Unreal Engine - Projekt Melody: A Nut Between Worlds! [v0.5.6.0] [Big Bang Studio]

TL;DR
As of now, the game is barely playable. I had ro reset the quest several times because it broke on every step.
The sandbox is barely functional with awkward looking animations at this stage.

I am trying to convey my journey through the v0.5.6.0 content.

Going to Blairs Lab is just obnixious. When you reach the area, you have no idea where to go and have to wait for Melody to catch up. It´s basically an escort quest and - as you may have guessed the worst kind.

Even if it wasn´t that buggy, it´s just boring and far to long. You basically walking through maze-like corridors while Melody is vomiting exposition.
It wouldn´t be that tedious if Melody wasn´t walking but running.

Then you get assaulted by Zomb.... I mean ""Infected". The only enjoyable thing about that encounter was how many things broke during it.
It seems like you are supposed to fend them off with your fist, however they wouldn´t appear.
So how do I know about it ? Well, they appeared during the cutscene when you get rescued.
After that even more expositional dialoge - which took probably longer then it was supposed to be because Melody still was repeating her voice lines which played during the aussault - I was able to continue to the lab.

Then Melody broke in because noone was at home but the door wouldn´t open. Saved & reload to continue.
Now Meloady was stuck. Saved & reload to continue.
Back to more drawn out exposition. After I got some proper clothes the game told me to wander around aimlessly to find something usefull.
Sure, makes sense.
The first thing I would do in an unfamiliar world I got thrown into while wandering around in some freakish medical lab is to steal some unfamiliar tech, because ... the plot needs the next cutscene to happen I guess. Reasonable story development.
Then I got caught by the owner - Blair - or her security robot arms rather who didn´t like it at all me wandering around.
She told me that she would like to interogate me, the sexy way *wink*.
Finally some action after wandering around! So, i knew the drill, saved just in case the game would break again in order to not getting blue balled but guess what ?
Melody came to he rescue, the situation got resolved. Boy, I was so exited to get more expositional dialog instead of some sexy times. Exposition is the most fun part of any game, everybody knows that!
At least the game would give me a chuckle, because Blairs arms clipped through her ridicoulous large breast, making the jiggle physics having more action then I had the last minutes which felt like hours.

Then combat training which went well, until .. the game bugged out again during the second part.
Save & reload didn´t fix it.

In all seriousness, this whole part would have been boring even without t he constant need to save & reload. I don´t expect Disco Elysium quality of writing, it´s a porn game after all. However the pacing couldn´t be more off and the plot isn´t original in any shape or form, even for a porn game.

Which is a shame because I appreciate the effort in trying to make a first person pron game. And some of the animations, those present 0.7.0 are something else in terms of quality.

So , it´s either an unfocused overambitious development, incompetence or they just want to milk the fanbase, maybe a combination of the three.
Again, a shame. I am fallowing this project for some time now and it started out promising. However, the game is getting worse with every update.

I really hope the project cuts down on features instead of getting perpetually more broken because of feature creap, but I don´t hold my breath.
I still hope getting proven wrong though.

"Projekt Melody: A Nut Between Worlds!" is quite a interesting game and isn't something you see every day. The story so far is interesting and doesn't have a lack of humor. Due to the game being far from finished, bugs are to be expected. Also due to it being a UE5 game, low-end and even high-end machines struggle to keep a smooth framerate. aside from that, the voice acting and world design are great.

This is how you can describe this: Developers blindly add and remove features for no reason at all.. sandbox feature is constantly being remade and gets worse and worse in every version.

Beta version launch -> A nut between world 0.7 POV scenes were tested and game seems very promising. Game seemed to have a bit of story, dialogue and cutscenes.. very nice.

Version 2. Cringy isekai themed story was added and 0.7 material got removed. Sandbox mode was added around this time to replace the 0.7 version POV scenes.

Version 3.0 -> Sandbox was remade and got a new hud.. but functionally it worked exactly the same.

Verssion 4.0 -> Sandbox was remade yet again but got slightly better.

Version.5.0 ->A LOT of textures were nuked in hopes to make the game run better.. this installation was also unplayable, loading times were abysmally long.

Version 5.3.xx -> Sandbox version works as intended but some poses are unusable due head and limbs clipping into camera. A test version of climax was implemeted but did not do anything.

