Hello,

I would like to give those who haven't yet played the game and are deciding a hint of what the puzzles are like and why I also only gave it 3/5 stars. So there is a huge puzzle spoiler coming up! Beware!

The first longer puzzle sequence requires you to fix a broken virtual reality device, you fall on it while you sleep. I will just quickly explain in bulletin points what you need to do to solve this quest (not in direct order):

1. Find hidden code to leave your apartment via broom
2. Find coins for a vending machine via screwdriver
3. Find your credit card via screwdriver
4. Pick you hoverboard, pills and an ID card
5. Order pizza via terminal for a bouncer for a shop to get into it
6. Have vendor tell you that you need battery and glasses
7. Buy screwdriver kit
8. Get battery out of hoverboard via screwdriver and get back to apartment to connect battery to VR headset
9. Withdraw cash via terminal
10. See beggar(!) throw away(!) virtual reality headset with replacement glasses(!) in dumpster
11. Trade pills for a VR cartridge from a shady vendor to give to beggar (beggar unhappy and wants better)
12. Talk to shady vendor, vendor wants more meds for better VR cartridge, so talk to other vendor
13. Use terminal to contact other vendor via dating app via ID card to blackmail him into selling stuff to you
14. Use withdrawn cash to and printed email for blackmailing to get meds for shady vendor
15. Trade better meds with shady vendor for better cartridge
16. Beggar won't take it, you need distraction
17. Go to sushi place and talk to people there, a blogger reviews restaurants that don't make spicy food
18. Go to vending machine and use coins to purchase spicy juice
19. Go back to sushi place and pour spicy juice on food to upset blogger
20. Chef of sushi place throws out food and beggar is distracted
21. Place cartridge in the cartridge collection of beggar
22. Beggar is distracted and you can access dumpster to retrieve VR headset
23. Get glasses out of beggar's VR headset and put it into your own device
24. Puzzle solved!

Now, for context: in my review, I complained somewhat about how the puzzles don't add to the story, but rather unlock the story. You also just learned that your girlfriend had to leave you in a hurry and broke up with you. Your character basically just reacts with "Well, I kinda deserve it." and goes on to fix the headset. This puzzle took me about an hour to solve.
To get something that is so abundant, that a beggar can afford to throw it away - the only explanation you get is: "Well, it just sold it out. Come back another time."

And let me tell you, the next major puzzle chain follows the same recipe. You learn that your girlfriend is a hacker and had to go undercover. So naturally your next goal is to fuck up a street thugs tattoo - you see my point? You never feel directly involved in the story. Two hours into the game and I know that my girlfriend is gone, that I am looking for her and that she probably is a hacker.

The puzzles basically have nothing to do with that in itself. I am not complaining about the puzzle design per se. They are not very organic imho, but challenging enough to not be boring and not tooooo confusing, albeit not very natural. But you have no tangible goal associated with them.

Constructed example: In Game A, you and your character know that you need to fix your headset, because you know that you need it to access the virtual space, because you know that there is a contact to give you more information on the location of your missing girlfriend and you also know that the augmented reality aspect your headset will give you information in a previously visited location. You have a story goal and enough information for the puzzle to seem worthwile and somewhat urgent.

In VirtuaVerse, you know that you need to fix your headset. So you fix it. You don't really know what it does and why you need it for the story. I mean, yes, having access to a virtual reality headset in a game called VirtuaVerse comes natural, but it really does not get your heart racing or get you involved in the story. And after fixing, a dialog explains to you that your girlfriend is know a hacker and the journal litterally tells you that you did good and that you now need to go to another location. You never feel any urgency, you don't care about your missing girlfriend because you only know her name and even your character does not seem to care too much, so why should you?

That is my biggest problem with the game.

Mmmmh: The reason why he needs to fix the headset is written in the first sentence and jounral -> to call his girlfriend and know what happened to her. The reason why you need to find her afterwards is also explained reallly clearly: you put her in danger and now need to find her at all costs.

Not sure which part you missed of all this but we also implemented journals to make it even more evident and clear.

Also the part you played is essentially still the prologue to the story. The real one unfolds actually when you meet her.

It's VirtuaVerse anyway :)

Hello,

thanks for the reply and congrats on releasing your game!

(!!!SPOILERS AHEAD AGAIN!!!)

I still think that my point stands though. One of the first setences in the game even says "What did I do wrong this time?", implying that this has happened before and she had returned on her own anyway on earlier occasions. I don't think that relying on one sentence in the journal to set off the story was the best choice. Additionally, you also don't know what the headset does and you also - if i remember correctly - never use the VR headset for communication ever again after trying to contact Jay once. Before that, you introduce the player to other means of communcation: text, apps, mail etc. via terminals, that also have call functions (Support) etc. - so it is also not inherently clear why it should be so important to use the headset to get in contact with your girlfriend, which makes it feel like separate issues in my opinion. And again, that technology seemed very abundant, since a beggar threw away a pair just to get back to his spare.

