Recent reviews by rezzealaux

3/8.

9 hours in, map and quests pages along with other reviews suggests ~80% complete.
I don't think I will bother with the other 20%.

Dredge has no purpose and no depth. The trailers are deeper because they have storyboarding.

The gameplay consists of piloting a boat, spyglassing to find fish, and a spinning circle thing to reel in fish.
In the beginning getting money and parts for better engines feels rather important because speed means being able to move enough to do multiple things per day. But there's plenty money soon enough. Other upgrades inconsequential. I thought upgrading to a bigger boat was important to haul in more fish, but this is was wrong, it's not a "how can I haul in more cash" game, it's a "catch each type of fish ~once and then forget about it forever" game.
Spyglassing is to see what kind of fish are at a spot. The game will say ??? if you haven't caught it before, or what type if you have. During nighttime or stormy seas this becomes as unusable as a point and click game, I'm just randomly scanning and hoping I hit something. There are no other ways to locate fishing spots.
Spinning circle has like three different types.
There's theoretically an upgrade system but it doesn't matter.
There are books that give you bonuses to this or that but it doesn't matter.

The story starts with a cutscene showing you sailing in with a job ad into a storm, your ship gets wrecked, but you're where you wanted to go, mayor gives you a boat and asks you to pay it off. Which is doable in 2-3 days. You're the only fisherman in town, feeding the entire populace. And you don't have to feed them. There's fish with strange features. But the fishmonger keeps buying them from you. One strange fish has a handkerchief in it, that starts the main quest, which is a shady guy sending you places to collect things.
Why bother with him? I don't know.
There's strange things going on at those places. Why? No idea.
What happens if you interact with those strange things or stay out at night in the dark too long? Your boat loses 1 out of 3-5 hp, a couple inventory slots get disabled (causing maybe your lights to stop working, or a fish goes overboard). Repairing is cheap, the monsters never get any harder, there are no compounding consequences.

What's the story after the opening cutscene? Nonexistent.

What's the stakes? Nonexistent.

There's just no reason to care about any of this.
The most interesting possibility is the old fisherman went missing and the lighthouse keeper says things that suggests she knows you, which means maybe you are the old fisherman except with memory loss or whatever. Except for the duration of the game the character has no motivation and neither do I.

Unironically it would be so much more interesting if I had to show up in town every other day to supply a certain amount of fish. But I don't. The debt is trivial, and then every other fish is playing pokemon. New area, oh I have to buy a new rod in order to play this part of the game, I have so many parts and so much money, what do I care.

Other reviews state certain quests have hidden time limits. This seems plausible, I had one failure of a side quest for no apparent reason. I also didn't care. There was no suggestion that any kind of impending end was coming, other than there is a day counter at the top of the screen, but... what would that mean? The +7.5% engine bonus and +10% sell price stuff is important? Speedrunning save the world in X days in a mystery horror fishing gotta catch em all is the intended way to play the game? Is this a joke?

It is a joke. A bad joke.

Also it's rather expensive.
But even if it was free it'd still be a waste of time.

Touhou Mystia's Izakaya was really, really good. I liked it, it was fun, it showed me new things, I will remember it.

I feel I'm only on the 7/8~8/8 fence because it looks cute and simple. By part and by whole it clearly outclasses many more 'mature and complex' stories.

This rating is by time. By currency I don't know what it's doing at 6$. Why isn't it at 30$? Were they trying to buy my interest after the game? If they were: they succeeded. I want to see what else is in Touhou, and what else these guys will do next.

It is good and it is beautiful.

Second fight in Presidia you need to bring a plane with AOA.
I make this review solely because it will ruin your experience of the whole game otherwise.

Discount indie Ace Combat. It's actually superior to Ace Combat in some important ways, but here and there misses the sorts of spots you would expect a major/established company to never miss. There's three that need to be mentioned, the others are minor.
- The HUD doesn't scale with FOV, so higher FOV means the HUD goes from an information display to illegible thin shapes and scribbles. There's a Unit HUD Scaling option but whatever it does it doesn't change this.
- Don't play Conquest mode. You literally cannot see what you are doing.
- You need to bring AOA to the second fight in Presidia.

