TL;DR: If you're into late 90s (early 3D) adventure games with all the jank that came with them and just can't get by without another dose - this game is for you. Otherwise - it doesn't even scratch the sci-fi/noir itch. ===== So you want a deep sci-fi dystopian dark story? Not here, my brother. Here you get a paint-by-numbers cliche-ridden shortie that can't even quite decide if it wants to be dark, grotesque, a pastiche or psychological. You're a low-ranking member of a corporation, that deals in synthetic brains and consciousness transfer. That means that of course the higher-ups are shady and of course you experience technical problems with your own brain and of course there were unsavory goings-on with the creation of the technology. Because it needs to be dark and edgy and ooooh. It's a dystopia so of course there's bodies everywhere and of course there's junk everywhere of course nothing seems to work properly and of course there's a fuggin hidden laboratory beneath a defunct amusement park (and of course both the park and lab are laden with dead bodies). Because it needs to be grotesque and edgy and ooooh. If it's a sci-fi dystopia where everything is wrong - that fact needs to be in-your-face. So of course no one cares about the dead bodies, of course the only entertainment in a poor district is an old arcade box at a cemetery, of course the cops don't care to even cover dead bodies on a car accident scene. Because if it doesn't veer on pastiche, it is not clear enough that it's edgy and ooooh. And finally: you - of course your perception is clearly tampered with, of course you are being duped by the system (or the corporation), of course YOU are the central pivot of the story (the Small World Plot cliche in action) and of course everyone and their dog revolve around you and the fate of the world is at your sole discretion, my dear special snowflake, because you're special and edgy and ooooh. But enough about the story - let's tackle other aspects. The graphics are what they are. The creators went all-in for a certain aesthetic. It doesn't gel well with me, but that doesn't mean it's a bad decision and that the game looks bad - au contraire, the game is quite good looking (for the aesthetic, mind) and the lighting does much of the heavy lifting to produce proper moods with great success. And the moods are kinda there. It's unfortunate that the authors have no concept of SUBTLETY, as everything is in your face and lingering a tad bit longer in any given space makes you notice how shallow the whole thing is. It's sci-fi, it's noir, it's dystopian, but it's no Dystopika is what I'm saying. And the grotesque aspects that come with the setting and should be presented as brief strokes of contrast, are instead shoved in your face by the bushel to the point of the nauseating realization, that you're simply a bit too grown-up to see this as "stuff for grown-ups". Which makes it all the more baffling that the puzzles are trivial, second-grade primary school levels of challenge. There's no thinking to them, no concept of clue-collection, no real discovery - you are led by the hand like a child through a world with visuals and themes that try so hard to be adult. Although if there was any deeper level of challenge, many players might actually quit midway through. Because of the Jank. Ohh the Jank. You'd almost expect that there would be tank controls in this, but luckily that must've been playtested out of the product early on. Nevertheless the controls are clunky, the murky screens make it quite hard to discern where you should actually go and often the transitions between multiple angles on one scene are so disjointed, they add disorientation to the list of things one needs to fight with to progress. Everything in fact seems to be resisting you ever so slightly. Maybe it's to create an oppressive mood? Or maybe it's for the few people that are nostalgic towards this kind of clunk, as whenever it clunks, you clearly feel some familiarity to it's clunkiness. ===== To summarise: * it looks OK, it sounds OK * story is cliche and you'll be feeling a pointed sense of disappointment once you see that you've had it all figured out within the first 30 minutes * controls and gameplay feel are jank * not much game to speak of * and the overall mood is not noir, but rather try-hard. One of the characters is literally named NOIR - you can't get more try-hard than this. Had the authors been less ham-fist'd, it could have been a decent mood-piece. Had they been more gameplay-focused, it could have been a decent adventure. Had they known how to avoid writing cliches, it could have been a clever, little thought provoking story. They unfortunately chose neither of those routes, so now this game is stuck in all the small ways it could be stuck in. Overall - not worth my time and not really worth yours either.
