I bought this game for less than a pound, and it's continuously satisfying. It's fast paced and intense but I feel a tangible sense of progress with each run. It's a roguelike, with the only permanent upgrades being aesthetic. It's a game with an incredibly simple premise but a lot of depth and variety within that. Well worth it!
The game has four endings, but they only vary slightly, and a bunch of different dialogue options with no long term impact on the story. It is primarily linear, but I still enjoyed my time with the game. Turing is charming, the art and music is good, the writing is funny and while point and click style puzzles were rare (and, often, a little convoluted), they were never the irritating, arbitrary adventure game puzzles everybody dreads. The story is largely your standard cyberpunk fare, but I enjoyed how inclusive and diverse the game was! That this is, thematically and symbolically at least, worked into the story without usually being too obtuse was great. It's not without it's flaws. More non-linearity, more interesting puzzles and a stronger first act would all improve the game quite a bit. I'm not sure I'd be satisfied paying full price for the game, and I also had some minor freezes when playing the game. It seems to be not quite what some people were anticipating going into it either. But if you want a chill, sweet and entertaining visual novel that'll make you laugh every so often, it's worth picking up on sale.
The game has some old-school clunkiness that makes it a little... underdeveloped for today’s standards. It’s ludicrously hard to place water pumps for no good reason; editing the landscape can be a faff because it’s all grid based; you can only make straight roads for a similar reason; the news ticker regularly contradicts itself as it struggles to keep pace with the simulation... if you want a cleaner, slicker experience, there are more modern, accessible choices on the market today. But... I just keep coming back! I played this when I was very young and owned it on disc, and could never get a functioning city together back then. But it had so much personality — the silly writing, the advisor system that gives you conflicting bureaucrats views on any given topic, the click with every button press even, and of course the absolutely phenomenal soundtrack... it has some spark that the newer games lack, and it’s easy to become engrossed and lose hours at a time setting up the perfect city, scrambling together funds and experimenting with new structures or deals. Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I just can’t convince myself to stop playing. Highly recommended.