I'm going to marry Dorothy!

It's okay. I'd give it a thumbs up over thumbs down, but VA-11 HALL-A has its issues.

The developers definitely showed their work in how they weaved characters, storylines, and the world together. Getting to know and trying to figure out what was going on outside in Glitch City from the small off-handed talk by first strangers then regulars who drop by for drinks was more than half the fun. The game mechanic of mixing drinks isn't particularly interesting, I didn't find it too hard to remember who liked what drinks either, but the simple act grounded me into the game: all these characters are out there living lives, and I'm there too, except while they're in the city I'm stuck at work in a hole-in-the-wall bar using an interface on a computer to make drinks. Literally too; that's what Jill the bartender does. There's a remark later about getting ice where her boss notes it's easier to go out and buy ice than try and get it out of the drink mixer. The song of VA-11 HALL-A is built off hundreds of these little notes which would be obvious to the characters, but not to the readers, yet still presented in ways which would be totally natural in the context of the story. The cast of colorful characters made it entertaining. I'm going to have to go back eventually to take more screenshots of more quotes. Dorothy's my favorite.

On waifus and memes they're not over-done or under-done. Which is to say they're not Reddit or Tumblr. They're implemented better than any other instance I've seen them in; definitely captures the feel of true internet culture 2013~2015-ish era. There's some social commentaries made in the game about how things will be more progressive in the future ~2069, but in this the game pretends internet culture is eternal, along with what is and isn't sexy and cute (like Dorothy), which are comforting. Serves both the purpose of fanservice and bringing readers into the world.

The art is great and the music is top-notch. There are some instances where the game occasionally takes advantage of the fact that it's a game and that it has a certain interface, which is always refreshing.

However it also has some problems.

Why is there no auto-read? How am I supposed to get comfy or eat while reading this if I have to have my hand on the mouse at all times? And if I have to use the mouse to continue to the next line of text, why is it that I have to use LMB? Do you know how annoying it is to click once for every sentence when the total length of the story is 10 hours? The game doesn't actually tell you about any of its available controls, I only found out just now reading other reviews that apparently QWERT allows you to select ingredients while mixing drinks. How was I supposed to know? I was dragging the drinks to the mixer the whole time until I found out that clicking anywhere in an ingredient's box (not just its avatar) would suffice, and then figured out that if you click at the edge of the box then let go, the game will register it as "picked up ingredient, dropped it in mixer". But those weren't so much a big deal because in the total of 10 hours I didn't have to mix drinks all that much. At first I thought it had standard VN controls and the devs either didn't have time or something to show controls, but it only has some standard controls. Mousewheel up brings up previously read text, but mousewheel down doesn't progress text and A doesn't autoread. Why is there no autoread?

The overall story was not particularly interesting or moving. It shares a similar disease that's plaguing American serials these days where it's just a bunch of different characters with different aims who just happen to be tied up in the same area together. It's just like "alright. it was interesting to figure out what was going on. now what?" aaaaand nothing. Nothing happens. No big moral, no big revelation. VA-11 HALL-A would actually be quite a golden opportunity to say something nice since they have established Jill and the bar to be that happenstance gathering place for all these characters with all their different lives, but they don't use Jill for that. She doesn't get jealous with her richer clients then gets closer with them as she sees they're just the same. She does empathize with people who are worse off with her, which is nice, but it's not tied up into any sort of larger theme. Jill felt mostly like a self-insert character at first, but she actually gets her own small story, and unfortunately it's not interesting or powerful or even very relatable at all compared to a lot of other characters and their events. Among the cast of characters there are some which are obviously main characters and some which are obviously side characters, and then some which are inbetween, just because their characters are better or they happen to cross more of the other characters' paths. Jill feels like a side character.

