Recent reviews by MakoSipper

One of those cases when I'd give a neutral review if I had the option, but unfortunately it falls shorts in way too many aspects for the experience to be more on the "recommended" side.

Pros:
- There's something really unique, mysterious and intriguing about the story in this game that makes you wanna keep going and figure out what is going on.
- Very mesmerizing bizarre, surreal, and oneiric atmosphere.

Neutrals:
- Puzzles vary a little bit. Some are ok, some are too easy, others are a bit too unintuitive (ie 'moon logic'). Sometimes they feel rewarding, sometimes they feel boring, and sometimes they make you go 'ugh...'.

Cons:
- The game is way too short. My playtime (3.6 h) includes 2 playthroughs (I played the 2nd time to help me understand a few parts after going through it all, and also to hunt the the achievements I had missed while playing freely). I'll return to this point during the other cons, because it has a few implications.
- The main characters walks WAY TOO SLOWLY, even for a walking simulator standard. It's so sluggish that it feels like you're a geisha doing the oiran walk underwater while carrying a 200-pound boulder. This feels like it was a deliberate choice in order to make this short game seem longer than it actually is more than anything else. And note that you don't have too much stuff to contemplate like in most walking simulators, so it's not a relaxing experience.
- Looking around, interacting with stuff and dialogues also feel VERY slow. Also you have to wait for the dialogue to completely end (plus what it feels like 5 idle seconds) before you can interact with objects again. This too feels like it was deliberate in order to make the game feel longer than it actually is. But the main problem is that the controlling experience is just awful.
- The narrative approach is so surreal that it ends up being too nonsensical and you don't get too many straight answers. On my second playthrough, a few things made more sense, but at the same time a lot of them just felt like they were randomly put in order to trigger the player's curiosity, but it kinda feels like cheating into reaching that goal.
- The game is so short that you have little time to connect and relate to the characters, which are obviously underdeveloped for the length of the game. The story has a lot of potential to be impactful and evoke emotions, but that job becomes nearly impossible if you have no time to fall in love with the characters.

While this is not a total miss and could provide fun in some level, I'd say there are better titles out there that do a lot better in areas where his game fails to shine. To name a few from the top of my head: What Remais of Edith Finch, Papo y Yo, Rakuen, Call of the Sea, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter...

Absolutely loved it!

What a beautiful, delicate story that conveys such strong messages in a most simple yet fantastic setting! It's very touching and capable of evoking a varied array of emotions on you... and will possibly make you cry at least once or twice along the way, so brace yourself.

Game-wise, there's not much to it (walking around, talking, interacting, a few easy puzzles), but still definitely worth the ride. My only gripe is that sometimes moving around feels too slow.

If you're looking for action, fights etc, look elsewhere.
NOT a game for children, although it may look like it at a first glance! Nothing graphic or anything similar, but Rakuen does address a few heavy themes.

The game in itself is awesome, but it crashes constantly to the point of sometimes you're not even able to move past the main menu.

I see some potential here, but it's completely unplayable in the current state:

- sound doesn't work for some players unless you connect external speakers
- insanely low FPS (I have a RTX 3070)
- slowest movement I've ever seen in a game, running does absolutely nothing, and you have to walk fairly long distances to find more points of interest
- no manual save

Very fun game similar to Pokemon Snap that kept me entertained for 20h.

Pros;
- You get 50+ unique monsters (or "Fictions") across 4 different worlds.
- Each world has 3 different "on-rails" route, plus an unlockable "wander" mode in which you can roam freely through the whole map (to unlock wander mode, you just need to play on each of the 3 on-rails routes).
- You can do some optional quests and minigames with the Fictions you meet (and most of them are very nice).
- It's also full of lore and each creature is very well developed.
- Beautiful graphics and music.
- Having to photograph Fictions in different poses (240 poses total), and if you want also maxing out the score for each pose (more on that rating system under "Cons"), adds a lot more challenge to the game, but all of this is roughly skippable, especially if children are playing.

Neutral:
The game has a slightly childish vibe, but definitely fun for adults as well.

Cons:
- Rhythm minigames are brutal. When you're starting, you'll probably miss a lot, and your first 10+ attempt probably won't last more than 3 seconds, since it's game over if you make too many mistakes. Pressing the wrong key counting as 2 mistakes (1 for missing the right kew, 1 for pressing a key that you shouldn't) makes this even worse. Not being able to continue through the whole melody and get a fail only at the end also makes practicing a pain.
- There's an interesting rating system for your photos (up to 10 pts) that adds content to the game if you're trying to get the perfect photo for all 240 poses (and there's a small reward if you manage). This rating takes into account size, visibility, center, and angle. This works fine most of the time, and you usually can intuitively adjust the first 3 parameters, but it's really hard to figure out how to get the right angle sometimes, and with some Fictions it's a lot harder than others. There ARE some unlockables that help you get a better rating, but a few cases are really frustrating.

Note that both these cons affect only optional parts of the game. I still manage to beat the game 100%.

Alekon is far from being perfect, but absolutely easy to recommend. I hope to see more games from these devs in the future!

DO NOT BUY!!!

There's a very old bug preventing players from beating level 23 (out of 100), as per this thread:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/416120/discussions/0/135511655654105220/

The game has potential, but this is a major bug that can't be overlooked.

