This game promises to bring the frustrations of the real world into an RPG and empowers you to overcome them.
It does so with systems of inconvenience, something the developer explored better in a previous title “Decay”.
You can be randomly mailed a pipe bomb, some enemies stalk you and try to kill you after one conversation with them,
This is the strength of the gameplay but often feels like an afterthought
Speaking of afterthought let's talk about the writing.
The writing in this feels less than uninspired, This feels like less than a rough draft It feels like the outline of a story.
Moments where dialogue could be written to characterize the party are written with the most dry unimaginative prose.
The entire thing lacks any sense of drama, There is no sense of building tension or any sort of progression really.
Some things are written Maybe as jokes but are delivered as if it's a complaint about something that it doesn't feel as though it's dry humor or anything like that.
For example the warehouse (definitely not Amazon) somehow outsources its work?
This is a functional impossibility so you want to assume that it's a joke, but everything around it reads as if it's serious.
And what is the grand solution to this problem? diving into delusion of consumer media.
Engaging in RPG combat and becoming a adventurer, pretending to be Chainsawman when you fight, And as always most importantly being angry and annoyed by everything that inconveniences you ever.
The marketing title should be “KILL YOUR LANDLORD”
Even the delivery of Ramona not liking talking to her mom is done so ham-fistedly that it's just immediately telling you everything about it.
There's no drama, there's no tension, no build up.
It might as well have been a text box that pops up and says “Ramona doesn't like talking to her mother because she's transphobic to her”.
The last thing about writing is all of the conflict and the entire point of this just seems to be to complain about things.
From anime nerd culture (But I'm definitely not one of those guys trust me), to NFTs, Crappy Landlords, trans-phobic mothers, and sucky jobs.
After 10 Updates the gameplay remains largely the same.
An exploit I used to make the game more bearable (Saving before every encounter) has been patched out since it could cause a potential softlock.
If you like RPGs with combat scenarios which make you consider your party composition, careful planning and meaningful progression, then look elsewhere.
It appears, to dissuade grinding, that the normal encounters scale to your level, making them MORE difficult than boss encounters.
Whether you win an encounter or not is largely up to RNG, I assume this is to add to the systems of inconvenience, which themselves put you at a disadvantage, how does losing 50 Max HP randomly because you wanted to save before you faced a boss?
In which you need to leave the dungeon and make your way back to your apartment and then to get back to the boss, travel through the dungeon again.
You can just use your phone to call an uber to get teleported to the apartment instantly but that costs money and there are situations that make it so you cannot use your apartment regardless, such as when the gramophone blocks it as a result of not completing it’s quest making it so that you are unable to save as well as unable to make your characters “rested”
The Artificial difficulty of someone who misunderstood what made Drakengard great, making their game “bad on purpose” because that’s the “art” of it.
This is my charitable read of it.
What we end up with is a game that is tedious, the gameplay loop doesn’t properly revolve around the systems unlike Decay as I mentioned earlier. So it feels needlessly tacked onto a game that just talks at you from the developer’s mouth.
I may attempt to see the other content the game has to offer, but from what I have so far it doesn’t inspire much confidence about anything being of quality.
(Since the posting of my last review the developer had claimed the entire thing was in bad faith, posted publicly to his followers complaining about the review several times and then acted on the criticism and advice I gave, as well as adding me to the credits? the original review will be posted below.)
It does so with systems of inconvenience, something the developer explored better in a previous title “Decay”.
You can be randomly mailed a pipe bomb, some enemies stalk you and try to kill you after one conversation with them,
This is the strength of the gameplay but often feels like an afterthought
Speaking of afterthought let's talk about the writing.
The writing in this feels less than uninspired, This feels like less than a rough draft It feels like the outline of a story.
Moments where dialogue could be written to characterize the party are written with the most dry unimaginative prose.
The entire thing lacks any sense of drama, There is no sense of building tension or any sort of progression really.
Some things are written Maybe as jokes but are delivered as if it's a complaint about something that it doesn't feel as though it's dry humor or anything like that.
For example the warehouse (definitely not Amazon) somehow outsources its work?
This is a functional impossibility so you want to assume that it's a joke, but everything around it reads as if it's serious.
And what is the grand solution to this problem? diving into delusion of consumer media.
Engaging in RPG combat and becoming a adventurer, pretending to be Chainsawman when you fight, And as always most importantly being angry and annoyed by everything that inconveniences you ever.
The marketing title should be “KILL YOUR LANDLORD”
Even the delivery of Ramona not liking talking to her mom is done so ham-fistedly that it's just immediately telling you everything about it.