Jill doesn't have a good story, which is made worse because there are nice stories in VA-11 HALL-A. Her story is basically about how she became a bartender, which in concept rounds out the story quite nicely, but the way it's executed is so mediocre. Her story starts coming up in the second half of the story and is introduced naturally through the same type of off-handed remarks and then a client, which is perfectly fine, but her reactions were not. She blows up with basically repressed memories and the insight into her character and history goes from nothing to everything in what felt like a very short amount of time. Perhaps she got the same amount of screen time (line amount?) as other characters stories, but in her recovery and her reflection on her actions it didn't feel like it involved her recent activity at the bar i.e. the timeline of the game at all. I don't like being hit over the head with obviousness either, but Jill's story really didn't tie much into any of the other ones at all - if anything she almost excludes the other stories. In retrospect she would've made a decent enough side character. But she isn't just any side character, she's the player character, and writing her out to be actually just like any other side character will definitely fail at achieving the "we're all just small people trying to live in a large world" thematic. You can't ignore that written stories actually do have a beginning and end even if you're trying to write to realism and to life where stories don't have clear beginnings or ends. But these writers did, or at least they followed the trend. The mysterious character at the beginning for example ends up being disappointingly under and misused. You can say that mysterious openings are tropes or cliches or whatever, but they were done for a reason, i.e. they worked. If you want to not do them, you don't not do them because other people have done them, but because you have something better. For the introduction of a lot of the passerbys in the world of Glitch City, they worked fine. But for the player character, who's structurally the main character, it wasn't. The opening except for that mysterious character read completely as "Jill is a self-insert", whose personality I thought was chosen again due to internet culture. Turns out it's not the only reason, which is fine, but the way it handled in the end was disappointing.

Is it worth 15$? 12 hours length for me, so just like an American serial. And it's structured almost just like an American serial. And I hate American serials because they're a waste of my time.

I guess it's entertaining enough.

But only because of Dorothy.

Because I'm going to marry Dorothy.

This game is phenomenal. It's difficult to say when was the last time I played something of such quality. I'm not sure if I ever have.


It's something that doesn't seem to exist in games anymore. Developers on one hand are selling RPGs saying "play your way!" and on the other hand are making automatically generated maps for "infinite replayability!". We might not know how correct those statements actually are, but we know how empty they feel. Skyrim's most popular playstyle is stealth archer because all things considered it's the simplest way to fight the game's mechanics by not even close, No Man's Sky supposedly has some absurd number of planets but anyone who's not kidding themselves knows the change from one planet to the next is both obvious and negligible. "You can do anything you want" is something only people who don't haven't paid any attention for the past ten years still believe.

In Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, you can't do whatever you want, and there isn't infinite replayability. But you can do quite a few exhilarating things, and for me it'll be the first time I am going to replay a game for achievements and "better score". If games were paintings, we've been sold a blank canvas and a few primary colors for so long we forgot what a piece of art really looked like. This game is a mural, and the 35$ I paid for it feels absolutely way too low for the greatness I've seen.

Each character has specific abilities, each mission is playable only to certain characters. Each character has certain strengths and weaknesses, and Mimimi's amazing map design meets those strengths and weaknesses halfway to create an engaging experience that invites your mind to look into it further. If you want to not get sent back to your last save, you're going to have to, and you're going to have to do it constantly - there's only 4 types of enemies (counting civilians), but in all 40 hours of my first playthrough I only encountered one situation where I was like "oh wait, I remember seeing this before". That being said, I still had to say "what was the solution again?", and it still came after trying something else completely ludicrous because I was at my wit's end, before I forced myself to believe it was possible. "Not getting hit" is the baseline standard of the game; I never used the one-time-heal ability, and there was no need to because the quicksave/quickload really was really quick. But even then you have to think. There aren't an infinite number of ways to play the game willy-nilly, there are a handful of ways which all require a lot thought about placements, timings, and surroundings. And boy does it feel good when you finally figure out where to start the break any particular system of guard vision cones and patrols.

And there's usually more than one way to do it - including ways to avoid the guards entirely, if the badges of "Don't kill anyone (except mission targets)" are to be believed. I find it hard to believe. I count two sections in the final mission only where I'm pretty certain there's only one way to do it. But even then I'm not sure. In all but the first two missions, every level has two fair-sized chunks which you can basically ignore entirely in fulfilling the primary objectives, and for most of them I saw one of them as significantly more "reasonable" than the other. I didn't use heal, and with a few painful exceptions I refrained from using the pistol, but there were a few times where I was using certain abilities quite a lot and I thought, "for people I think are noobs, the devs put in health kits, but since the speedrun badge is 20 minutes and I took 2 hours, this was probably the dev's noob-friendly thing for me".

