My pleasure. I hope you enjoy it!


Oh, I know you weren't, sorry if my response sounded like that. I was merely trying to play off of how insignificant an issue it is, as though there was no way to correct it outside of a patch. :)

Quite so. I lament this aspect of online communication as well. Always tricky to strike the right chord every time. :)

Thanks for your detailed thoughts on this one. Based on your review and what I know from our discussions about our similar appreciation for games of this nature, I'll be picking this one up tonight when I get home. :)

Would like to hear your own thoughts on it as well. The game could use more balanced reviews, too. :)

SPOILERS (for those who care)

I just finished the game recently, and I have to say that I really don't get where your brother got the basis for his conclusion. The stuff your brother sees as meta-critique aimed at the game/games on a larger scale I saw as a manifestation of survivor guilt and depression caused by obsession trying to torment the player character; it does so in the traditional ways (taunting the PC for obsessing over his sister's death and generally attempting to demean him), but also taking the odd jab at the game world as part of an attempt to demean the PC who was, for all intents and purposes, the designer by virtue of creating it from his mind. The thing is, though, none of the things said to that end feel like they have any substance to them; they attempt to mock, but the mockery lacks any basis to give the player pause for thought about what it says, at least not beyond "yup, that was convenient. so what?".

That feeble nature of the attempts at trying to belittle the PC was what sealed it for me; the things said aren't intended to be critique meant to draw the player's attention to something wrong in game development, they are intended to inflame by pure appeal to emotion in an attempt to beat down the PC.

SPOILERS END

That said, the game is not well designed in some pretty important ways. The optimization is rather poor to the point that I had to drop my resolution to the bare minimum when in wooded areas, and even then my FPS was so low that I had to look up to keep the game from having the FPS of an old silent movie. Since I could not change my resolution without first quitting out of the game to the main menu, I decided to keep the lowest resolution to save time. The lack of a save system is rather galling, but it sadly becomes obvious that it is necessary when a physics object needed to proceed becomes unattainable. One time a ball went into the water, not far enough to respawn, but far enough that attempts to wade in to get it killed me, and one time a conjured ball meant to roll down an incline refused to resume movement upon reappearing; the only way I was able to proceed was by quitting out and selecting "continue". Finally, the control over the physics objects is incredibly wonky. Sometimes holding a ball and walking would cause the ball to drop from my grip for no reason, in some cases making it possible to proceed only by gripping the ball, turning around 180 degrees, dropping it, moving forward, and repeating. Given that this seemed to happen more often when my FPS was suffering and I was not averting my gaze from the direction I was walking, I suspect that the performance of the game was so bad that when I walked forward, there was enough of a delay in the ball moving for the game to register it as behind me, thus meaning I couldn't be grasping it. Then there were the times that the game just wouldn't recognize that I was attempting to pick up or drop an object. Again, I managed to get through the game ok after turning everything down to the bare minimum, but that didn't eliminate by troubles; it did reduce them to about 1-9% of what it had been, but that's still too many issues in a game where the gameplay revolves around precision movement and placement of physics objects.