary animations that you wonder who is that person behind those and why is he or she doing so many of them? I mean, when your character is climbing a tall tree, the last thing you would ever expect is 3-4 different animations with moving camera just to immerse the player into the process of said climbing. Just for that! There is nothing important going on, yet the animations are there, at every place you would expect them to possibly be, and additionally in so many other places which could have been perfectly fine without them, but with additional animations these scenes become so immersive you start to even doubt what game you are playing.
The gameplay: the mechanics are very simple, yet so refined and flawlessly crafted that it makes me wondering how that was even possible. Imagine you have to build 3 additional objects to your base. There is an entire menu for that, with all quality buttons and blueprint renders more suitable for a building simulator.
Another strong point about the game mechanics is how well the game is balanced. There is no need to grind anything, just start what you can and do other things while the longer processes are going. There is almost no difference whether you spend 4h grinding xp on weakest mobs or rush forward into the later areas. You dont need to grind foor - just spend one day of the week exploring the lake and fishing. You dont need to keep an eye on 20 gauges like in some games, and everything your character needs is acquirable so easily that there is no need to worry about anything - just enjoy the game.
The content is pretty large by now, I think it took me like 10 hours or more to play through what is available, and I enjoyed every second of it. I have only found this game recently, so I do not know of how frequently it is updated, but it is worth playing already.
The bad points:
Disclaimer: this is nitpicking. The game has so few of those that you have to search for one. I am stating this here that they in no way influence how great this game is, and serve here just as a possibility to improve the game with correcting them even more.
* There are like 5 spelling mistakes in the entire text of the game, almost equally distributed throughout the content. It seems like noone proofreads the scripts, maybe this could be a good thing to do.
* There is no map of expedition locations, this is the most crucial with forest - the very first location the player gets to explore. I have incredibly good visual memory (IRL I am able to perfectly remember the path I have taken in the unknown city/district only once several years ago). But not everyone does. I expect at least some players to get lost in the forest, not knowing where exactly they are and how to go to the mission objectives. If I was the playable character, I would have surely drawn at least a scetch map of where everything is. And there even is a map! The thing is that it is not used for anything, just found and delivered. I think any sort of a map could improve the game even more.
* Lastly, it seems a bit weird that certain activities with the girls can be performed only in a certain timeframe - either during the day or during the night. This is one of the few things which seems not very logical. And all that changes is the light, so it is not really hard to do.
From all by experience in the games of such genre this one is standing out as the one I will probably compare everything else to from this point onwards. I am so happy that I experienced it and loved it, but also sad knowing I will not enjoy other good games as much as I used to knowing how well this can be done.
TLDR 10/10 GOAT game go play it RN.
? Like I don't know, the combination of the sound of skin touching, goosebumps, shiny skin and genitals really make for a satisfying experience. 