Progress report: November ‘23 (a.k.a. What Is My Life?)
I don’t even know anymore. I haven’t been able to post this in time, because one of the reviews just wouldn’t let me write it and AAAAA…!
So anyway, here we go! :D
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100 hidden fish
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Epistory - Typing Chronicles
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Five Dates
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NEKOKORO
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Quickie: Fantasy Adventure
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Say No! More
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She Sees Red
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You, With Me - A Kinetic Novel
2.2 hours playtime
no achievements
100 hidden fish - This one was nice.
Epistory: Typing Chronicles - Y’know… this is a really nice typing game, what with the visuals emulating a world made out of paper, challenging gameplay and a tearjerker story, but… I won’t lie, I made the mistake of not jotting my thoughts down right after I’ve beaten this game. Now, all that’s been eclipsed by the massively annoying bug that halted my progress on a particular achievement. I am, by far, not the only player who encountered this problem, and let it be known, the devs responded to my inquiry and tried toying with my save file, but to no avail, and so, the game stewed in my backlog, eternally marked as beaten. Every once in a while, I’d pop in to check if something fixed itself, but still, no. This month, after noticing the update from May (timely, I know) that claimed to have fixed some bugs, I tried again… and it worked! Now that I think of it all, I can no longer tell how much of it was in my head, knowing that my save file had been tweaked with. (Also, side note, for some reason I was convinced my original playthrough happened in 2018-2019, but apparently it was 2019-2020? Confusion upon confusion.) All I want to say is, if you have been stuck on the same achievement as me (Bug Spray, to be exact), or any other ones (I hear Explorer is troublesome as well, though not so much broken as it is tedious), this is your call to launch the game again and see if you can make some progress.
Five Dates - I’ve been trying to write this review for so long now, but every time, my brain just gets fried and I don’t know what to say. This was a nice FMV, much like other Wales Interactive offerings, with a great cast (it’s always a joy to see someone I’ve seen before, and in this case, it was Georgia Small as Saffron) and a concept that’s easy to wrap your head around (even if I can’t relate to it). I’m looking forward to playing FMVs on my own again.
NEKOKORO - This turned out to be just a generic wish fulfillment story about a guy so self-insert he’s nothing past his name, who gets chosen by three alien catgirls from another world to be their carer. After a short common route, which establishes who they are and why they’re on Earth, you get to choose whose route you want to read, and those end up being shorter than the common route, which isn’t great. Perhaps most importantly, I find it hard to believe that on one hand, these girls come from a civilization intelligent enough to be able to speak all the languages of Earth, but on the other, they marvel at concepts like pizza or the internet. Then there’s also the issue of how shallow it all is; not only do the girls fall for the main character really fast and out of nowhere, they also go for dates to the exact same places (somehow the concept of taking each girl to the same shopping mall to get more of the one thing she’s interested in is just funny to me…) The girls have some nice voice acting, although the script (even after proofreading) is a bit rough around the edges. Whether accidental or not, there are a few memes here and there. When it comes to “indie” art styles, you could do worse than this one; plus, the character models have some subtle animation, which is a nice touch. The BGM consists of a few poppy and cute tracks, which I couldn’t help but be sweet on, since I’ve heard them in another game I like a lot, and now that the credits have directed me to the source, I’m going to say this is, overall, a positive. I’m not against checking out the dev’s later games, but with their prices, it’s probably not going to happen any time soon.
Quickie: Fantasy Adventure - A spin-off of the Quickie series, set in a fantasy world. I’ve heard of these games before, but I don’t look for sexy stuff on Patreon, so I’ve been more than fine not playing them. This one came out on Steam recently and since it’s free, I figured I’ll check it out. It was a short and simple adventure, with each and every girl having an unique role and being equally hot for the main character. Though I can’t say I see myself playing the other game from the series that’s on Steam right now (mainly because it’s got management mechanics and whatnot), this one was fun.
