Recent reviews by Marik

Yeah this is very good

Excited to play a game like Nethack. Tutorial stages. Immediately nmap tool doesn't work. Refund.

I hope this review is useful for the developer. The game needs more in the initial stages to make sure players don't get lost. Maybe there was a way to use nmap from the server separately, but if things can be made this obtuse 10 minutes in, then I already know this game is only going to be frustrating

"This is pretty good, but they could have done XYZ thing instead to make this REALLY good". That's how I felt about most of the game. The ideas present in each route are good. They really are. But they are implemented in such a narrow and shallow way that it leads the majority of routes to only accomplish about 15% of their potential.

Some routes feel like they were written more as filler, just to have another route. Yet at the same time, they also feel like they are meant to give you a certain minimum experience in case you got to them first/early. This causes most routes to feel meaninglessly bloated with small interactions and facts you already know. This ultimately causes your experience to be luck-based. You can find routes that hinge on eachother and that have the experience amplified if you do them in that specific order. But you can also end up finding routes that feel extremely meaningless and routes that make it extremely obvious what happened in other routes because you did one route before the other.

Sometimes the story feels too linear without meaningful narrative writing techniques being employed. i.e. There's an obvious goal to achieve. You slowly achieve that goal without any detours. Then the route ends. Other times, you are waiting for half the route for characters to do the obvious thing. Or you're just waiting for the game to just do those reveals already that you saw coming 100 hours earlier. It's a large problem within the greater structure of the game as well. The routes themselves can't be naturally paced with eachother and some routes inevitably spoil a different route in various ways.

The gameplay sections are good and actually feel good, but they are also meaningless within the game, since one route already leaves your units powerful enough to kill everything in one round. You end up skipping every possible fight after the first route you do. Free roaming sections also feel meaningless and ruins the pacing of the game far more often than it doesn't.

There's a few routes that definitely feel like they were written with love. And then other routes that feel like they were made by a guy in an office just making hours. Ultimately, the game was good enough to keep me going and playing. It has its highs. But I never got to feel meaningfully lost in the mystery elements. I was constantly just waiting for the game to go on already and do the obvious reveal or for characters to do the obvious thing.

The game is good. It could have been a timeless epic.

The game is just meaninglessly, horridly long. And while it tries to combine escape room puzzle gameplay with roguelike gameplay, it fails miserably at doing this.

The puzzles are not hard. They just have their puzzle pieces scattered across many different playthroughs that will take you hours to find and note down due to being accessible only by pulling a specific room with specific items in your inventory.

Extraordinarily good in its variety and meaningfulness of choices.

Not exactly spectacular, but still holds up. That said, I wouldn't buy the game for full price. Everything that I expected would happen, happened.

You don't need trial and error, but the game needed an undo button.

This has to be the first time I have dropped a visual novel in my entire life. The writing didn't just feel bland; it felt meaningless. Reading it was just a chore. The same was true for the dungeons. They are such an unchallenging gimmick that you may as well take them out instead of forcing the player to spend time on the most boring minute of their life every single time they want to try and get a different route.

The characters simply never stop feeling like a sprite with dialogue chosen for them by a writer. There is no point of immersion across the whole game. Every single non-casual conversation just feels like an outlet for outdated political talking points that nobody has heard of or thought about in over 10 years. If the only thing you can write decently is casual banter between kids, you're not a writer.

Buy it on sale. The game is pretty much just a collection of fun dialogue with a gimmick on what dialogue you actually get to see. Although the writing is done by pseudo-intellectuals for sure, the world and dialogue are still interesting enough to make it worth it.

The only thing that really frustrated me was how you being a detective takes a secondary role within the game. It's likely you'll solve the case way before the game allows you to.

Banned for saying the Escort name change should be reverted, since there is no reason to change it after 10 years of the name being completely fine.

Just so you know what kind of people you're dealing with when it comes to Blankmediagames :D