I don't understand the high ratings.
The game is a year and a half into development, and is painfully short.
Characters are thrown at us without telling us who they are. There are all manner or relationships (not just familial kinds) that we are not told about, so when we find things out later, they make no sense.
The story, as short as it is, is all over the place, with exposition dumps to explain that aspect of the story, but not any background we need to understand the current context.
It is as if the dev has a crystal clear view of who every character is, and what every aspect of the plot is, and has utterly failed to convey it in a way that means anything. As if we should go into the game already knowing who these people are, what their relationships are, and what the backstory of everything is.
I may be phrasing that awkwardly. Let's try another way. The game feels as if it is chapter six or seven of an existing game, where the first few chapters were there to set up characters, plot, and provide backstory and context, and now we are finally getting into the chapters that should introduce the main story to us.... but instead of releasing those first chapters, as it were, it is as if the dev said "no, I don't think they'll need this," discarded them, and released what we have as the starting point.
The game feels like you are jumping into the middle of a story you SHOULD know something about, with characters you SHOULD know something about, and then just blazes forward, with awkward writing and jarring jumps between scenes, characters and plot, leaving a contusing mess in it's wake.
This game I'm rating at a two, because it simply makes no sense and there is not enough to grasp and hold on to to give you the context it needs. However, I am not rating it a one, because I BELIEVE the dev knows who the characters are, knows what the story is, and has a worthwhile plot to convey.
But unless there is a re-write to some scenes to make them make more sense, and some sort of exposition or alternate opening scene to help us know who we are, were we are, and what is happening, the whole project, and story the dev wants to tell, falls flat on its face.
Grasping at the pieces, I see there is a design. And a story that could be interesting. But it's like a beautiful pieces of glass art that the dev made, dropped on the floor, swept up, and then is trying to show us, like "look at what I made!"
I can tell it was SOMETHING. I can tell it might have been something great. But all I see is random shattered fragments.
If you want to fap, you can. Models look good, content is there for that. If you want a story, and to be blunt, I believe the dev WANTS us to want the story, and has put great effort into building one, the sad fact is, as the game stands right now, we are not given enough to work with to know what the story even is. We're just sifting through that pile of broken glass, and wondering what we're supposed to do with it.
This CAN be fixed. It CAN work. It COULD be worth, genuinely, 5 stars and high praise.
But if, and only if, the work is put in to give us the context we need for anything to make sense. We don't live in the dev's head. We can't understand what is happening in what feels like a random, disjointed mess, just by magically extracting the background and context we need from the devs mind.
