I'm kinda confused as to if this is a completed project or not, since the title at the top of the window says demo but there's no mention of it being incomplete on the store page. There's a mention of the year 2025 in the ending, but I can't tell if it's just in-game lore or not.

I think there's a lot of roughness around the edges here. The overworld is absolutely gorgeous, including the character sprites, but the talk portraits feel really off. Not because the art is bad, but because they just stand in stark contrast to the rest of the game, what with being so much lower in resolution compared to everything else. They're also way too small/low compared to the dialogue box, with shorter characters especially, they tend to get partially or almost fully covered by the text. The game is built in RPG Maker (not sure what version) and has a completely overhauled menu UI, which is very nice, but oddly uses the default font for dialogue, which feels really out of place.

I also kind of don't like the protagonist, as we get a rather cold open to the game of them having a casual conversation with another character, and they're just complaining and being rude the entire time. As an introduction to the main character, it certainly doesn't make me very excited to be playing. In fact, I avoided conversation with a lot of the non essential NPCs because I really didn't want to hear them be mean spirited any more than I needed to. I get that part of their character is being a frustrated teenager, but I feel like it could've been handled differently.

I'm kinda confused as to if this is a completed project or not, since the title at the top of the window says demo but there's no mention of it being incomplete on the store page. There's a mention of the year 2025 in the ending, but I can't tell if it's just in-game lore or not.

I think there's a lot of roughness around the edges here. The overworld is absolutely gorgeous, including the character sprites, but the talk portraits feel really off. Not because the art is bad, but because they just stand in stark contrast to the rest of the game, what with being so much lower in resolution compared to everything else. They're also way too small/low compared to the dialogue box, with shorter characters especially, they tend to get partially or almost fully covered by the text. The game is built in RPG Maker (not sure what version) and has a completely overhauled menu UI, which is very nice, but oddly uses the default font for dialogue, which feels really out of place.

I also kind of don't like the protagonist, as we get a rather cold open to the game of them having a casual conversation with another character, and they're just complaining and being rude the entire time. As an introduction to the main character, it certainly doesn't make me very excited to be playing. In fact, I avoided conversation with a lot of the non essential NPCs because I really didn't want to hear them be mean spirited any more than I needed to. I get that part of their character is being a frustrated teenager, but I feel like it could've been handled differently.

Another game I downloaded for the goddamn Fetch points because it had the highest rate and I was planning on just leaving it idling on my phone so I could rack up minutes on it but I guess there's some provision to prevent that because an hour left idling only counted as 2 minutes.

Anyway this is probably one of the most non-games I've ever 'played'. You spin a slot machine and you take care of a 'village'. But this isn't a tycoon/city builder! Oh no, there's only 5 things you can have in each 'village' and each can only be upgraded 4 times. Nothing in the village serves literally any purpose and you can't even choose where it goes. It just appears once you buy it and then starts its little idle animation. They don't even react or bounce if you tap on them.

The game showers you with spins when you start. So many that they literally have an auto spin mode where it just mows through them. And after you've burned through them all, you get 5 spins every 45 minutes. And... that's it. You spin the machine, you earn coins, you upgrade your village. Once all 5 buildings have been upgraded all 4 times, you unlock the next village. The next village will be the exact same, even down to what types of buildings you get and where they go, but with a new visual theme and everything will be more expensive. There's a 'raid' feature and an 'attack' feature, but the only way you can access them is if you get 3 in a row of their respective icons during one of your spins. Raids and attacking sounds interesting. Unfortunately, they're nearly identical and also are defined by the fact that there's no HP, no attack power or different moves, there's just pre-determined spots the screen that you tap a single time per spot. Raids you get to tap three spots, attacks you get one. What happens after you tap is all random. You don't conquer people or take over their villages for your own growth, there's no passive income, there's no personalization, you apparently unlock a 'pet' at level/village 4 but all it seems to do is sit in the corner of your screen in a bubble. You can't interact with it.