The story is and ends as distinctly Japanese. The hijinks and wildy different and dorky characters portrayed by the official trailer and game description are, I am very, very happy to say, not anywhere to be found in the actual game. I had expected to have to put up with Borderlands / Big Bang Theory tier nonsense as a cost for a decent game at a decent price, but no, Mimimi did it all. They actually did it all. No Early Access, no Season Pass, no misleading gameplay trailers, free demo... except for maybe a hand of minor bugs (i.e. 5 or less), the trailer which actually doesn't look as good as the game itself, and the same trailer's portrayal of the characters as silly, they actually did it all. There's a lot of games with fundamental problems which people defend as "but the publisher was meddling!"; this is one time where I think it's legitimate. The story's feel at any and every given minute is so vastly different from

Originally posted by "About This Game" on the store page::

The group is composed of very different personalities. Working together as a team seems impossible at first. Yet over the course of many missions, trust is won and friendships are made. The characters develop their own dynamic and each member will have to face their own personal demons.

that I can't write it up as anything but meddling from sales and marketing thinking their pet focus groups know better. I won't say the story isn't generic, it's not anything particularly special, but it's good generic, and more importantly, it's not Gearbox / Bioware generic.

I won't go into the visuals or music, but suffice to say if they released an artbook and an OST and both were the same as the price of the game, I'd get both.

There's a lot of care put into the game, from the big to the small. Yuki hums a catchy and endearing tune while she places her trap, which itself has a very satisfying sound when it clicks into place. When enemies fire their guns or call for help, there's a split-second wave showing the radius of their sound and all the red exclamation points pop in at the same time. I didn't like it when civilians pointed at me when they found me, but their whole package really made them feel like civilians. Roofs shine just the right amount at certain angles, the weather makes everything opaque just a little bit, and every color feels like it was chosen for its proper place. I have to wonder what I missed out on by not using health packs and not failing and alerting the guards more.

When the credits rolled I let it go while I checked my phone for a bit, until I realized I actually did want to know some names this time, at which point I thought "what if I could scroll up during the credits? why does it feel like, if anyone, it'd be these guys who'd have considered something like that?" And sure enough, they did. They ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ did. After 40 hours of suffering, quicksaving, thinking, and finally getting through, they just had to put a final smile on my face.

I can't recommend this game enough.

This was the first game in a very long time I got hyped for, a period of time whose length was only matched by how deeply I was disappointed in it.


I won't go too much into Ground Zeroes (GZ), but it was quite intriguing As it was the demo for The Phantom Pain (MGSV), it was why I was confident that this game would be good.

MGSV felt entirely different from GZ. It was the same engine, same mechanics, same lighting, but the balance of everything was completely ♥♥♥♥♥♥.

I'll truncate the FOB (PvP) parts here because everything they said about it were lies. You can't visit your friends, you can't even friend your friends, there is no customization you can do to your defenses other than "more" vs "less" and "upgraded" vs "not researched", same with base building, no minecraft or terraria mode, just "do you want this platform for your base" and "how high level do you want it". As such, playing it was completely boring so I only dabbled in it a few times before giving up. The game used to have resources mined by FOBs move to your singleplayer game, but somewhere along the way they got the bright idea to move it the other way instead, so now my base has a bunch of stuff on it and if I ever come back to the game I will have to start over from scratch.

There's apparently a TPS PvP mode too. Which came out like five months after the game released, or four and a half months after the game died.

The game is interesting for the first several hours, and then interesting again the first time you go to any location where there's enemies. But after you've been to a place once there's no replayability because there's no depth to the enemies and there's no level design to speak of whatsoever. The best couple of fortresses are boring, and everywhere outside of the fortresses has no point to it. The plants are all concentrated in certain areas and they're marked on your map, so wandering only gets you animals, which gets you - what? As far as I can tell, nothing. There's some zoo platform in Mother Base, but it's empty and you can't do anything there. It just gets you more points.


