Let it not be said that you don't get enough pinball for your money with this purchase. What you're actually buying is four seperate pinball games across three launchers. This nets you twenty different tables, but this has its downsides too. There's a lot of table variety on offer in terms of both theme and gameplay, but that means that for every table you enjoy there's going to be one you don't, and if you're anything like me (and I know I am) you'll end up with 6-7 tables you enjoy spread out across the three launchers. This makes keeping all three launchers installed, booting up the correct launcher for the table you want & wading through the often slow and obtuse menus (only one has mouse support) annoying when all you wanted was a quick pinball fix. Furthermore, when I say there's a lot of variety, I mean a LOT. As someone who enjoys Horror and Sci-Fi themed tables I found enough that I didn't feel shortchanged, but most of the tables' themes left me cold. Both gameplay and sound design too can vary, this time in terms of quality. Even as a Pinball neophyte it's clear some of these tables are boring or badly designed regardless of skill level, and the music (even now that it has the CD quality music included) can either be great or grating. For example on Pinball Illusions (the weakest of the 4 games included in my opinion) Extreme Sports has a great Main Table theme, while The Vikings has the single worst table music I've ever heard. I'd still say you should buy this if you want a handful of enjoyable Pinball tables for a low price, but you're just going to have to live with the fact that you're not going to enjoy a lot (or possibly even most) of the tables on offer here.
I thought I'd add an actual review to clarify the low score this add-on has gotten to the uninformed observer, and describe the contents in greater detail. The artwork's nice, though as it's mostly pixel art it's comparatively low-res. You might be able to make an avatar from them or something? The promotional art is essentially fanart, though it's quite nice and from artists you may recognise (such as the artist behind Darkest Dungeon). The .gifs are interesting to have if you want a closer look at the enemy designs in motion, though it's nowhere near all of them, or even the most interesting enemies. Overall, if you've bought an older game on here and gotten a .zip file of concept art, that's pretty much what you're getting here, just for an extra £2 instead of free, which is where I think a lot of the (not unwarranted) negativity stems from. The "Behind the Scenes" documentary is nice, and quite informative. It's also a slightly longer (12 minutes as opposed to 7) version of the one available for free on the developers' Youtube page, with one of the lead developer's brief anecdotes put back in. Make of that what you will. If you've got your heart set on what I've just described then by all means buy it. As for the rest of us the most value this add-on really has is that on GOG buying a whole bundle in a sale often increases the overall discount, so buying the whole bundle may end up negating the cost of these extras and slightly reducing the cost of the game itself. On its own, though, you can safely skip this.
... because it makes up about 75% of this game. While designed to resemble an open, exploreable world with things to do and find, a better way to describe the area design is a series of roof-less corridors and large 'yards' with very little in them connecting each of the dungeons up. Get used to stone cliff-faces hemming you in during the outdoor segments! The 'towns' are also essentially dungeons, each with a handful of NPCs (all of whom are vendors or questgivers), no amenities other than maybe something that refills your health/mana & the same enemy encounters as elsewhere. This leaves the world feeling unintentionally lifeless, as you set up camp in an inn-room (because the inkeeper doesn't rent rooms) hoping that you won't be ambushed in your sleep. Frankly, 'lifeless' is a pretty good descriptor of the game itself - content is very thinly spread & even the simplest combats pad the game out for up to ten minutes at a time. Enemies respawn relatively quickly, come in multiple packs of up to 6 & are picked from a table for that area based on the party's average level, meaning you will have to fight your way through every single time. You can sometimes avoid the enemies' patrols, but once combat is initiated packs will follow you for a long time. Aside from a couple of instances where the developers threw in overpowered enemies (supposedly to teach you to not fight everything you see), you're not supposed to want to run. Again, you really need to like the combat. The game's replayability is derived from playing through the same sparse content over again with a different party combination, but sadly that's the only portion of this game that has any real depth. Even as a dungeon crawler this game has its faults - loot is sparse and low-quality, maps are nigh-incomprehensible when areas overlap & I never encountered anything close to a 'puzzle'. In short, play this game once you've finished all the better alternatives, and still think long and hard before you do.
I bought this game after seeing a Youtuber play through the first couple of story paths (of which there are many) and I was suprised at how mature and dark some of the outcomes can be. I promptly bought the GOG version and completed it 100%. And while the majority of the 'game' itself is a Visual novel of the Otome style, upon completing at least one path with each romantic partner an arc plot is unlocked which is longer than the entire main plot put together (with an epilogue if you completed all the other possible paths), addresses the strangeness of the setting and unanswered questions about the characters, and will BLOW. YOUR. MIND. As mentioned, this is is an Otome Visual Novel, so you'll be playing the same year of highschool each playthrough, combining different dialogue options and training in different statistics to unlock a variety of different endings (playing through X's storyline with a maximised Charisma score or without it, etc). Also, despite the seeming outlandishness of the main characters other than the protagonist being birds (the anime characters are optional, one-time visualizations upon first meeting them) this essentially allows the game to follow the plot of a highschool anime (with many bizarre and surreal elements), but without any obligations towards the lewd fanservice that turns so many off the genre. In short, this is a many-layered gem of a game that rewards repeated playthroughs and 100% completion far better than many AAA releases.