TL;DR: If you buy it a month after release and don't need a high challenge level - this is actually quite good. Recommended for your kids aged 12-16 (benign themes, challenge on the teenage level). ======= Up front: * Current state of the game is BROKEN, but a developer patch & quickfix exists somewhere on the forums. * Current state of the EULA is THEFT & but good luck to Focus or Rundisc if they ever try to enforce it. ======= As for the game itself: It's an ATMOSPHERIC puzzler. The difficulty is easy-to-mid and an average shmuck should have no problems and should not get stumped at any point. It makes you think that there's wiggle-room and that you don't have to 100% all the puzzles, but that's misleading and to complete even the first ending you likely need most, if not all the glyphs to be decoded. Oh, yeah, it's a "decode the runes" game if you didn't know. There are several languages to decode and there is light worldbuilding and lore around the way that they interact and are constructed. Unfortunately the closer you are to the endgame, the more convoluted the scenarios of learning the languages get and the last language decoding was deeply immersion-breaking. Still, the atmosphere in general is on-point and makes you want to dive into the world. Game is very linear and, while it gives you an illusion of sprawl, it's only local sprawl and ultimately you will have to explore 90% of the area to complete major tasks. Sometimes the contrivance of your path is a bit too much though. Themes are benign, mild and rare scares, no sexual content, very mild violence/death references, politically a mostly inferred anti-authoritarian skew, no "wokism" (if that's your deal-breaker). Accessible to hearing-impaired and color-blind by default. Clicking proficiency required, but not at high speed. And they made "medieval Flappy Bird", which I found particularly hilarious.
WARNING: NOT A DEVCATS GAME. There's a certain, how should I say it, courtesy, that when one developer puts out several games with a certain theme in the title, you shouldn't really jump on that same naming convention. Especially when the theme is that specific. Doubly so when you host your game on the same platform as they. Luckily you avoided the tripple fail with this being something totally different. Still - I clicked because I expected Devcats. Turns out to be imposters.
NOTE: This is only a SOUNDTRACK review. For game reviews - go to the game's store page. TL;DR: Songs are silly lyrically and well made musically. Ambient tracks are mostly very good. You can take this one on a drive and be satisfied. ---- For those who have a decent grasp on popular culture, it should be no surprise why I mention "Benson, Arizona" as a sort of benchmark for this soundtrack - they both stem from the same notion that whenever space travel becomes mundane, it will have a similar culture and vibe to it, as good ol' American Roadtrips. While the songs here do live up to that theme, they unfortunately do not reach the absolute pinnacle of Space Country, that Carpenter-Taylor-Yager managed. The reason being, that "Benson" was at least one step deeper than the surface level, had a wistful aftertaste, was more of a sci-fi romp clad in a country aesthetic than the other way around. And the other way around is what we have here - here the songs are simply goofy. And it is absolutely fine as a spoof in a lighthearted game. The showing is quite diverse and mostly lands (though Pilgrim Peterson didn't for me) and I am confident that you can take this listing on a night drive on the bi-lanes and get into the "driving through space" mood. But that's about it. The real meat is the ambient tracks. They obviously aren't as diverse as the songs, but the instrumentals manage to land the breadth necessary for having an "outer space lonesome experience" far better. It is a crying shame that in game you have to pick either mostly silent with occasional ambient or constant radio songs and can't mix them without using mods. It is also a shame that the ambients are so short. All in all - it seems like the whole soundtrack is all over the place, but once you take your picks and compile them yourself to your liking - you will land with something worth listening to outside the game. If you sank more than 20 hrs into the game - there is no reason not to buy this as well.