Say No! More - Ever since I first saw screenshots from this game, I knew it had a delightful, Katamari Damacy-esque aesthetic, which automatically makes it something worth checking out in my mind. Lo and behold, I eventually won a code for it on SG, and when the monthly challenge came around, I couldn’t not play it. Right away, I was positively surprised by the fact that you can choose to say “NO!” in a long list of ways, with a male and female variant for each available language, including Polish (although the game itself is not available in Polish - boo!). That was a fun, if odd, contribution to the whole experience. The story is about you - one of the new interns at a huge company - finding it in yourself to say the one, forbidden word - “NO” - and experiencing all kinds of success because of it. I find this game to be a good reminder for all of us today that saying “no” can be healthy and a form of self-care, and that it’s not about refusing everything at all times. Maybe it’s just me not having had a job to be fired from yet, but I find the idea of a world where people are conditioned to say “yes” to have a good life truly scary. The major downside of this game is that it’s so short (and in relation to playtime, rather expensive). It only takes two hours to beat and while a few new things get introduced along the way, none of them are really essential to the gameplay, meaning you could get through the game while almost always doing one and the same thing. It’d be hard for me to say that I got bored with the repetition, because I didn’t, but maybe there could have been something else to do as well. But then… it took six hours of idling to get the “no” count achievements (no way I’d do that manually)… it kind of irks me that that is the only reason for a play time this long.
She Sees Red - A high-production FMV hailing from Russia is not something I ever thought I would play, until this game came along. She Sees Red starts off strong - there’s been a murder at a nightclub and now, a detective is on the case. Follow both the culprit and the detective to the end, and… yeah, about that. A single playthrough lasts about half an hour, which means that when you’re just getting into it, the game cuts and rolls credits. “Okay, so it’s not a feature-length film, what’s the big deal?” Well, maybe that alone wouldn’t have been too bad, but you will not get the whole picture after just one playthrough. Yet, at the same time, there’s not nearly enough variety in the game to warrant more than two playthroughs. Maybe three, if you’re still hoping to dig deeper, or at least patient enough to watch the same scenes again. Not that you’re necessarily forced to watch - there is a skip button, but as far as I know, liberal use may lead to skipping a scene you might not have seen before. (And if you’re a completionist, you’re going to want to see everything for achievements’ sake anyway.) I “got” the story, to an extent, after three playthroughs, I believe, but overall… I really wasn’t a fan of it all. There are a few cool action scenes, if a little too violent just for the sake of it, and Veronika Plyashkevich simply shines as the detective, but ultimately, this game isn’t even worth its base asking price, as low as it is compared to many others. Also, a short behind-the-scenes video, while not made to include any talking heads or interviews, is left untranslated… just a tiny oversight.
You, With Me - Maybe it’s just been a little too long since I played a VN from Afterthought Studios, but I can’t help but wonder how anyone could write a few okay stories and then come out with such a steaming pile of shit. No, really, this is bad, with a capital B. You, With Me is a story of Jacob and Lisa, an ex-pat couple living in Singapore, who dream of going on vacation to Sapporo. These dreams come crushing down when Jacob’s stomachache turns out to be cancer. The developers claim that this story is based on “(an) experience with a cancer patient”, in which case, I’m truly sorry to the person in question. It’s a kinetic novel, meaning there are no choices to be made, which isn’t bad in and of itself, as long as it has an interesting story to tell, and You, With Me does not. You just read about these people eating breakfast, going for medical check-ups, arguing every so often, then going to bed, rinse and repeat with small changes. Between the story being so ordinary and boring, and the writing style betraying the fact that whoever’s responsible isn’t a native English speaker, there was neither anything to make the reader invested in Jacob’s condition improving or make them wish he gives up on everything; no stakes, no intrigue, not even a single random piece of trivia to make someone say they know, now that they’ve finished reading. The game is also a mess from a technical standpoint - character sprites appear on top of each other, speaker names are mixed up (one of the characters straight up has an entirely different name when speaking, and it’s not even remotely similar to their actual name!), text isn’t properly split between boxes, so at times, characters end up saying so much in one box that it doesn’t even fit on the screen, and last, but not least, the music is so sparse, it feels like an anomaly when it does play. If you’re somehow still considering playing this one, I recommend you purge it.
See you… in, like, less than two weeks…
Hm, I was considering to activate “Say No! More” but that last achievement seems a bit demotivating (even if it can be idled/automated). I wonder if this is meant as meta achievement to say “No” to achievement farming O.o
And now I am considering if saying “No” to activating the game is a meta feat in itself :P
OMG… I think you solved it. You, good configuration of being, are what I aspire to be. (Can you tell I love meta humor? :D)
Whatever floats your boat! I’ve still got so many untouched games in my library, I figured there’s no use sitting around waiting for someone to play the ones that aren’t my thing with me. There’s a lot more to see in this life!