The game runs at like 130 fps and all the animations are set to like, x2 speed. It's especially noticable during the raid and attack segments, like the game can't wait for you to get the slightly more interactive moments over with. It's constantly begging you to put money into it to get more spins, get more coins, unlock more upgrades for your village, that is also the exact same as your number-neighbors' village, and is also the exact same as the top "player's" village was when they first started "playing".

I think mobile games get a bad reputation because yeah a lot of them are kinda skeevy and predatory, but you've gotta admit, some of them are really fun. But this... filth... it only exists to prey on people with gambling addictions and people whose entire lives have taken place in the same small town and play slop like this in order to feel something. And you know it works because the ads for this fucking game have had some of the biggest celebrities in them, people who cost more to have around for an hour than most of us make in our entire lives. And at the end of the day, you have to ask, should we even honor this piece of software with the title of 'video game'?

I really don't know how to feel about this one. There's a lot of melancholy, sure, but I feel like it hinges just a bit too hard into melodrama? Like, suffering for the sake of suffering or a more well dressed version of 'look, isn't it so cool? I guess I'm just fucked up huh? :)" Especially the way the game ends, it just goes on way too long.

Like, I enjoy a good narrative about pain and suffering, but we're playing as a character who we know nothing about, aside from the single tiny sprinkles of indirect character building that exist in the two/three rooms of the house that have them. And because this game is made in bitsy, there's not a whole lot of room for visual detail that exists without being told to you. Compare this to a game like Soul Void where there's a very obvious narrative about suffering and pain, but we see it in the environment more than we're told it out right. And on top of that, there's stuff that happens outside of that agony that gives us something to do.

And on the topic of telling and not showing, the three NPCs you find in the game have very long dialogue that largely is just more metaphors about being sad or in pain. And aside from one line/string of lines from one of the three of them, I literally don't remember anything that any of them said except from a running theme of vomit and sheets of paper. I think it might've been made better if the visuals on screen matched what they were saying, but instead we just get a boiling line shot of their face/upper body.

And as for the gameplay, it's fine. There's really only one puzzle but it's made really annoying by the fact that the solution is multiple maps away and there's no teleport/run button, so you have to go all the way back to find it, and then all the way back to where it belongs to use it. You're also expected to use the sword you find to kill the three NPCs which isn't really indicated, but maybe that's on me for not assuming to kill NPCs in a game about pain and suffering. There's also a lot of discrepancies with where you're able to walk and what shapes/tiles represent walls. As in, there are invisible walls everywhere, and also tiles that look like walls that you can pass through. It just makes traversing annoying because you don't know where you can and cannot go until you try to go that way, and when the map is as big as it is here (at least for a game made in bitsy) it gets a bit cumbersome.

I'm a bit disappointed with this one, especially considering how much I liked the previous game I played from this developer. I think the idea was cool, a miserable person in an apartment falls into these ghastly catacombs, but I feel like it could've been executed a lot better.

Ironically, played this one last out of this studio's library. I also think its funny that this game is literally called 'Scope' and the cover art shows the telescope in the holder yet when I was met with the telescope and the weird-shaped metal rods on the balcony, I did not put it together in my head that that was where it was supposed to go. In my defense, it looks a lot like the device in the living room that holds the marbles, so I thought I was looking for bigger marbles.

This is their shortest game, and although its possible to beat it in under 15 minutes, I feel like most people on itch were taking about an hour or so. There's a healthy amount of obtuseness here, nothing super outlandish, but a few parts where I had to check a walkthrough just to get past one or two blockage puzzles. Also, I feel like, at least in one area, the click detection is off, so I had to spam click around to get something to show in the right perspective.

Same great artstyle as the other two games, with a lot of the same charm. Short little afternoon snack of a game.

Very good, like with Trace, this game has very good art and sound design. They nail the clay/crafted aesthetic and this game reminds me a lot of ISpy books. But I feel like this one has much more obtuse puzzles than Trace does. I found myself needing to resort to hints/walkthroughs much sooner here than with Trace. Granted, it could be a skill issue on my part, but the game actually has a built in hint system which Trace doesn't have, which leads me to believe the developers knew this one was harder.

Either way, still very good, lots of character and charm here.