Regarding "putting her in danger": yes, but I as a player only know that from that news bit and because it is said so. There is really nothing else in the game imho that makes this evident. The environment/setting comes across as run down, but not really hostile. There is not much hints on what will happen if I as player would hypothecially fail, so there again is no real "goal" except the game telling me all of this. And even later on, in retrospect, there never seemed to be real danger (I mean, there are two policemen before the club, carefully waiting and they don't seem very threatening and after that nothing like this happens again).

In the Slum section you didn't shy away from using an omniscient perspective to show the player something he could otherwise not know. Maybe even a weaker form of maybe showing us something from the perspective of Jay that implies the danger, urgency or give us some hint on their relationship earlier would have helped to set things off smoother. For example: GeminiRue starts of with a different perspective - it does not really tell you anything, but it is somewhat intriguing. "Who are these people? What are they doing with this guy?" This gives you a hint that there is something foul going on. Then, urgency is created by the first dialog with your character and your space pilot - someone is late and your pilot is getting nervous because they are afraid of being detected. And also a graffiti is the first thing you can interact with in Gemini Rue - telling you about a gang which abducts people for unknown reasons to an unkown place. That took like three to four minutes. So in my opinion something like this would have also helped VirtuaVerse a lot and probably would not have taken that much time or effort.

For example, you could have just shown us the TV in the background displaying some news, maybe police violence while clearing out a hacker den, maybe even killing a few in the process, while your character still sleeps. Or have a hooded trio say some cryptic stuff (e.g. later revealed as the Technomancers). And imho it would not have changed to much regarding the story, if the player new that Jay was a hacker in the first place. The player still would not know much, but he would know that a, someone does not like hakers b, it is dangerous place for a hacker and c, if Jay was hacker, just her being gone without telling you implies something bigger and also urgency. If that makes sense. :D You had her note on the mirror, yes, but since other things in the apartment are also broken or run down, it could just have meant that Jay just left you because she was bored with you (e.g. the comment "What did I do wrong this time?") and that she had to use some form of digital force to leave the apartment as a means setting of the first puzzle.

It took me roughly 8 hours to finish the game, being stuck on some puzzles, so my biggest gripe would be that in my opinion, too much time was waisted in the beginning with unnecessarily convoluted puzzles without enough information to really justify any of that hassle. I don't think I needed nearly as much time or steps for any other puzzle compared to fixing the headset. :D

I also think that you did way better in the second half of the game, which felt a lot "tighter" and more "packed". The puzzles involved less guesswork, the solution to problems was more obvious and you had a reason to do it aside from the game telling you to do that, especially very close to the end aboard the spaceship. You had a clear and urgent motive (albeit maybe the wrong motive :D) for destroying the "AI", the environment seemed dangerous and problem (e.g. the heart, which is organic) and solution (a syringe and a machine to produce chemicals) were easier to connect. I just wished you had shown this earlier in the game.

And sorry for the wrong name. I shall correct it!

You'll probably disregard or completely ignore my reply, since it's coming from me, but, still, I'd like to add that nothing is as "black and white" as you tend to imply.

This all seems to boil down to the democratization of Art (capitalized on purpose), and whether we consider video games to be Art, or not. Also, it's the old "should a director give in on their vision for the movie/game just to deliver a more palatable experience to the viewers/gamers?" debacle, and, honestly, there's no right or wrong answer to this. I do think an artist is 100% entitled to go through with their vision, their ethos, but, then again, when you're doing a point & click adventure that appeals to such a high demographic, maybe (not saying you DEFINITELY should, just MAYBE) a designer/director should consider "pandering" a bit to the majority of the people who will be playing their game. If they want to stay true to their vision, that's fine, but then maybe the game shouldn't be sold on mainstream digital outlets, just like a huge shopping center bookstore won't sell Pier Paolo Pasolini or Robert Coover, or just like an indie cult film won't get noticed by the big-film Hollywood industry. Is this right? Probably not, but, unfortunately, it's the way the world works, and we have to work with what we have been given.

