The only game I would truly describe as "Lovecraftianly bad". Not only does it find new and exciting avenues to being bad every 10 minutes or so: after playing Yiik you are permanently scarred with it, a small section of Yoourk brain is tainted with the sickness. As Yoouk thiink about it more and more, the void where your sentiience Yuused to be grows. The more you ponder, the less iit makes sense. Untiilk your sense of self is eroded away and you are left shaking, vibrating with motion.

I named my real life cat after one of the characters in it. So know this 2.5 is not because the game is miid. But because it exiists in a simultaneous 0.5 and 5.0.

Before playing this, I have obviously heard about how infamously bad it was, but mostly on a storytelling perspective. From the combat I heard it was boring so the combination of the two made it a game not worth to play. I would lie if I say I played this cause I was excited to play it, but also I want to clarify that I didn’t come to the game with a “I want to see how bad it is” but more of a “I want to see why everyone say is so bad”.

I played the game on version 1.25, without elemental affinity, without beat down and with the original edit of the game. For context, this is the closest you can get to the original version of the game. But also I tried to play with the new additions to put perspective.

I’m writing this big intro just to give weight to my words. No matter the options I picked, no matter if I came with a fair try, I truly believe this is the worst game I have ever finished.

This review is story spoilers free.

Let’s just say the good thing about the game: The music is cool, it has some well-known composers (toby fox is in here) so some songs are good. That’s it, that’s the only thing I can give the game. Everything else is so unbelievable bad from start to finish that I can’t believe someone thought that they were a good idea.

From how convoluted, confusing, bad written, unfunny, and boring the story was. Literally nothing makes sense at the end, you are literally in disbelief that what you witnessed has any relationship from what you started with. To the characters: every single one is either too unfunny and an asshole, or too perfect to the point where they are just not a character anymore. We are on a RPG, the characters are one of the most important parts of this genre and they didn’t even get this right. They are also kind of unimportant at the end, which can be a pain or a blessing.

Now if you know about Yiik you may know about the main character: Alex, the ginger boy. He is very annoying, pretentious, a piece of shit in general. He has some options during the game that are laughable. The worst part is that it can seem to be pointed out that he is like this for outside reasons, or at least, you could pick that at the end, so it does come across as a very unlikable character which is not what you want on your story (specially with the themes of the story). He also has some internal monologues across the story (if you select the original edit, which btw, is not the recommended option anymore) that make him look more like a piece of shit, and also are very long sometimes, and pointless.

On the actual game side, the combat is god awful. It’s a turn base RPG with a system like Paper Mario where you have to do a mini game on every skill you have. The problem with this is that most of the mini games are awful, or very long. For reference, there is a mini game of a character that, to do the max damage, you have to do for 17 seconds. Imagine having to spend 17 seconds of inputs just so at the end the character do minimal damage.

That’s another point, most of the combat in here is braindead and pointless. There are ways to increase the combos of your mini game to do more damage, but they will only increase (at least on the first half) like 2-3 more points of damage, which is not worth the effort. The combat it’s truly boring and bad designed. The worst part is that they had change it a little bit, and it’s still bad.

The level system is also pretty weird. You store experience and at the end have to do a weird menuing on a tower to apply points to each stat. You have to do this on a specific location too, so it’s very annoying to do.

The game is also not very well made. I almost soft lock myself at least 2 times (one of which I had to actually restart the game). It has constant movement glitches, duplicate items, and clunky interactions. Also if you ever play the game (why would you after reading this), play with the football on the main city. I can’t believe you would let that on a fully release game.

Just to end this horrible rant, I just want to say something about the design choices at the end, so if you don’t want to even get an indirect spoiler you can skip this paragraph: The last 2 chapters are one of the worst things I have ever witnessed in a videogame, there is no way someone thought that people would want to play whatever happens in the first one, and I can’t believe someone thought that the last one was a cool conclusion that people would be excited to play. Even if what you want to give a commentary on the RPG genre, the reality is that the point was missed at the end, and it came out as one of the worst last chapters ever, and probably the worst final boss in a RPG I have played.

So I’m Yiiking out of my mind after playing this. I did stream this game so I had fun even while being miserable playing it, but if you are a normal player that want to play this on their own to see how bad it is: Trust me, it is actually not worth to play. This game is not funny bad, its godawful bad on a design and storytelling level that there is not worth spending the time laughing at it. May as well just watch a YouTube video about it, or a gameplay so you don’t have to suffer doing 10 minutes of normal enemy battles in a RPG.

YIIK is one of those games that for better and (mostly) for worse is going to leave the player speechless. It blurs the line between what is being done deliberately to annoy and frustrate the player and what is actually just a bad idea implemented terribly. It's a game that's endlessly fun to talk about, but actually playing through the game is an exercise in patience. Its inspirations are obvious and plentiful, but they don't do anything interesting with them. It takes so much of its time to say things to the player, but in the end doesn't say anything of interest.