I tried. I tried HARD to engage with this title. But the game itself refused to engage with me. The main point of failure is the UX/UI. Everything is obtuse there is a metric ton of detailed micromanagement options, which are USELESS and don't give you any feedback. There might be a decent simulation underneath it all, but it doesn't communicate at all. The main force you're using is a few cultists, who you have to constantly handhold, micromanage and you can't even automate a simple action on them. Unlike for the secondary underlings - those guys automate just fine. Everything is measured in turns (days), but time passes realtime, so the turns vary in length of real time because reasons. Constant pause is a must. And some windows auto un-pause when you dismiss them. Your core team has set individual roles. If you do not have a certain role occupied, you cannot perform certain actions. For example: * You want to capture enemy agents in two separate countries? NOPE. You have ONE agent that can do captures, so suck it up and do things in order. * Your agent that captures people got captured himself? TOUGH LUCK BUD. There is no rescue option, so you best dismiss the guy totally and recruit someone else. I hope you have your recruiting agent still at hand, yes? * You want to expose a lodge but your espionage agent is doing counterintelligence in a neighbouring country? THAT IS ON YOU, PAL. The moment that made me finalize my opinion on the game was when I was in the midst of a quest, I'd say a fairly good midgame, which said "organize a successful coup". By then I knew HOW to organize the coup, so I did. And then another. And another. And each coup deposed the ruler - but the game didn't see it as successful. Nor did it communicate anything about it (it doesn't communicate success on 90% of actions btw.). I did 10 coups eventually. No avail. Softlock. Quit. 1-star review. Gameplay concept sux. Execution is atrocious. Implementation is buggy. FAIL ON ALL FRONTS.
TL;DR: This is "baby's first merchant game" and perfect both in theme and complexity for ages 8-13. If you're looking for a 0-violence, 0-explicit-content, feel-good experience for your child - this is a very good pick. ---- Picked it up on being an exlplore-type mercantile simulator with nice pixel graphics. All the promise from the screenshots and promo video are 100% delivered. The characters are all well-meaning, nice, mostly-human beings without a shred of hidden agenda. There is no innuendo, gags are harmless, no fighting and everyone seems to get along with everyone. Even a boss battle is done via an easy version of Mastermind and it's all good-natured fun times. The mercantile mechanics are a bit barebones and become quite easy to exploit once you get the hang of things. The market does not adjust to your actions (except the bazaar, but that's hardly your main engagement), you earn more through radiant quests than running supply-demand routes. Early game can be a bit challenging in the exploration department and managing your inventory, but by the time you get to the second-tier ships it's all smooth sailing. World lore is sparse, but imaginative and lets you run with your own head-canon. The story itself is just a series of missions to fulfill that are hard enough to make you struggle just a bit in the early-to-mid game and built so that you need to engage with most of the mechanics. Endgame is unfortunately a disappointment, as the upkeep costs are balanced for the early and mid game. There is no scaling to them so by the time you get to finance a small company running a single automated gemstone mine with one ship servicing just one trader that buys those for a good price - you've won the economy game and the challenge dissipates. The exploration challenge disappears even sooner - once you get second-tier ships. All in all I still recommend it for the early and midgame fun as well as graphics, fun little stories and absolute non-violence.
Are you a casual? Did you like the passport stamping gameplay loop in Papers Please? Perhaps you enjoyed mopping around Sci-fi areas in Viscera? Or you found Truck Simulator a perfect distraction for your hands while listening to podcasts? Or you enjoyed the bliss of changing out processors in PC Building Simulator? Or some other example I cannot think of? Or perhaps, like me, you saw the intro cutscene to Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order where Cal Kestis dismantles Imperial Star Destroyers for parts and thought to yourself "Wow. I'd like a game about JUST THAT". If so - THIS GAME IS FOR YOU. It is what it says on the tin - do a rather menial task of breaking up spaceships into components and sorting those into three nifty "boxes". The game is as challenging as you want it to be and has a nice upgrade-progress mechanic. The core loop here is perfection. The mechanics of how the ship should be disassembled give you a learning curve and each ship model soon becomes both familiar in broad strokes and distinct enough in minute details to not be full-on boring. You get added bonuses of collecting lore audio-logs and they're a light sci-fi treat if you're into that sort of thing. The main story is clunky and dull, but also endearingly comedic in its depiction of "How To Unionize in a Dystopian Nightmare - For Dummies". The one gripe is that the main plot consists of unskippable cutscenes, but once you've gone through them once, feel free to install a mod that removes them and allows you to enjoy the game all over again on a different difficulty setting. So, yeah, the plot is the only downside, but the lore, gameplay loop (both immediate and long-term) and mechanics make up for its shortcomings. TL;DR: Get it, get it, get it. Even Yahtzee (a famous grump that hates nearly everything he reviews) recommended it as a great "Dad Game". It's a latecomer to GOG, but I bought it AGAIN just to commend the devs for creating this gem.
