Having sunk a few hours in, I'm pretty impressed with this game. I think it does a lot more right than wrong.
Good stuff:
-The tone of the writing and gameplay are well-matched. This game is very consistently lightly comedic. The writing is funny, but not trying too hard to show off how clever it is. With that said, it genuinely caught me off guard a few times and I laughed out loud.
-Characterization seems consistent.
-The game gradually throws new gameplay mechanics at you which makes it feel less repetitive and grindy, and that there might be something new and interesting around the corner.
-A ton of work went into the art, and I realized that when I noticed that characters are consistently wearing their specified costumes in scenes.
Things that could use some polish:
-The early game is a bit slow and repetitive. I think it errs a little too much in the direction of being simple and accessible to the point where it feels sterile and grindy. Just having more stuff happen early on, even if it were inconsequential random events, would liven it up significantly.
-There seem to be a lot of people complaining about signposting of the next step in the game and UI issues. The UI in this game isn't bad. It's actually pretty good most of the time, but there are some inconsistencies that stand out because they don't seem to follow the same rules of UI design as the rest of the game does. For instance, most events that advance the story or that the player has not tried yet are marked with a big red "!". However, there are a handful of instances where this is not the case and those exceptions are disproportionately frustrating because they spoil the flow, even if they are rare.
-The game UI is not 100% consistent in what indicators mean. In the workshop, for instance, there will be a white highlight around The Pen if you haven't used it yet that day/night when you mouse over it. If you click on it when there is no white highlight, it only brings up a message saying that you've already used that action. You cannot waste your time trying to draw more than is possible. When navigating the park at night, however, a white highlight means that a location can be interacted with at all. The white highlight around the BBB, for instance, doesn't go away when there's nothing new there and it can feel very "adventure gamey" trying to figure out where the next chain in the story is if you need to go back and check every location. As with adventure games, sometimes the in-text clues adequately signpost what is going to happen next and where, but sometimes they do not.
-In-game navigation is a bit inconsistent and weird. For instance, when using the costume interface in the back area of the BBB, there is a "back" button that brings the player back to the previous scene, which is the storefront of the BBB. However, when interacting with villains in the villains' tavern, there is no back button and the only way to select a different character to interact with is to go all the way back to the workshop interface, go back out into the park, and then select the villains' tavern again. Switching between the regular park and the epcot is similarly clunky for no reason; why can't I just go straight from the workshop to epcot and straight vice versa? Why do I have to go back to the main menu to load?
-The interface for the management side of the game desperately needs to have a projected daily profit displayed somewhere.
Things that don't matter one way or another but kind of weirded me out:
-I know all the attractions are based on real ones, but why isn't there like, a little one or two sentence description of them when I mouse over or click on them instead of the terse "I don't have anything to do at that attraction right now"? They basically don't feel like there's really anything there until you actually have to visit them for something story related.
-Is the reason that Aurora won't do anal that she doesn't have an anus? She's consistently drawn without one.