There's no drama, there's no tension, no build up.
It might as well have been a text box that pops up and says “Ramona doesn't like talking to her mother because she's transphobic to her”.
The last thing about writing is all of the conflict and the entire point of this just seems to be to complain about things.
From anime nerd culture (But I'm definitely not one of those guys trust me), to NFTs, Crappy Landlords, trans-phobic mothers, and sucky jobs.
After 10 Updates the gameplay remains largely the same.
An exploit I used to make the game more bearable (Saving before every encounter) has been patched out since it could cause a potential softlock.
If you like RPGs with combat scenarios which make you consider your party composition, careful planning and meaningful progression, then look elsewhere.
It appears, to dissuade grinding, that the normal encounters scale to your level, making them MORE difficult than boss encounters.
Whether you win an encounter or not is largely up to RNG, I assume this is to add to the systems of inconvenience, which themselves put you at a disadvantage, how does losing 50 Max HP randomly because you wanted to save before you faced a boss?
In which you need to leave the dungeon and make your way back to your apartment and then to get back to the boss, travel through the dungeon again.
You can just use your phone to call an uber to get teleported to the apartment instantly but that costs money and there are situations that make it so you cannot use your apartment regardless, such as when the gramophone blocks it as a result of not completing it’s quest making it so that you are unable to save as well as unable to make your characters “rested”
The Artificial difficulty of someone who misunderstood what made Drakengard great, making their game “bad on purpose” because that’s the “art” of it.
This is my charitable read of it.
What we end up with is a game that is tedious, the gameplay loop doesn’t properly revolve around the systems unlike Decay as I mentioned earlier. So it feels needlessly tacked onto a game that just talks at you from the developer’s mouth.
I may attempt to see the other content the game has to offer, but from what I have so far it doesn’t inspire much confidence about anything being of quality.
(Since the posting of my last review the developer had claimed the entire thing was in bad faith, posted publicly to his followers complaining about the review several times and then acted on the criticism and advice I gave, as well as adding me to the credits? the original review will be posted below.)
hellkrai
2 months ago
(After sending their sister's friends into the comments and encouraging his followers to harass me the developer said they were going to address some of the issues discussed in the review. They mentioned one way to subvert this issue in a passive aggressive manner instead of bringing it up here properly. After they update the game I'll check it out again and adjust my review.)
I Hate You Please Suffer promises to bring the everyday annoyances and inconviences into a turn based roleplaying game.
This game builds on Systems of "Inconvience" that the dev explored in their title "Decay". This means you will just lose money, your max health will go down, you will just be mailed pipe bombs. There exists a slight humor to these but it feels asthough it intends to be "Inconviencing" and relatable to real life annoyances first and for most.
I tried to play through completely it but after 7 hours and getting completely soft-locked with a single save file I don't think it's worth my time.
Ironically this puts it in the camp of a YIIK fangame.
When bringing up a comment about how games "Must be fun" (You know the one with Reggie Fis Ame) The developer of that game replied "My Mistake was thinking that Video Games are art".
It feels like game attempts to be "The Papers Please" of RPGs but falls increbily short.
Instead of actually depicting the struggle of life though, it wants to showcase the utterly soy conclusion of escaping into fantasy.
The characters are utterly flat and the writting, to call it half baked would imply that they have all the ingredents together in the first place.
It feels like an outline of the story, a first draft. Which would be fine if this project was their others, Game jam games or a really short RPG with a lot of backstory for every single character except the main one, it would be fine.
But here with a game that took 3 years and at a $13 dollar price tag? It's a bit much.
A lot of what I'm reffering to here is 4th wall breaking dialogue that is either a poorly written joke (Which I've seen the writter complain about needlessly in other games) or just literal place holder text.
To give an example when explaining to a new party member what has happened so far ionstead of re-contextualizing it or even giving us more of what happened they opt for "Ramona explained the stuff from the intro".
If this were supposed to be a joke I'd expect it to be written something like "You've already seen this, Ramona is just explaining the stuff that happened before" or with more character "Ramona explains about her dreadful experience with unemployment thus far."
"Wow this seems like a really weird thing to be hung up on, it's just one line of poorly written text", might be your thought reading this. The issue is that this is how almost ALL of the text in game feels.
Every single character, every conflict, seems to exist soley as a way to complain about something in the writter's life.
Lets pivot form story to gameplay.
This follows Slimes perfectly in how leveling up is utterly worthless.