Version 5.4.4x -> Sandbox version only works on floor level and climax mode was implemented and worked surprisingly well.. too bad sandbox only works on cold floor instead of warm and sof looking bed..

Version 5.5.5x -> Sandbox was remade yet again with system that you can place characters everywhere even floating in the air if you want to.. character animations were remade yet again and looks quite goofy now.. Like the custom made animations for every pose is now replaced with animations that can be described as rubber people rubbing each other..POV camera mode got removed from sandbox, button is still in hud but does not do anything. I dug trough settings and found experimental sandbox tab when enabled gives the characters different expressions.. too bad the expressions are pretty much useless as POV camera does not work and the character sometimes eyes jitter into every direction, like they don't know where to look at. On top of all this, previously implemeted "time" option that could change lighting of the map from day, evening or night time has been removed.. even though it worked poorly, it did do something.

On and all, the current version of the game looks GRAY as every colorful texture got removed, POV action in sandbox mode is useless, new sandbox mode is horrible and scene selection button can clip inside roof objects making it unusable..

The theme is. Things that do not need to be remade are being remade multiple times, features are constantly being cut off or made so that the end result becomes more and more alien from the original pitch..

Devs seem to try but every attempt falls short from target.. so in release their hard work shows unfinished functions being implemented to replace one that worked completely fine. Second problem is that these changes exist with in the game for months or half a year when they do the exact same thing yet again on next update.

What a mess...

I didn't think a game could be this creative and beautiful. Apart from optimization and a few texture errors, it's a great game. I hope it continues to be developed. I will follow all the developments of this game closely from now on.

Here's what I would like to see with regard to new updates for the project:

Major bug fixes to previously introduced features. I would like to see new features massively cut back on or scrapped until they are in a state that is suitable for release. Fix broken features that have existed in the game for a long time FIRST. Introduce combat, massive environment exploration LATER, when previous features are near finished, AND when new features are in a suitable state for release. Right now you have a situation where broken new features are constantly added, meanwhile none of the previous features work. It's a schizophrenic development process.

The reason I'm leaving 2 stars instead of 1 is because the art direction for the project is solid. In fact I'd say that's where the real talent of the studio lies. I don't think programming, production etc is up to par with the artists on this project.

Worst game, this game is broken, doesn't work.
The game consumes a lot of resources but the graphics are terrible, it constantly bugs out, the animations are awful, I didn't understand the story, I even fell off the map, the girl walks so slowly that I felt like closing the game, this game just sucks

Potential is something we like to use as a measure of how successful something may become. It is a way we use to ascribe if someone or something may be worth putting time, effort or resources into. In this case, Projekt Melody does not fall into this definition.

The "game" if you could call it so, is poor. With poor quality slap-dash animations, out of focus cameras and absolutely horrendous NPC clipping issues, thrown out to the masses in the hope of skimming the top.

Don't get me wrong, some of the things done in this game do look impressive. But that's about as far as it goes, at this current stage - the game has progressively gotten worse as more content has been added. And we're not talking about an issue with a map loading or a dialogue option not being clickable, we're talking about features being fully stripped out of the game.

In this "version" of the game, 5.2.2 I believe it currently is, we've seen the removal of the "fast forward" button, we've seen removal of certain graphical options like the ability to adjust DLSS and of course - VYSNC being broken.

Pair this with the fact that there is now a permanent "PRESS E TO CONTINUE" bug that only vanishes when the user reloads a previous save, followed by - for some reason - the ability to punch people - which at the moment serves no purpose other than to break scripted events and so on.

In essence, before I get too in depth - I will say this. The game currently weighs about 11gb. That's 11gb of bad animations, poor quality scripted events, NPC's that run like they're crapping themselves and a map that is so pointlessly large that it actually lags on a 14th Gen i7 with a 4090 GPU. That's right, I'm hitting high 50's with a 14th Gen i7 and 4090.

Would I recommend this game? No. Not right now. Will I change my mind? You bet, but only if they pull a cyberpunk and fix all of the issues with this "projekt"

Until then, it's a no go from me - I'll check back in about a year. Maybe we'll have cameras ingame that actually focus properly.

Update 18.08.2024 - I tried the latest version. And... well...