And that's the theme of this game - "Everything gets you more points". Well, that, and "Fulton everything", but we'll get back to that in a bit. The vast majority of the game can be summed as follows:

- walking or driving in a straight line from point A to point B through wilderness that is flat, has barely any flora, usually no fauna, and never any enemies
- tranquilizing enemies at range and fultoning them
- menus

All the plants you gather are managed through a menu. All the animals you gather gets you points on a menu. All the resources you steal are managed through a menu. All the people you recruit are managed through a menu. The mecha you never get to use is built through a menu. Menu menu menu menu and all on your "iDroid" which looks ridiculous for the era. Every time I'm about to take this game as a semi-serious military game with occasional magic (quiet, skulls, etc.), I have to pop open this stupid menu device. I would've been more appreciative if he set up some folding table and laid out some folded papers with spreadsheets and stuff, but no, it's just obviously all points and all menus.

Most you can interact with your animals is tranq them again, most you can interact with your soldiers is tackle them or choke them out. The only meaning I get out of any of these points and menus are upgrades to my fultons, my suits, and occasionally my guns, and they are so detached from the experience that I don't see it as a reward for either doing the things I did or going through the menus.

The research, resource gathering, and team deploying systems are the most obvious and egregious example of the developer just telling the player that they made this game about point collecting: they take time! Real world time! Why does it take me two hours of in-game time to research a silencer? Why does it take eight hours in-game time for my soldiers to do some escort mission? I could write it off if it was between the five to fifteen minute range but I can't justify this at all. Especially because the game demonstrates otherwise; the first researches you do are instant.


Part of the reason why everything feels like it's about points is because the world is boring and pointless. There's actually nothing that I can interact with for most of the map, and where there are things I can interact with, either 1) I don't care about them because the game gives me no reason to, or 2) they're laid out in such a boring way that obtaining them is just a chore. Nothing in this game is particularly pretty (not ugly, just nothing to look at), and the way everything looks it's as if everything outside the enemy locations was procgen'd and everything in the enemy locations was made by interns in one draft.

The missions change this quite noticeably by changing enemy spawns and timings, and dictating objectives, but it doesn't change the boringness of the locations themselves.


Story was nonsensical and forgettable. Characters were similar: I don't care about Quiet, I don't care about Big Boss, I don't care about Kaz, I don't care about Ocelot, but there was The Man Who Got Cucked To Death who was infuriating so I guess I'll give that a few points. Big monologue of the villain was the most cringey thing I've ever seen in a videogame, literally no one in storywriting or screenwriting would ever think that was a good idea. The second half of the missions are all simply modifications to turn the first half of the missions into various kinds of hard mode. Again something I don't know any single gamer or designer would ever think is even remotely close to a good idea.


This wouldn't have saved the game but I have to mention it because it would've killed Ground Zeroes. In this game you can Fulton things to capture them, which is basically attaching a balloon to them and then they disappear into the sky. Animals, soldiers, vehicles, containers - anything you can directly interact with that you aren't putting down and can't pick up can be fultoned.

Simply put this negates map design.

In GZ I had to watch my step and not take too much time because when I neutralized a guy I had to hide his body. If I wanted to extract prisoners (or enemies) they had to be moved from their location to the edge of the enemy base, unless I wanted to neutralize everyone first or have the chopper come in guns blazing, usually to significant loss of points. I had to pay attention to enemy placement, enemy route, enemy timing, and the map itself - both the land I'd already traversed, and scouting the land ahead.

In MGSV I don't care. It didn't have much map design to begin with but with fultoning it has none. I'll neutralize a guy, then fulton him. Doesn't matter if he has no skills and I don't want to add him to my army, I'll just dismiss him later - fulton him now and get him out of the way. The enemies don't see or hear the fulton unless they're really close, and they don't care if their buddies go missing. Tranq, fulton, tranq, fulton, tranq, fulton... no one calls in to check, no one sends search teams, the worst that happens is that you screw something up, someone radios in, and all the *other* bases nearby tell everyone that smoke breaks are not allowed for the next 12 hours.


