What a waste.
In some ways, this is actually worse than older version. The new UI is horrendous. Cursive grey font on a largely grey background, and the only other color is neon green? Really? The color of Monster Energy drinks, sports cars, and Kawasaki Ninjas? Putting cursive font all over the UI doesn't give off the feeling of being 'fancy' or 'upscale', rather it screams 'I like pretty fonts' and 'fuck my UI's readability/usability'. Want to use it for the title, and the title only? Sure, fine, fuck it, whatever. But when you put it in the game UI for character names and for the quick menu? That shit needs to fuck right off.
I did notice the updated renders, but the old renders weren't the problem. The story was a mess with far too many threads, and I can understand wanting perhaps start over with a clearer vision and more experience with the idea to perhaps wrangle that all in to a more controllable and cohesive narrative. But by all indications here, with it's slavish adherence to the old game's plot, that doesn't appear to be the case.
You know what else could have used some work, what might have been worth rebooting this for? A writing overhaul. The game's writing and narration has never really been good. Now it hasn't be awful either. It largely was coherent, had a minimum of grammatical errors, and generally made sense; it didn't look like it was written by a non-native speaker then dropkicked into an MTL algorithm. But, it was never really good either.
One of the cardinal rules in storytelling is 'Show, Don't Tell', and this game's narrative has always done the opposite of that. We start off with an exposition dump that introduces the MC, their wife, their job, the supporting cast, and the primary dilemma or motivation. A textbook example of telling rather than showing. A hypothetically better written introduction with a focus on 'Show, Don't Tell' could have started with the MC toiling away at their desk at work, leaving it up to the audience to intuit that they work in software rather than needing to be explicitly told so. Then they could be interrupted by a text message from Ann, causing him to pop out of his tunnel vision and now start to anxiously run in mental circles over their love life problem.
A more creative writer could weave a narrative that gave light to the inner lives and personalities of these characters, without just saying the quite part out loud; but we're not getting that here. As is, the returning cast is just as vacuous as I remember them. Nobody has any personality, they're just mannequins moving from scenario to scenario (and calling each other 'baby' and 'babe' enough to be aggravating rather than endearing). It is frustrating to see such wasted potential here. The premise was good, Ann was hot, the renders were decent and the writing was at least coherent. Redoing the renders for a slight improvement in quality, but leaving the same underwhelming writing leading the same wooden characters to the same clusterfuck of a story, wasn't what this game needed (nor do I imagine, what the audience wanted).