For the number of reviews harping on Opus Magnum, not one reviewer seems to have actually played the thing. Well, I did. And the reviews are wrong. This is not a clone - and it is a BAD thing. What sets it apart from the original: * You have to generate ONE item, not produce a sustainable loop * You have a limited budget spread out across multiple levels * The instruction length is limited * There is a multitude of mechanics not present in Opus Magnum (throwing, unique target receptacles etc.) * There's no competition against peers (no end-level stats) Now to the question of WHY it is bad: * The UI is pretty bad. It's cluttered, rail directions are pretty much guesswork, targets are not exact (not all links need to be fulfilled), the mechanism list covers part of the playing field when opened. * The mechanics are a guesswork to figure out. Like transformers don't work on linked pieces, they activate when a piece hovers over when swinging on a mechanism arm, unique targets that are trial and error to understand etc. * Limited budget promotes badly inefficient solutions... * ... which bites back when you want to go extreme inefficiency ona a deeper level and stumble on the instruction length limit (which the UI fails to communicate). * The budget refills... sometimes. It is unclear clearing which particular level will refill the budget. * Game soft-locked when I maxed out the instruction list And with that soft-lock I was DONE. It is not fun to play - it is tedium personified. The way it promotes lousy solutions makes the whole thing unwieldy. The rails are a nightmare. The mechanisms not activating in a consistent manner is an annoyance. The game suffers from feature bloat in some areas and lack of refinement in others. I would give it 3-stars if it were but a clone of Opus Magnum with 1-2 new mechanics. As it stands, the inspiration was there, but the delivery is abysmally bad. It is not even worth the 90% discount price I paid. Total failure.
TL;DR: Abhorrent UX design. Approachable plot. Interesting (albeit broken) mechanics. Well made worldbuilding. No unique selling points. Deeply unpolished, not worth the full price. ====== I've put in 100+ hours into this thing (GOG vanilla) and of course there is some appeal to it. If you like casual grinds with high variety, low stakes and some dark humor to boot - that game is in here... somewhere... But it is buried beneath problems. A broken economy is key, because there is practically no midgame. You're first barely scraping by and then suddenly you're shot up straight to the endgame where you cheese through everything with money. Even worse - unlocking automation of resource gathering will make almost everything you want built practically dirt-cheap. All systems (and there's aplenty) are burdened by UX problems - even inventory management. ALL quests are main-story quests and all need to be completed and there is NO choice on how to complete them. The questing system could have been the selling point but it's sorely underdeveloped, as all the systems in the game it seems. On the plus side: the worldbuilding is nicely done though inference, so no wordy loredumps. There's a lot of absurdity and a lot of dark humor. The humor is hit-and-miss though, as the writers thought it wise to lampshade many of the unfinished, broken and disjointed systems in the game. ====== In summary: there is nothing that this game does that hasn't been done better. The unique selling point of being a dark comedy about a graveyard quickly fades in face of the fact, that the graveyard is just ONE of many systems you work with - and most of those systems are just poorman's farmville. And the humor wears thin too. Get this if you like grinders so much, you're willing to cripple yourself to get another dose.