For anyone who may be interested, the current iteration of the title is as broken as it previously was. With random NPC's now spawning in and out of the area, longer than ever load times - even from an M.2 drive, broken resolutions and a constantly playing moaning/orgasm sound despite there being nothing present on the screen to even warrant an orgasm sound, let alone require one - I'd say this game is definitely off of my watch list.

To the developer - I don't know what you are doing, what you're trying to achieve - but one thing is clear, either get some support in aspect of quality assurance or broaden your testing pool - a "product" like this absolutely stinks of Wish DOT com. And, that's not a good thing.

3 Stars for now and thats just because I want to believe this will fullfill its potential at some point in the far future!

For now its a very unfinished alpha even for HGame Standards. You have some nice Scenes but its buggy, and the performance is bad very bad. I am packing a 13900K and a 4070ti and i just manage to get 60 fps with massive screen tearing everywhere and some frame stutters. Some scnees (the angel/godess f.e. I had like 5 fps)

Please let this game get good please.

Goddess? I thought it was about melody?
The developers don't know where the project is going. I don't like goddess scenes. poorly animated and lip synced. Nothing new, just minor.
it is to be hoped that there will be more of medoly in the next update, otherwise it is nothing that is good

it may look nice on screenshots, BUT THATS ALL - NO MORE PROS
cons - UI is shit (7/10 of shit scale), no penis/vagina connection, no physics - this is shitty model placer with preplaced animations and thats it. THere are ton of games like that, but they are not boaasting around their so called "systems" which are shit on closer look

The performance is god awful with shader compilation stuttering that is worse than in emulated games. The game uses ray tracing for lighting, but looks worse than games with baked lighting and runs 10x times worse than games with baked lighting.

1 scene w/no choices that do anythin. Body parts go backwards or through ppl & objs. Cant skip past horribly long boring parts. I feel bad for Melody havin her name associated w/this garbage. Its not even a passable demo.

Dull and glitchy. It takes an inordinate amount of waiting between actions, to the point where I thought the game was stuck at first. When there is movement, there is a lot of clipping, and the animations are just awkward at best. There are numerous other VR-type POV games that are a lot better than this, and I just got too bored of what is literally mostly waiting for the next action to trigger to bother any longer.

No way this deserves 4 stars or above. It's still in Alpha. Here's what I got. The animation is dull. Very robotic and not very detailed, the facial animation is really lacking (very doll like), her model is bugged causing her limbs to flip out in unimaginable ways. Overall, it looks rushed to accommodate people that's been waiting for this short and incomplete demo.

EDIT: I bothered to look into the dev's Patreon since I've no prior knowledge to Projekt Melody. Almost a whopping 2k supporting the project. It's embarrassing to even call this shit a demo.

EDIT 2: Played the most recent version. I still hold the same judgement as my first. Not very interesting, overall. Very basic.

This game is simply amazing. I just really hope some new versions will come soon and start to be more consistent. Every game aspect is really nice, well done to creator. Can't wait for the next version

Projekt Melody, you could be my cybernetic dream,
Log in on the stream, shawty always doing ecchi things,
Got me out here simpin', now I'm trippin', spendin' all my green,
I'm about to blow a whole stack, you know what I mean...

This game is pretty good and a good sign of things to come. There's already a lot here considering it just started. But since it is pre-alpha, there are issues that I hope will be resolved in the next few updates.

One issue is the pacing. Each scene takes too long, and there's not much to do. You can control the speed with the mouse wheel, and if you press the play button in the top right, it will shuffle through different animations if they exist, but the scenes go on a little too long, so you get bored before long.
Another is the animation. A little janky, and Mel's facial animations sometimes aren't the best. Again, I doubt these issues will stick around for long. I did sort of wish that they would take sound bytes from her actual streams, but her voice acting is pretty good.

One thing that I found strange, however, was Mel's model. Her face's design seems based off of her 2D model she uses for Twitch instead of just using the same model she uses elsewhere. I'm not sure why they didn't just use the existing 3D assets since that's what most people think of when they think of Mel and porn.

this is a really good one especially for what it is now.

unlike the other voiced first person game with that mandy girl, this one doesnt have the annoying giggling and horrible voice acting. it sounds like something a girl would actually say when she really wants it.
character is beautiful, animations look good. keep an eye on it.

the only thing missing for 5* is to make the scenes a bit faster (you can always continue them if you want) and maybe a bit more different poses depending on how fast you do her.
other than that, i really enjoyed it. looks great, sounds great.