The story starts off simple enough; Alex Eagleston comes back home after graduating from college, and very quickly gets himself embroiled in the disappearance of a woman named Semi Pak (or Park, the game appears to not pronounce this name correctly). The first thing the player is going to notice is how fucking wordy this game is. Alex keeps constantly monologuing about stuff that is only tangentially related to what's happening. It gets tiring very quickly and it never stops. I get that Alex is meant to be unlikable, but the worst part is that its verboseness is not a trait unique to him. Everyone just does not stop talking, and they just keep going on and on and on. This has the undesired effect of making the story difficult to follow, since the game throws so much uninteresting dialogue at you that you start to mentally check out. You get the impression that the devs would have rather written a book than make a game, which isn't terribly surprising seeing as they've often cited the works of Haruki Murakami as inspiration for the game. Deciphering what's actually happening in the game is the hard part, but the actual themes of the game are pretty easy to grasp. Themes of self-improvement and standing by your friends are pretty obvious, but they aren't very convincing coming from our main character, who doesn't seem to change all that much throughout the game. Also, the fact that he has any friends to begin with is hard to believe in it of itself, but I digress. The story is easily the worst part of the game and is the main reason why the game is as infamous as it is.

That isn't to say it's the only thing bad with it. The gameplay might be the worst I've played from a JRPG, and I've played quite a few of them. For reference, I played this game after the combat rebalance patch they put out, and if it actually improved anything I'd be terrified to know how the game played beforehand. The combat takes inspiration from the Paper Mario and Mario and Luigi games, where your attacks will have inputs that you can do to increase your damage. The main issue with this is that you have to do the minigames if you want to do any sort of damage, and they are way too long for what they are. It also doesn't help that battles themselves last forever. A battle with random enemies can easily take several minutes to complete, where in a better game they wouldn't even last a minute. The game would probably be several hours shorter if they made regular enemy encounters take a reasonable amount of time to beat. I get the feeling that they didn't playtest their own game, because how one person plays it and comes out saying "Ya, this is perfectly fine" is beyond me.

The only thing I'd say that succeeds in any sort of capacity is the soundtrack and art direction, and even then there are some massive caveats. The character portraits are generally well drawn, and the main cast have some pretty appealing designs, but it's held back by some characters having only a handful of expressions, making some scenes play out very awkwardly. I generally like the games' art style, and some of the dungeons can be quite nice to look at. It feels like one of the few things that had a lot of thought put into it. The soundtrack has some decent tracks to them, with Alex's theme being an especially catchy music. I was actually surprised to see his leitmotif used pretty frequently throughout the game. Unfortunately, the soundtrack also comes with a lot of bloat. The game has an ungodly amount of battle themes, and the quality of them vary wildly from pretty good to unlistenable garbage. It reminded me of Shin Megami Tensei V, in that that game also had a ton of battle themes. But unlike that game, where it spread out its battle themes and placed them in appropriate parts of the story, YIIK just throws them willy-nilly in any battle, regardless of context. This makes it that these themes just blend in with each other and lose any sense of identity they have. Even when the game succeeds, it finds a way to fail in some way.

I played YIIK because it was a game that fascinated me from the outside looking in because of how people talked about it. I'm still debating whether it was worthwhile to play it. There were moments where I was trying to figure out what the author was going for, if a certain narrative or gameplay choice had purpose behind it, or if they were simply doing a bad job. With the I.V story update coming soon, I might get a better understanding of what they were trying to go for. Or maybe it'll be a similar exercise in futility.

Timeline of events:

I'm a games writer, and I was feeling bad about my work. I'm also a fan of postmodernist fiction. I thought: "Surely, comparing what I like and what I do to YIIK, a notoriously awful game, I'll feel better about myself." I bought it later, when it was on sale.

Now, I've played an hour and 9 minutes of it.

I did not know.

Even four years down the line, YIIK's developers do not understand... anything that makes a game coherent, and hold somebody's attention. We can't even talk about "good" here - this is not in the same star system as a "good" game.

At the start it's a thousand pinpricks. As it continues, they ramp up and turn into drills. And make no mistake: No video essay talking about it can make you understand how bad that feels to play.

Basic feedback for most player actions is absent; actions such as setting the Panda-barrier cannot be cancelled out of; the music meanders without skill or purpose; the graphical style has small inconsistencies and errors that would've been easily fixed, but never were; NPCs are either cardboard, or just the worst babblers I've ever seen anyone write. Statements that could take 2-3 text boxes and one selection screen take 20.

I genuinely thought this game could make me feel better; instead, I feel like I smugly punched a kid. With less time, fewer resources, more rudimentary tools, *I, and YOU* could create something better than this.

I spent money, and that's fine. I also put part of my soul as tribute on it when I put it in comparison to what I do, thinking that comparison would be anything but a let-down. And that is not fine. I want my soul back, YIIK.