I'll be honest with you, here: I think you made a good game. Really. But I set my expectations too high -- that's on me -- because, unlike what you guys at Theta Division seem to think, the video game industry is NOT dying; in fact, there never have been so many worthwhile indies and "AA" games like there are today; and, as a point & click adventure fan, I've been spoiled by the likes of Primordia, Gemini Rue, Technobabylon, The Cat Lady/Downfall trilogy, Thimbleweed Park, Memoranda, Fran Bow, the Blackwell series and Unavowed, Kathy Rain,-- the list goes on. Looking at VirtuaVerse, I honestly thought I was getting something more like those, and instead I got an honest labour of love, passion and dedication that still feels kind of amateurish despite it. And I'm not blaming you, you guys did the best you could, considering this was the first ever video game project any of you had worked on, you're really not to blame, here; do understand, though (being Italian, you, more than others, should understand this), your game was released during a global pandemic, a lot of places -- including my own country, and yours -- are affected by it, socially and economically, I had to use money from my savings just to make ends meet, because working from home, for me, also means "being paid half my salary", so when I buy a game, I'm actually investing money on a product I *need* to absolutely adore. I felt kind of "betrayed" by your game, because the game I ended up playing was not the game you guys advertise on GOG or Steam, and this is aggravated by how little money I have to spend on gaming, right now. You keep asking gamers to put them-/ourselves in your shoes -- and we should, I agree --, but you guys should do some of that, too, since we're the ones giving you money by buying your game.

I don't know how hard it is to develop a video game, I can't pretend like I do, because I don't. But I do know that the fact that I grew up playing some genres (namely point & click adventures) and knowing A LOT about them doesn't automatically qualify me to be a dev of games in those same genres. That's how I feel about VirtuaVerse. Your love for point & click adventures looks honest and real, but the execution leaves a bit to be desired. Plus, the fact you get so defensive when your game gets some sort of criticism doesn't help at all... I do not think a developer should "asslick" every person who bought their game [your own words, not mine], but I do think a bit of PR goes a long way in maintaining relations with your audience, or else we just end up with another YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG dev or, in the worst case scenario, another Phil Fish.

I talked at length about the reasons I think your game is not as good as it leads people to believe, at first, so I guess I'll skip that for now. I think you're all intelligent people, and I'm sure you'll take some of the criticism to heart and improve things with your upcoming game, and I DO wish you the best of luck, because there are glimpses of good things in VirtuaVerse -- again, some are not explored to their full potential, others suffer from amateur execution, which is to be expected, considering it IS your first attempt at a game.

I'd like to close my post by saying that getting defensive by using the "this is our first game, we're a team of three, doing it off-hours during a span of four years" is kind of a low blow. I'm taking your game at face value, it shouldn't matter how long you took to make it, how many of you there are or if it's your first or tenth game. Sorry, that's just a poor excuse to try making people overlook the flaws in VV (same as saying we have no right to think Valenberg's work looks bad because he worked on a 320x280 canvas; that's like saying that a painter doing an A5-sized painting deserves more respect than Picasso because he painted murals and our dude is using such a small piece of paper). I could mention a couple of games that took years (sometimes decades) to make, with teams of sometimes one single person, but, honestly, what matters the most is how good the end product is. Iconoclasts, for instance, took Joakim Sandberg more than 10 years to make, on his own, while working on other stuff, off-hours. He NEVER used that as a weapon to throw at people being critical of his game. You know why? Because the game speaks for itself, and it's a widely praised, great game (within the genre, of course). Which brings us to this: *what kind of game is VirtuaVerse REALLY trying to be?" Serious? Goofy? Funny? Puzzle point & click, à la Myst? Story/character driven point & click, like Monkey Island, Beneath a Steel Sky or Broken Sword? It's never really clear, and not even you seem to settle on any particular definition, even going as far as telling people to take it "seriously, because it's cyberpunk" while telling us to take it "lightly, because it's a point & click adventure" in the same (now deleted) Steam forum thread. brixx.744 seems to know more about how to make an engaging point & click adventure than you guys, sorry... you just don't dismiss excellent advice like the one they offered you on how to make a game more engaging, by replying "oh, we don't need to care about engaging people in our game from the get-go, since the story only begins when our stalker sociopath dude finds his girlfriend". If Ron Gilbert hadn't made Monkey Island interesting from the start, how many of us would have stuck with it until the end? Maybe all of us, I guess, since back in those days we got one game per year and were stuck with what we had, so might as well play it -- but that is what rose-tinted nostalgia glasses does, it makes us kind of overlook how wrong some of the stuff from the "good ol' oldskool days" was. It's 2020, I can get awesome games for 5-10€, there's no more need to waste time -- or money -- on frustrating titles that take away my fun and enjoyment just for the sake of being "hard because the video game industry is dying".

There's a place and an audience for VirtuaVerse, just make it clear what that place is and who that audience is when advertising it, and... maybe only sell it to the right people (i.e., your fans).

Best of luck,

the bad poetry "lamer" dude.