Although this is so far only a 0.1 release, I think there is already enough here to give this game a fair rating. This is a very ambitious game that gets most things right so far but also has a few minor weaknesses. I am looking forward to seeing where this goes.
The art style and general flair deserve 5/5 stars. I don't know how the renders were produced, as they don't look like any of the standard engines but clearly aren't hand-drawn, either. Maybe really well done Daz renders with postprocessing?
There is voiceover for everything, but unfortunately it's not natural enough. I switched it off very soon, as I found it annoying.
The story so far is basically what I expected from the description. The MC is a criminal planning a heist during an event held at a hotel by the Russian embassy. So far there have been two cases where I had to make a decision and can't be sure if it was correct. So there may actually be meaningful branching here.
The game so far has been an almost kinetic visual novel with an embedded sandbox scene and three kinds of minigames. One consists simply in choosing the right dialog options. In the second, a large disc occurs in a random location and you need to click it quickly before it disappears. There is also a lockpicking game. Roll-back is disabled for these minigames. I really wish it wasn't, as I don't care for the minigames and now need to use save slots for repeat attempts.
There is so far one sex scene. It's not spectacular, but it's nice, it's animated, and is meaningful in the context of the plot.
Ren'Py has been reskinned for this game to create that distinct alternate reality 1950s US flair, which looks a lot like the Roaring 1920s or the 1930s. I would have said the reskin is perfect, if there wasn't a case of visual perfectionism over function: The game has been reduced to only 3 pages of 3 save slots, for a hard limit of only 9 save slots!
The texts are mostly good. They have clearly gone through an automatic spellchecker, as is clear from 3 typos that made it into the release:
The art style and general flair deserve 5/5 stars. I don't know how the renders were produced, as they don't look like any of the standard engines but clearly aren't hand-drawn, either. Maybe really well done Daz renders with postprocessing?
There is voiceover for everything, but unfortunately it's not natural enough. I switched it off very soon, as I found it annoying.
The story so far is basically what I expected from the description. The MC is a criminal planning a heist during an event held at a hotel by the Russian embassy. So far there have been two cases where I had to make a decision and can't be sure if it was correct. So there may actually be meaningful branching here.
The game so far has been an almost kinetic visual novel with an embedded sandbox scene and three kinds of minigames. One consists simply in choosing the right dialog options. In the second, a large disc occurs in a random location and you need to click it quickly before it disappears. There is also a lockpicking game. Roll-back is disabled for these minigames. I really wish it wasn't, as I don't care for the minigames and now need to use save slots for repeat attempts.
There is so far one sex scene. It's not spectacular, but it's nice, it's animated, and is meaningful in the context of the plot.
Ren'Py has been reskinned for this game to create that distinct alternate reality 1950s US flair, which looks a lot like the Roaring 1920s or the 1930s. I would have said the reskin is perfect, if there wasn't a case of visual perfectionism over function: The game has been reduced to only 3 pages of 3 save slots, for a hard limit of only 9 save slots!
The texts are mostly good. They have clearly gone through an automatic spellchecker, as is clear from 3 typos that made it into the release:
- "trough" should be "through"
- "brake" should be "break"
- "Be aware" should be "Beware".