Solstice

Highly recommended! Well-written, in a unique game world. This may actually be the first game I've played where it didn't feel like any one ending was the 'true' ending. I wish there had been a chance to be even more of a 'hero' and help all of the characters more, but I recognize that that also wasn't realistic. There are no complete heroes or villains here - every character has very human motivations and weaknesses. Compared to their other title Cinders I found Solstice more polished, better written, and getting 100% completion (all possible endings / variants) was much more logical and not as frustrating. Sometimes autoskip would stop working but that was the only bug I encountered (saving, then quitting and reloading the save worked to solve this). Hope to see more from this developer!

I can sometimes enjoy stories where the world is not coherent and lots of things are arbitrary to fit the story, but it depends on enjoying the direction of the story and being asked to make decisions without relevent background of the characters you are asked to make decisions for is not something I enjoy at all (not everything is arbitrary but a lot of things are). After being told early on that essentially everyone in the city is effectively a slave you are later asked by the person who told you that what your least favorite part of the city is, but "everyone is a slave" is not one of the options. If you decide that destruction of the city is the best outcome (as I did fairly quickly) you can let that happen but there is no way for the characters to embrace that option as far as I can tell. Rather, decisions you make in that direction are second guessed by the characters. If there are other options where you save the city but disrupt the power structure it would not be believable. The music and graphics are nice and the overall setting and world could be put to good use in the right hands but this game is just a frustrating and upsetting experience. The game crashed once "out of memory" on a Win10 system with 16GB main memory and 8GB video memory (where the game directory is 151MB total on disk), so it must not be freeing memory at all on my system for some reason (there was at least an autosave seconds earlier in the story). Also skip mode stopped working after I tried to use it once and even in it there are still a bunch of unavoidable delays. Cinders was also quite a frustrating experience so I've added MoaCube to my list to avoid.

Art and music get 5 stars from me, since the game is pleasant to the senses and adequately executed. The story though... oh boy, where to start. There's no depth to characters, they do not evolve or change in the game. The story itself is rather short. It's not a mystery in a sense that you can deduct something with logic. Employing logic would be quite counter-productive here (I hope that wasn't a spoiler). Your choices matter, but you can rarely predict which way each choice would lead your character. Therefore you have little control over the course of events, being swept away by the waters of forced storyline. It irritated me during replays up to the point where I gave up going for certain endings (didn't feel like reading a walkthrough). ** minor spoilers ** As someone has mentioned before in comments, there's no option to really *change* something. So to say, the best possible outcome is to save everyone, but the corrupt system stays the same (or it gets worse). Your actions don't give you that sense of accomplishment. Also note, that this game features same-sex relationships. If it's a sensitive topic for you, you've been warned.

Just a dialogue without depth all the way through ! I am sorry I exceeded the time-frame for return, Nice graphics though but as I said - not a game !

What _could_ have been a nice game, turned out to be just clicking from one line of dialogue to the other. After the first half an hour or so you have seen all the characters possible expressions, which only meet somewhat both text and emotions. They shift between three or four »attitudes« and there is no lip synchronisation at all. All characters remind of known actors - Michelle Pfeiffer came to mind or Zhang Ziyi - and it would have been nice with at least _some_ kind of speech sound. The backgrounds - like in a theatre - and chacters look nice, but since all you do is reading while the characters change their position and never really match the situation, there soon is no reason anymore to look at all this beauty. After one hour of gameplay you have seen everything there is to see. It took me 6,5 hours to complete the game (so tells me GOG Galaxy), and I kind of ask myself why I did it. The story itself is not that bad, but it is told in an especially boring way. There are two main characters, and it seems up to the player - or better: reader - to determine, who they are and what they did while nobody was watching - in any case not you, the player. They just tell about it in those dialogues, or they get accused for something, and it is some kind of weird if you get to know things about them you already should know – since you are »playing« them … reading them … … well … something like that … Even the option for some romance does not add some kind of _life_ to them. I liked the idea of a book-like story told like a play on stage, but »Solstice« is not good enough. Wouldn’t it been for the dialogues, I would recommend it for children under ten, and I see no reason at all why I would like to click all theese lines of text again, just to catch another one of the four possible endings.