Unless you want to get spesific skills, that may or may not be useful, doing any combat encounter but the required ones is a waste of time and resources. (So much so that I've opted to restart the game everytime I encounter something and can't run away imediately, because it is just faster.) Enemies scale with your level, so that means you'll never on top, (Which makes sense given how this is supposed to be a cruel unforgiving world) but every enemy encounter is actually more difficult than required ones. And going through them does "help you" for the required ones, they actually just make you waste resources making the required ones harder arbitrarily.
Part of me understands what they're going for here.. But this doesn't even irratate me, it just bores me, it's not particularly interesting or meaningful. It's not setting the tone of the world or telling me anything about the chaarcters. It's just boring basic RPG gameplay thrown ontop of a rough draft of a story.
I noticed how you added more inconvience systems to counter my strategy to just grind for money, and that's where the game is stronger.
This aspect of the game, which is most of it's gameplay feels so slapped on and unpolished that to say it's the ingredients of something would be almost unfair.
As usual ScityDreamer does a decent job of coming up with abilities for his chaarctersand how they tie into who they are. it's just the grander system that is very weak.
After playing this Years Knmuckle Sandwhich I realized it fell into the same pit falls as YIIK 1.0, and with this game it's odd to me that you as a critic of YIIK would make a combat system that is worse than it's 1.0 iteration.
"It's bad on purpose"
is a phrase I loathe, but is said by people primarily about games like Drakengard (which I love).
This feels like a gmae made by someone who shares this same sentiment as the youtube reviewers that would say the same thing.
"Drakengard is beautiful because the terrible aspects of it make it even better as art"
No, Drakengard is great because of its superb world building and extremely clearly defined and explored characters.
The world that is utterly unsavable and characters who are entirely unreedeemable.
Contrast that to I Hate You Please Suffer, and it feels like a millenial complaint letter that we don't have walkable citys, how warehouse jobs suck, how people seem to be only there to screw you over or make your trauma worse, and how people want you to, force you to accept their insane crap but refuse to show any respect to you.
This would seem like it's "Punk" by the way I described it, but in reality it's "Pop-Punk".
Instead of going out rebeling against the powers that be and clearly demonstrating how vile the world they created is.
Let's complain about relationships, our hometown, and how much our jobs suck.
Disclaimer: The developer of this game has a history of passive and active aggression toward me.
I also paid full price for this game, because I like supporting independent artists.
(I don't want to hear you and your sister complain about me "yapping" when you posted SEVERAL articles about one game dude, you shouldn't be so adverse to criticism if you're going to paint yourself as a critic.)
While I have you here because I know you desperately hangonto my every last word I feel it's nessecary to give you some advice.
This advice should prove useful so please read carefully and not skim over it and assume what I've said.
So it is true the ESRB does give discounted ratings for indie devs.
It's not required for your game to be on Steam, so that would be an exorbitant waste of money on your end.
Which yes, you have to pay to have your game rated by the "Entertainment Software Ratings Board".They are a legal entity that does have to pay it's employees.
I personally doubt that you went out of your way to get your game rated and by looking up on their site can see that you did not.
This was what was causing you issues when you were trying to release your game before.
Not that Steam thought your "Content warning" needed to be checked but because you're claiming to be rated when you're very likely not to be.
While you took a random tweet of mine and assumed it was about you, lets talk about the price.
I'm not going to sit here and tell you what your game is worth, I will say you probably need a little bit of marketing advice.
$12.99 is a weird range because the arbitrary nature of it puts you JUST out of being in the "Under $10" category here on Steam.
Though with this in mind I will say as a bit of advice when you put it on sale you should price it at $9.99.
Why? Well because steam puts out notifications to people who wishlisted the game when it's discounted at 20% or more.
that would equal $10.39 normally but really why not allow yourself to be in the "Under $10" category for 40 cents?
I promise you'd be likely to do more sales that way.
Lastly, Why two steam pages?
You haven't made a community post on the other about your game being released....
You should probably get on that.
Why wouldn't you just use the same page and have set up "Basic" as your demo since you gave it away for free anyway.
Games with Demos have proven to lead to more sales and that would have benefited you greatly here.
but having it as two seperate pages makes it harder for consumers to find, and doesn't do you a lot of favors asking people to wishlist it twice. Additionally the people who would've wishlisted the page before hand would have gotten a notification that the full release is out. Which would've helped retain costumers and again likely have lead to more sales.
You hate me I get it, but I know what I'm talking about, and that likely only makes you hate me more.
Cheers and I hope this criticism and advice helps you on future projects. Good Luck!