Yakman_
Bio
Vaguely nauseous, slightly annoyed
I got lists bout games on my RYM if you want 'em.
Vaguely nauseous, slightly annoyed
I got lists bout games on my RYM if you want 'em.
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Being part of the Backloggd community for 2 years
GOTY '22
Participated in the 2022 Game of the Year Event
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GOTY '21
Participated in the 2021 Game of the Year Event
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This review contains spoilers
While it certainly does stumble at points (mostly around the ending) I think much of my excitement of this game comes from the potential that an entire adventure genre based around learning conlangs (or real world languages) has. The narrative of the game is pretty clearly a modern retelling or reimagining of The Tower of Babel, which results in the game going for variety rather than depth of any of the four languages it teaches the player. However, there is some pretty significant crossover in how the languages are constructed; all of the languages are written left-to-right, are logographic, and don't have a spoken component (as far as the player is concerned.) This isn't to say that the languages themselves don't have significant differences in their construction (the bard language in particular was difficult for me to wrap my head around when I was trying to translate it because of its sentence structure) but that is to say that the potential that this game shows has a LOT of room to grow.
I think the surprise malware-horror ending that every indie game made post-Undertale engages in takes away from this particular ending a little bit, and there were points where the direction is a little too unclear made worse by the utterly labyrinthine design the maps engage in. When this game is successful though, it nails both the rush of feeling smart for solving a puzzle, and the enjoyment I get from getting a difficult Duolingo question right on the first try.
I think the surprise malware-horror ending that every indie game made post-Undertale engages in takes away from this particular ending a little bit, and there were points where the direction is a little too unclear made worse by the utterly labyrinthine design the maps engage in. When this game is successful though, it nails both the rush of feeling smart for solving a puzzle, and the enjoyment I get from getting a difficult Duolingo question right on the first try.
Maybe the best incremental game Ive ever played, mostly because its incrementalism exists to actually prove a point. Not only with like seeing what it would like to be an AI with the express goal of making paper clips from the first person, but also like reading it as a business sim, it really expresses how capitalism incentives particular behaviors. Like it makes sense that several economic crashes would occur because of extremely high risk debt, because at a high level of wealth, its the only way you can chase the high of making it big. It really feels nice to see number go up, and then to see number go up faster. And that itself is the problem.
I played this for like 5 hours straight, what the fuck.
I played this for like 5 hours straight, what the fuck.
You basically play as Martin Shkreli, the poison salesman from the Runescape quest Murder Mystery, and the Potion Seller from Potion Seller. Pretty good!