The game mostly revolves around walking across large, sparsely-populated low-poly landscapes. The player is given little to no direction, and none of the NPCs are terribly helpful, mostly delivering rather vague and vaguely poetic dialogue. The main meat of the game involves finding phrases written on walls in hidden places around the maps based on clues — a task which clearly requires some familiarity with the game's locales. I did not have the patience to complete this rather daunting and utterly uninteresting task, so I never found all of the connections between the maps, and hence, all of the phrased required to progress.
6 Comments
sounds atmospheric ngl
@NOWITSREYNTIME17 it would be atmospheric, except for the fact that music is rarely present (I have only found one instance of BGM in my playtime, and one or two radios), and the soundscape is otherwise pretty much completely empty. I don't think the player character emits footsteps, so the only sound ends up being the beeping of the Tether device, indicating the direction of the nearest portal, which honestly gets annoying pretty quickly (you can turn it off and soak in the silence, of course).
Small correction: Not the nearest portal, but the portal which you have elected to track with the device.
Well, you know, thanks for giving it a try anyway!
To be completely honest, and this probably makes me one of those pretentious, self-indulgent, hipster fartsters, pretty much everything you've described in your review is true, and is part of the "intended experience." Except for the "utterly uninteresting" bit, which, you know, is a fair criticism that I couldn't argue with at all - it's perfectly valid that any given person might find it uninteresting.
I am always just kind of blown away that there are people that I don't personally know who have played this game at all, even when they hated it. It's a trip. And I really appreciate it.
Anyways, the sound design was definitely my bad 100%. It was one of those things where it sounded fine on my own computer during testing (I could hear the music well enough in most areas), but since I was making this solo on basically no budget, and tend to exist in utter isolation anyway, I never really got any kind of proper QA for it, and didn't really discover how weak much of the background sounds ended up being, to the point of being almost to completely inaudible in places, until long after. The same can be said for some of the more tedious exploration segments (such as the maze in the suburban area), which probably could have used an outside eye that simply can't happen in certain kinds of solo scenarios. Like, it is supposed to be an opaque, frustrating, and confusing game ... but there are points where it absolutely goes overboard in ways that are tough to stomach even for me. It's all "optional content," but that's not exactly a good excuse. There is some control jank that comes in in certain areas that is also totally a mistake and not a feature. I forgot to turn the gravity and speed down in the city area, so it has the speed and gravity tuned for the desert area, which sometimes causes weird floatiness on inclines ...
A lot of those very obvious and unintentional flaws are things I'd have loved to fix in, like, a "director's cut" version or something, but the only way I know how to actually finish projects is to let them go, and since this game is obscure as they come, and simultaneously has been in a bunch of huge bundles, and is almost always available for free via community copies, I think I've made like 30 bucks total from its existence post launch. So it's kind of hard to budget the time and energy. Plus, I don't use Unity anymore, for obvious reasons, and remaking it from scratch in Godot does sound even more daunting that playing through it must be.
Anyway, I totally get it, and probably shouldn't be name searching or answering negative reviews anyway, but it's still cool to see any reviews at all, and I know sometimes folks appreciate getting the dev perspective even on games they hated. Thanks for trying it and taking the time to write this.
Aleks
To be completely honest, and this probably makes me one of those pretentious, self-indulgent, hipster fartsters, pretty much everything you've described in your review is true, and is part of the "intended experience." Except for the "utterly uninteresting" bit, which, you know, is a fair criticism that I couldn't argue with at all - it's perfectly valid that any given person might find it uninteresting.
I am always just kind of blown away that there are people that I don't personally know who have played this game at all, even when they hated it. It's a trip. And I really appreciate it.