The game is awesome, but I lost my whole progress twice already. Once was when there was a power outage, restarted to game and had my progress wiped, but I had just completed the game once with one character. Second, I was lv 67 with roughly 300 challenges completed, had completed the full tour with 5 characters, played multiplayer a lot, had completed all gaps, and then the game crashed during online play and then my progress got wiped again.

The game is constantly auto-saving the progress, literally multiple times per minute, so the chance for something like a power outage or a crash to happen during these moments is high. Why doesn't the game keep a backup save file in cases like this, so it can revert back in case of a crash that erases the progress?

That's very amateur programming... Developers of this caliber shouldn't let that go unchecked, so I'd recommend that you don't buy this because you might end up losing your progress, and having to restart everything all over again. I know I'm not restarting a third time and run the risk of losing everything once again...

EDIT: Yeah, I ended up going back, but it feels really stupid that I should be manually creating backup files in 2023.

At the very start you're flooded with tons of info when you're prompted to pick a signature skill (among 24, I think), in a game that maybe you don't know much about if you like me try not to learn much about the game before jumping into it. I don't even know the game mechanics, so having to read through 24 long skill descriptions and trying to pick just ONE is insane. You're not even told what is a "signature skill" and how it affects the game, how exactly picking it over another will affect your gameplay.

After that, I had to deal with some nonsensical dialogue with bad, bad VO, all under a black screen for the character trying to wake up. Felt really like a teenarger-ish way of trying to shock by "being different" just for the sake of it.

Woke up, was curious to check my surroundings, noticed a necktie hanging from the ceiling fan, tried interacting with it, failed a check (like D&D) and I DIED, BACK TO TITLE SCREEN, FORCED TO RESTART. I didn't even learn the character name, and I don't even understand WHAT hurt me, seriously, it's not even like the fan beheaded me or anything, I think I just got confused and lost the only HP I started with? It was all very crazy and saying it was "poorly explained" would sound like they've explained stuff more than they did.

This is just atrocious game design, I'm sorry to tell you that, fans of this game. Yet another game that gathers a huge, passionate fan base for confusing "mysterious" and "deep" with "convoluted" and "nonsensical". But seriously, I couldn't even check the story enough, even though I don't doubt there could be some potential in that area, because if I'm allowed to play the game with Physical attribute set to 1, and since I reckon I'd play as a DETECTIVE or similar, I should not be scared to check a freaking necktie in my apartment because I might die.

This is probably one of the worst games I've played in years (and I play A LOT of games), one biggest gaming disappointments I can remember.

Fun for a while, but:

- bugs (like you can't answer the phone sometimes, the phone ringing when after you bought a power-up to disable it for the round etc)
- getting an A+ relies too much on luck and power-ups more than skill
- confusing menus if you're playing with a gamepad, you have to press the correct button instead of navigating and selecting with arrows and confirm butto, but most icons don't show

I can see some potential here (or maybe I see aspects that were carefully placed so the game looks like it has potential), but my experience was just VERY disappointing at the end of the day:

- You start with no goal or indication of what to do, you just explore aimlessly, but the world is procedurely generated, so you end up just walking around A LOT, and you end up backtracking A LOT more than doing anything else.
- You can explore the map off the beaten path, and each world is HUGE! But exploring is not rewarding at all. You have to spend a lot of time just seeing more and more trees until you reach a point of interest.
- The random order at which stuff are thrown at you make the mechanics too obstruse. For example, you find the rabbit soon in the game and it can create a bush, but I only found out a use for the bush on the 2nd world (and each world takes a LONG time), and only knew of that use because I looked it up.
- There's no real story. Everything is just too vague. Sometimes you find a creature that will tell you random vague self-help messages totally out of context or order, and that's about it. Throughtout my whole experience, I saw no purpose in my explorations.
- The game calls itself an "action adventure". There's no real action. This is more a walking simulator.
- This game is INSANELY repetitive. You walk around A LOT (I can't stress this enough), only to find a procedurely generated obstacle you've probably faced before, with some little variants that don't feel different at all to be honest.
- You can interact with animals, and some of them wil lhelp you a bit, but barely. Enemies are either very easy to avoid or really annoying, depending on the amount they cram into a given area. Also, there are some plant interactions that made no sense at all to me, I still have no idea of what they do. Everything is very obscure and make little sense. There's no feeling of reward in trying stuff out.
- Since you spend most of your time running through woods, it REALLY sucks that (1) you have stamina for running and (2) bumping into the trees will slow you down. You're just making the game artificially longer.
- Deaths mean little to your progress, but they're cheap, and sometimes they force you to backtrack a LARGE area. For example, you take the wrong turn, you die, Use the wrong teleporter, you die.
- Whenever I finished covering an area on the map, and then I saw the size of the next and figured the world was even larger than I'd expected, I just felt annoyed "ugh, more ground to walk over", instead of "great, more interesting stuff to explore!", because there's nothing interesting to explore, seriously!

Basically, this "game" is really uninteresting, boring, and repetitive. I've played for 5 hours and it felt like 15, And I didn't even finish world 2, which was dragging way too long and felt like it was 3x as large as world 1.

There's no sugar-coating, Future Unfolding is just a plain experience that looks pretentious enough to make you think "oh, I think there's something here", but actually there's nothing. Nothing. Maybe the whole point of the message here is that "life is meaningless", in which case, "yeah, that's obvious, but I'd rather have fun while I'm at it".

Don't even bother!