I love this game. I wish it loved me back.
So much of my time spent in this game is spent wishing there were actually decent usability features. The point, at least on the first playthrough, is to figure out how the cards interact with each other to tell a compelling narrative, but about halfway through that playthrough, you start playing "Organize Your Cards" simulator. It's atrocious; group moving is inconsistent at best, the raw quantity of cards makes organization near impossible, the separation and constant fading of certain kinds of status effects like reputation and mental ailments makes organization a never-ending battle, and most importantly, under certain extremely common conditions like "there are too many timers on the board," the game slows to an absolutely unplayable crawl, where even fast-forwarded time ends up slower than real-life time. If this game had a sort function, or even passable optimization, or like... any sort of opinion on how you should be organizing your board, I'd enjoy it a lot more than I do.
God, please let me just hit sort. Please let things with different timers stack. Please stop making me hit "pause" every 2 seconds so I can figure out where my cards got scattered to.
Or don't, I've already lost like 2 days, so...
Update: Played through to one of the major endings. Towards the end of the game, I spent about 5 hours doing about as many expeditions because the raw number of cards on the screen made the framerate and timer tick-rate slow to an abysmal 5 frames per second, causing in-game time to be even slower than real-world time, even on fast-forward. The game became borderline unplayable, and it speaks to the quality of the worldbuilding and writing that I wanted to keep going despite the absolute hell that was the actual experience of playing it. Honestly, even if that were not the case, the game became the least interesting grind of "hope RNGesus finally lets you win."
At this point, my recommended way to experience this game is to play through to a standard ending once to get the experience of discovery, then read a wiki somewhere to actually get to read the excellent writing.
So much of my time spent in this game is spent wishing there were actually decent usability features. The point, at least on the first playthrough, is to figure out how the cards interact with each other to tell a compelling narrative, but about halfway through that playthrough, you start playing "Organize Your Cards" simulator. It's atrocious; group moving is inconsistent at best, the raw quantity of cards makes organization near impossible, the separation and constant fading of certain kinds of status effects like reputation and mental ailments makes organization a never-ending battle, and most importantly, under certain extremely common conditions like "there are too many timers on the board," the game slows to an absolutely unplayable crawl, where even fast-forwarded time ends up slower than real-life time. If this game had a sort function, or even passable optimization, or like... any sort of opinion on how you should be organizing your board, I'd enjoy it a lot more than I do.
God, please let me just hit sort. Please let things with different timers stack. Please stop making me hit "pause" every 2 seconds so I can figure out where my cards got scattered to.
Or don't, I've already lost like 2 days, so...
Update: Played through to one of the major endings. Towards the end of the game, I spent about 5 hours doing about as many expeditions because the raw number of cards on the screen made the framerate and timer tick-rate slow to an abysmal 5 frames per second, causing in-game time to be even slower than real-world time, even on fast-forward. The game became borderline unplayable, and it speaks to the quality of the worldbuilding and writing that I wanted to keep going despite the absolute hell that was the actual experience of playing it. Honestly, even if that were not the case, the game became the least interesting grind of "hope RNGesus finally lets you win."
At this point, my recommended way to experience this game is to play through to a standard ending once to get the experience of discovery, then read a wiki somewhere to actually get to read the excellent writing.