Anyways, the sound design was definitely my bad 100%. It was one of those things where it sounded fine on my own computer during testing (I could hear the music well enough in most areas), but since I was making this solo on basically no budget, and tend to exist in utter isolation anyway, I never really got any kind of proper QA for it, and didn't really discover how weak much of the background sounds ended up being, to the point of being almost to completely inaudible in places, until long after. The same can be said for some of the more tedious exploration segments (such as the maze in the suburban area), which probably could have used an outside eye that simply can't happen in certain kinds of solo scenarios. Like, it is supposed to be an opaque, frustrating, and confusing game ... but there are points where it absolutely goes overboard in ways that are tough to stomach even for me. It's all "optional content," but that's not exactly a good excuse. There is some control jank that comes in in certain areas that is also totally a mistake and not a feature. I forgot to turn the gravity and speed down in the city area, so it has the speed and gravity tuned for the desert area, which sometimes causes weird floatiness on inclines ...
A lot of those very obvious and unintentional flaws are things I'd have loved to fix in, like, a "director's cut" version or something, but the only way I know how to actually finish projects is to let them go, and since this game is obscure as they come, and simultaneously has been in a bunch of huge bundles, and is almost always available for free via community copies, I think I've made like 30 bucks total from its existence post launch. So it's kind of hard to budget the time and energy. Plus, I don't use Unity anymore, for obvious reasons, and remaking it from scratch in Godot does sound even more daunting that playing through it must be.
Anyway, I totally get it, and probably shouldn't be name searching or answering negative reviews anyway, but it's still cool to see any reviews at all, and I know sometimes folks appreciate getting the dev perspective even on games they hated. Thanks for trying it and taking the time to write this.
Aleks
@thealeks What makes publishing my reviews online for everyone (even the developers!) to see is that while I, too, am definitely pretenstious, I am ultimately not sure of myself. Reflecting on games and my experiences with them is a way for me to introspect, but this can certainly act as a double-edged sword as it can cause me to come up terribly short when critiquing games which I did not like.
The fact is that this game does "sound atmospheric ngl", and I did pick it out amongst all the other free Ukraine bundle games to play (I ended up picking about 20 out of a few hundred). And I do not have much valid criticism to offer beyond "I spent three hours walking around and didn't really understand what to do, ultimately feeling like I did not get anything out of it." I never even figured out what one was actually aupposed to do with the phrases once found, for example.
Ultimately, my point is that you "shouldn't be answering negative reviews" the same way that I should not be posting them in the first place — this is less of a review and more of a snapshot of an experience, a frame of mind, for me to reflect upon, and perhaps for others to reference. I have amassed some followers on this website by now, so I expect that there will be people with some vague familiarity of what ny thoughts on video games tend to be, possessing of an oblique image of myself as a person, who might discover a game they are interested in from seeing that I've logged and reviewed it. This is, in my mind, a good reason to keep posting half-baked first impressions alongside more thought-out reviews (not that those do not tend to reflect the specific state of mind I was in when I finished the games, of course).
I'm also kind of wondering about the "international auteur" thing, or whatever it was that the itch.io page for the game claimed you to be. I can't say I've heard of any of your works outside of this game, and it is indeed obscure. Do you not have a cult following who'd flood this page with 5-star reviews, perchance? (;
The fact is that this game does "sound atmospheric ngl", and I did pick it out amongst all the other free Ukraine bundle games to play (I ended up picking about 20 out of a few hundred). And I do not have much valid criticism to offer beyond "I spent three hours walking around and didn't really understand what to do, ultimately feeling like I did not get anything out of it." I never even figured out what one was actually aupposed to do with the phrases once found, for example.
Ultimately, my point is that you "shouldn't be answering negative reviews" the same way that I should not be posting them in the first place — this is less of a review and more of a snapshot of an experience, a frame of mind, for me to reflect upon, and perhaps for others to reference. I have amassed some followers on this website by now, so I expect that there will be people with some vague familiarity of what ny thoughts on video games tend to be, possessing of an oblique image of myself as a person, who might discover a game they are interested in from seeing that I've logged and reviewed it. This is, in my mind, a good reason to keep posting half-baked first impressions alongside more thought-out reviews (not that those do not tend to reflect the specific state of mind I was in when I finished the games, of course).
I'm also kind of wondering about the "international auteur" thing, or whatever it was that the itch.io page for the game claimed you to be. I can't say I've heard of any of your works outside of this game, and it is indeed obscure. Do you not have a cult following who'd flood this page with 5-star reviews, perchance? (;
thephilosopher
5 months ago