Event[0]

The project is quite promising, but at this moment there is not much to see here. Graphics is good. Storyline - quite obvious if You open and read everything You can. About AI: 1) it's not a real AI, don't expect much from dialogs with it; 2) to perform any action You must be pretty strict in choosing words; 3) I've been talking to KZ for several hours just to find out what it can say and everything I got - the same tens of sentences but in different words; 4) attitude changes to player are clear - be polite and it will call You friend. Not actually the thing I thought it is, but I have experienced several hours of a good game, not great, but good. If You ever wanted to talk to computer, that's the right game to play. Maybe, if developers will add more story, more action, more choices and more speech freedom for AI, then this game would be very good or even great.

The premise of this game got my attention. My first PC game ever was Zork, and and I loved it. After that I played many of Infocom's text adventures in the 1980's. The gameplay mechanic of solving "conversation-based puzzles" can be great, if it's done well. Unfortunately Ocelot did not do well at all. In fact what they delivered was horrible. In my opinion the AI in Event[0] is only marginally better than the one from Zork and Infocom's other text adventure games. It was pitiful how limited the AI was in the vocabulary it understood. Countless times the AI would keep saying the same thing over and over in different ways. I would enter things as clear and as simple as possible. I would carefully tweak the words I used trying to get the AI to understand. I would always use the simplest sentence structure. Over time I got better at being able to figure out what exactly the dense AI wanted to hear. But it was VERY frustrating and essentially ruined the game experience for me. I mean the key selling point that was supposed to set Event[0] apart from the competition was the chance to interact with a highly intelligent and temperamental, AI. Oh they got the temperamental AI part right. They just forgot to include the high intelligence part. Honestly I think if Ocelet would just remove their language processer and replace it with the one used for Zork, then this would be a much more enjoyable game. Don't waste your hard earned money on this game.

Too many stupid design choices make this intriguing space story game irritating. Pros: the space walking bits are well done and impart the real feeling of being in a spacesuit and maneuvering, and o2 dependency. the animation for airlock pressurization is good. the online logs are credible and interesting to explore. There is a story to find, it just takes patience, and its ok. the one song on a loop is ok, does add to ambiance, tho it gets old fast. Cons: so many. 1st and foremost, humanity is smart enough to launch an interstellar ship but doesnt have a clue how to do self opening doors with sensors? want to go poop? walk back to computer and input code to open toilet. want to walk back out of room, go to computer on other side of room and input code to open door. every bloody time. second, idiot AI interface. this is not a point click adventure game. this is a choose your own adventure text novel. you will spend all your time typing infinite ways to get the AI to do something, ANYTHING to impart game progress. EXTREMELY LONG LOADING TIMES. I timed 5min to just get the game to start, and for each progress save, others have up to 10 minutes. extremely high cpu usage. i clocked 4.5mill on my pc. stuttering mouse movement made better a medium settings but still irritating. what for? not the graphics, there are maybe 5-10 objects to code, no water, no particles, no wind, no npcs, no weather, just a very plain spaceship hallway, a few monitors and space with painted stars in background. no excuse for this poor optimization. SHORT gameplay. couple hrs tops. most of it messing with ai text inputs in frustration. there were times of enjoyment, i liked the space suit bits the best. the ending(s) were lackluster and anticlimatic. with some fine tuning the game may have been fully enjoyable at much lower cost.

Now, you probably shouldn't do what I did. I didn't want to wait for when I've upgraded my hardware [which I plan on doing this year] to play this game. I played it on pretty much "diashow mode" on my 2008 M11x R1 (Core 2 Duo 1.7 GhZ, GeForce GT 335M, 8GB RAM). I did this because I knew there wouldn't be any "action" that required split second reaction time. Yes, I'm crazy. Now, the game - the first playthrough will take the longest, and don't spoil it by watching too many gameplay videos before. The concept of the AI only works as intended if you don't know what exactly to type to progress - you're supposed to tickle that out of Kaizen yourself. Depending on how you act and talk to Kaizen, that might be easier, or harder to do - I did both a mistrusting, uncaring playthrough, and a, let's call it, "OMFG KAIZEN I LOVE YOU SO MUCH" playthrough. The reactions and willingness to tell me things differed greatly, uncovering different things, or things from different angles in each playthrough. Which makes it all the more impressive even if you sometimes feel like talking to a, well, chatbot. There's still a given context frame of the location and progression and things you did in the game, which helps guide the conversation - and Kaizen will subtly hint at things if you seem to be stuck somewhere for too long. Is there a right and wrong? It's all about trust. You're on the same boat, and wether you love or hate each other, you need to get along in the end - and find out what happened, and what you can do. Depending on how you play and interact with Kaizen, you'll different endings to the story. Comfort, out of your comfort zone. Book now!

a short but ok game with some puzzles although not at full price. - you need to look for some clues outside of talking to the AI (i took me a long time to realize that) (short is not bad when you have a big backlog :) ) problem is, i think the text parser doesn't understand a thing of what you can say. like said, it looks like the ai answers are mostly scripted. It was so infuriating, i would have like to destroy this AI, didn't care about dying too :) Hope there will be a game like this, but with a real text parser and a real AI behind. I'm disappointed by that mainly, after all the hype and talk. And i would have liked more interaction, like using a crowbar against the AI terminals.