I'll try to be concise. The good: + Interesting setting + Nice artstyle + Dialogue in the VN-type bits is more or less engaging + An innovative approach to match-3 type gameplay The neutral: * Music is at best forgettable * Gameplay is a bit samey. Well, it's basically match-3 with some VN bits inbetween, so what did you expect? The bad: - Story is short and the ending is, well, kinda disappointing. More of a sequel bait than an ending - "Side quests" are at best fetch quests - There are quite a few random difficulty spikes. You might say I just have zero skill. That might be true. Still, going from breezing through to dying 15 times in a row seems like bad challenge design to me. The ugly: - I keep running into keypresses not being registered, tiles not becoming activatable when the character is over them, etc. This wouldn't be a big deal if this was your common leasurely match-3 game. But in a hectic action-y context this is extremely frustrating. - Respawn mechanics are weird, to say the least. It's like the devs couldn't be bothered to make it consistent, and just gave up halfway. - There are a few maps where getting things done is extremely hard due to low overall amount of tiles and a mandatory tight squeeze where you will get mauled by melee enemies. Clearing such maps comes down to the luck of the draw most of the time -- if you can dispatch some melee enemies with the first few actions, all goes smoothly from that. If not, you're dead. Add to that the weirdness of the respawn mechanic, and it becomes something of a willpower challenge. Overall, I applaud the innovative approach, but the execution is apparently less than stellar. The actual match-3 part of the game I personally don't enjoy due to problems outiled above. Then the question becomes "is the rest of the game worth wading through these match-3 parts", and while I want to say "kinda", ultimately, I end up leaning to "no".
This is overall a nice, if pitifully short, cyberpunk narrative experience with minimalistic puzzle elements. I'll first go over pros and cons and then go on a bit of a rant about rather clumsy and immersion-breaking agenda-pushing going on. Pros: + Writing is rather good, for the most part, but see below + Graphics are pixel art but are done reasonably well + Animations look fluid + Music is great, if not especially memorable + It tries to explore a broad variety of social topics, and for the most part leaves it open-ended enough for the player to draw their own conclusions, but again see below Cons: - Puzzles are somewhat anaemic, for the most part -- it's perfectly possible to get through the game while flailing about not really knowing what you're doing. That's not the point, to be honest, but a thing to bear in mind. - It's very short - The story is extremely linear, overall you don't have much control over where it goes, although some minor branching is present - The game occasionally tries to push one social agenda or another. Sometimes it's extremely "in your face". Not anything I couldn't get behind, but the clumsiness is grating So, now for the promised rant. I'll try to avoid spoilers as much as I can, but those can't be avoided entirely, so you've been warned. There is a bit of an obvious "social justice"-esque agenda going on here. Which actually would be fine, were it not so "in your face". First of all, the game makes a point of bashing you on your head that some characters are queer or trans -- at times at the expense of tact and immersion. For one, the fact that one character is trans is part of a solution to one puzzle you have to solve to continue the game (and it isn't handled well). While on topic, I find that bisexuals are severely underrepresented -- I mean, if they wanted to represent LGBT, they forgot about the B (as apparently did everyone else in the world -- which I find rather sad). Then, the very same trans character is a bit... glorified? At one point in the game, you can see how some characters react to each other. And while most reactions are that of disdain or animosity, everyone, and I mean literally everyone, loves that trans character for some reason. In the light of mandatory "revelation" that they are trans, that feels more than a bit forced. (and to be clear, I'm using a genderless pronoun here only to avoid spoilers) I would also go into how the portrayal of the said trans character draws on some of the worst stereotypes, but that's spoiler territory. Lastly, there's this bit where you get to answer some questions that get increasingly meta -- this doesn't really affect the story in any meaningful way by the way. So it starts tame enough with things like "should violence be allowed", "should we let people commit suicide" etc. But then it gets into "should homo- and transphobia be allowed", and finally "should women be oppressed" (that's not my choice of words about oppression, by the way). Now, I'm not saying that currently homo- and transphobia are not an issue, and I'm not denying that in some parts of the world there's a fair bit of female oppression (as in, real oppression). But from the context of the narrative, this feels extremely forced -- at no instance, you actually see anything remotely resembling homophobia, transphobia, or good ol' sexism, let alone oppression. And considering its supposed to be gods know how many years into the future, and there are no examples of the things discussed, it feels more like clumsy agenda-pushing. To be clear, there *are* examples of other things discussed. The "women oppression" bit is the most jarring, since instead of a binary "yes"/"no" choice, you're offered a third option of denying that it's a thing. Which leads to some admittedly amusing, but ultimately somewhat grating dialogue that amounts to "don't worry your silly little head about it then, you dum-dum". If nothing else, it breaks immersion. I will also add that dialogue for this particular question seems to equate sexism with "oppression", which are pretty different things, I'm pretty sure, which betrays an underlying "social justice" agenda, and frankly encroaches on the "white knight" territory. And let me reiterate, I would be entirely fine with all that if it wasn't as clumsy as it is. Film reviewers often like to say "show, don't tell" -- well, it's applicable here as well -- the game feels comfortable to just handle some issues by asking direct questions without providing context. If this isn't trying to bash the player on the head, I don't really know what is.