I've abandoned it. I don't intend on picking it up again, even if it updates. Don't buy it. It's not even funny; it's just sad, and will make you feel sad, too.

I’m not gonna pretend like this game isn’t bad but it honestly is a game that had serious narrative potential that’s ruined by the developers not seeming to know what they wanted the game to be in the first place. The strongest aspects of this game is when it goes fully in on the surrealist art project vibes and is willing to just show something weird and not have any of the characters give overly detailed reactions to it. I do think that provided the developers can figure out a way to make the gameplay feel less torturous and know when the characters need to just stop talking that they can definitely make a very high quality game that is worth talking about for positive reasons. Maybe I.V will fix things but for now I would just leave the game as sometimes interesting but very very deeply flawed and sometimes even pretty uncomfortable.

Yiik Fiction

It's insane how bad this game is, but it really shows the devs passion. It has love, but low intelligence. Pretentious as shit, involuntarily funny, weird characters, weird moments, weird jokes, weird artstyle, weird OST, weird level design, weird story. This game is the definiton of weird.

An amateur work made by passionated developers. It has a very human side to it, like watching a baby trying to walk. It tries, but it's hard for him. The attacks tried to be very Paper Mario-like. But it failed because it was so over-designed for a single attack.

It's a reflection of the dev team. They wanted to make something special. That doesn't mean it has to be objectively good, but it needs the soul to shine. I like what they tried to do, not the execution itself.

I ended up watching on Youtube because I got stuck on a boss.

I'll update/add a segment were I talk about I.V once it's out. A big update made 4 years later for free.

YIIK is impressively bad. I wanted to play it not only for the meme but also to understand why it’s so hated, and after 2 and half chapters I found my answer. It’s just not fun and bad.

This lack of enjoyment is entirely in the gameplay, the battles are dull and repetitive and take soooo long. I would have stuck it out if they were at least short, but every one felt like a waste of time. That’s not all though, the story is also way too messy. There are some neat ideas I guess? But it was also agonizingly slow and bogged down by uninteresting or frustrating characters.

If the I.V update actually fixes some of the main issues I might go back to it, but as of now I’d rather play anything else than spending more time on this.

I don't think I have a more confusing relationship with another game. This game ticks me off on so many levels it's hard to describe, but I'll go over the things I like first.
I love the art style this game goes for. It has a cool shell shaded look with PS2 looking graphic that blend really nicely together. It also runs great on my 4k monitor with a GTX 1070 which was great. I also love the low frame rate animations that adds nicely to the retro theme, overall a great and memorable visual presentation.
The soundtrack is also great. I know a lot of people say that "Into the mind" by toby fox is the only good song but I actually disagree. The other battle music is good and some environmental songs like omnism 1999 and Wind Town are lovely tracks. However the quality ranges way too much, since this game was apparently composed by like 12 people so the soundtrack isn't that consistent.
The character and world designs are also nice and varied, each location like wind town, flag town, mt town cave are all cool locations, and going into the brain of someone is also cool, even if the dungeons can be tedious.
I also like the concept. Being a group of friends to discover conspiracy and paranormal theories sound like fun especially since I'm into those kinda things.
Everything else? Fucking awful. Seriously this game feels like it's having identity crisis it doesn't know what to fucking do with it's story. First of all most of the characters are unlikable or just boring and uninteresting, Alex himself is such a confusing character I could never tell if the game wanted me to like him or not. They try to give him an "asshole" personality but he's not like that all most of the time and is just inconsistent with his character in general, the other characters are just boring and just follow whatever Alex does, they yell at him from time to time but no growth ever comes from it.
Another thing is the voice acting. Some voice actors do a great job, but it's the presentation that makes the VA laughable at best. The whole story is presented with PNG’s of the characters in generic poses with text boxes. Without the voice acting it actually would be good but the actors try way too hard and it makes any serious moments just come off wrong.
The story is just horrible. Lots of potential but the pacing is so backwards. First it's about finding a missing girl, then it's about getting a job, the it's about finding a robot girl and then your trying to stop a world ending meteor? I really just couldn't care less about what was happening. The ending of the game tried to pull off this 4th wall breaking moment that's supposed to make you “Question reality” when really it just makes me question what the fuck they were thinking? The execution In this part is so horrible I just don't care.
Combat is generic and nothing special, it gets really boring real quick with no variety or fun to be had with it.
Overall this game sucks. I don't recommend it to anyone other than to have a good laugh and to not take it seriously. I dont mean to punch down on the developers they're clearly talented, I just think maybe they bit off a bit more than they could chew, this game was clearly too ambitious for them but I'm genuinely exited for 1.5 update. They seem to take all of the flaws and improve them for free! So I'm gonna be there day 1 to support it. I love the concept here it just needs a lot of improving.