There's a lot of people out there who will say "It's unfinished" or "It was rushed" or "Kojima didn't want to but Konami forced him" or whatever, which whether you believe them or not might give you some background to the game, but doesn't tell you the quality of the game itself. I'm a customer before I'm a historian.

The quality of the game itself is terrible.

This game is why I'm writing off Konami and Kojima for life.

This game had me confused about its quality for about 30 hours until I was sure what I was doing was the intended way to play the combat. Then I played a few more hours and finally decided it was boring.

The game is quite beautiful; visual downgrade and everything aside they did quite well in this department, and I'm playing on medium. Whoever was in charge of lighting definitely gave a ♥♥♥♥, and same goes for whoever was in charge of overall terrain design. There is no "completely visually pointless vast amounts of ground" like there is in MGSV, and your eye will always find something to look at unlike Skyrim.

The writing is decent too, and there are too many beautiful women in this game. Can't say I remember much of the music, but there's a few neat pieces here and there.


It is not interesting to me to quick attack - dodge over and over again. Dealing with a pack of dogs is more difficult than dealing with a single monster because they all actually attempt to attack you at the same time and there isn't much you can do. Sign recharge takes a while so you can't really spellcast, and bomb capacity is quite low with material costs being quite high so you can't really do that too much, and the crossbow is basically pointless except underwater, where it's 1HKO. The basics of the game is "how fast can you quick attack - dodge?". Since almost every enemy has the same attack pattern, it gets old real quick.

There is not enough money. There is too much pointless loot (except food, which you'll need to pick up because no money) which sells for basically nothing. Swords break pretty fast, fast enough that I'm inclined to believe I should basically always be using weapons I'm picking up from bandits to avoid having to (spend money to) repair my stuff. Armor doesn't break fast though so that's fine for gameplay, but terrible for immersion. Overall I can't say I understand why this mechanic was implemented; everything else costs so much money I don't see the need for another moneysink, and due to the combat system a weapon debuff from lack of maintenance doesn't make much sense to me either.


There was a quest which required me to clear out wraiths from a manor, and I saw that it was a decent distance away, so instead of following the roads I decided to walk straight to my destination, and since I felt like exploring I thought I'd go on foot. Halfway there I found a ?? (or was it XX?) level monster, and after swinging at it a few times to see how little damage I'd do, I ran away and continued towards my objective. And then got one-shotted at long range.

It's definitely a world-building plus to say to the player "stay on the roads or who knows what'll happen to you", but what this also does is discourage exploring. I basically have to stay on the roads if I don't want to get instagimped - there's no additional warning range for larger or extremely high level monsters. And if I only stay on the roads, the only things are towns, in which there are people, where I get quests, and basically all I do is follow the road to the quest location and/or use Detective M- I mean, Witcher Sense and follow the red whatever.

The map isn't split into "here's your low level area" and "here's your higher level area" except very broadly (White Orchard, Velen, Skellige), much too broadly to be meaningful. If you have a quest of a certain level and you have to go somewhere, there is no guarantee that the area you are traversing will be anywhere near your level. Which means stay on the road.

So it might as well be linear.

The quests have a similar problem; there's quests that will appear on notice boards which are far beyond your level. As a level 7 I picked up a notice and checking my quest logger it said level 26. There is no way, at least as far as I can tell, to abandon quests. So they'll just stay there and clog things up. And I have to pick up more quests to get enough levels to keep up with the story.


Terrible combat, poor economy, really odd enemy mapping, and disordered quest distribution finally kept me from following the story.

Mostly the terrible combat.

I probably wouldn't have played as long if I wasn't playing Japanese and hearing my favorite voice actors/actresses.

I probably would've played more if I could play more GWENT, but I couldn't (without guaranteed losing), because the enemies' cards were too good, and I couldn't buy any more, because I had no money.

It's not worth playing without mods.

Now that mods are going to be ruined and erased by the temptation of the gold magic, there's no reason to obtain this game.

I'm going to be talking about the immersion/atmosphere/mystique in Dreamfall Chapters as it appears in Part 1 and appears to be the trend for the currently unreleased parts, i.e. the quality of the writing and the mechanics of how the game conveys you that writing. See other reviews for stuff like graphics and whatever. I played TLJ and Dreamfall in like 2012 or something and loved them so those don't really matter to me too much.


The expansion from point-and-click 2.5D static background in TLJ to the simple 3D corridor in Dreamfall survived decently well, but Dreamfall Chapters just drops the ball on the atmosphere as far as I'm concerned.

With TLJ the technology limitations and game type worked fairly well together. Fixed background allows easily for design to really make it feel more like an art piece and really define what it is that the player sees. The nature of clickable things being part of the fixed background though kept it on the game side via interactive exploration. April growing and shrinking also gave a more effective sense of distance than I think game developers these days are willing to admit.

Dreamfall managed to keep the transition to 3D decently since 3D world capabilities were probably fairly limited back then. Our world's cities were fairly narrow without too much "open world", but there were enough things to interact with to not feel like it was simply a walking simulator. Marcuria's city was the same way.


What happened in TLJ when you clicked on things and they had no purpose in the story or its progression, it simply gave you no response. There were things here and there you could look into, but there weren't that many and they gave you a feel of the situation, things that felt like they were there to speak for the music, the art style, and the premise of the story.

Dreamfall somewhat removed this with its eye/highlight system, but it was a reasonable system. The system had a very narrow range of view when selecting things to highlight, and although scanning was a lot easier than running a tiny cursor over the whole screen, it retained enough of the TLJ spirit to it to feel like I was still exploring and finding things out. The world shown was fairly small, but the way things were talked about made it feel fairly big and alive. Sort of like Remember Me, if you played that. The small corridors with glimpses of a huge world behind it are pretty good design choices. Creating a desire and hinting at it is often stronger than fulfilling a desire that one is unaware of; see skimpy clothing on women and basically any PR/hype for any product before it's out.

The population of the world in Dreamfall Chapters completely reversed this. I can remember the look of some people and some of the things of TLJ and Dreamfall. The autotaxi I thought was super neat, and the space station scene and the type of people in it have been strongly imprinted in my mind.

Whereas the technological limitations were implicitly acknowledged in TLJ and Dreamfall by its design, Dreamfall Chapters makes it way too obvious to the player. Now instead of a few things that you really pay attention, there's a torrent of repetition. In Europolis no matter what I higlighted in the market I heard the same things over and over again. Why are there 20 or so market tables but only 2 or 3 messages I hear about all of them? What is the purpose of 10 selectable trash cans? The adbots of Dreamfall Chapters nowhere near compare to the Screens of Dreamfall. There's a bunch of people now walking around that I really don't care about, and a lot of things strewn about that I don't know if I should really care about.

And I know where every single one of them are because with almost no effort on my part any time I look in a general direction, I'm told exactly what is and what isn't selectable.

There's something else that causes this complete lack of atmosphere or mystique.


In the opening of TLJ and Dreamfall we're introduced to a bit of the mystery and the scale of the story we're about to uncover within the first several minutes of the game. TLJ opens with a girl in underwear clearly from a time and place we can relate to and in a world which is clearly not. Dreamfall opens largely the same way with some vaguely modern guy with a bunch of kooky priests doing kooky stuff.

There is none of this in the opening of Dreamfall Chapters. We're told everything matter-of-factly, Zoe Castillo seems to perfectly know what she's doing except when she doesn't, and whatshisface opens his mouth too much in too many stupid ways and there's nothing amazing about any of it at all. Storytime used to be this really unknowable timeless place, now it's, oh, it's basically just where dreams happen. And we have this guy who has a poor command of the english language who appears sometimes. And we have superpowers somehow. We're told that we need to go back and stop the undreaming or something, which could be great even if the intro was poor, but we don't do any of that. We go back into the real world and all we talk about is Zoe's feelings and politics. There's nothing tying this to anything at all.

Not knowing the whole story is integral for a story to move forward, but thinking you know the next step is necessary for a story to even happen. April knew what her next step was going to be at all times, even if it was wrong. Zoe Castillo in Dreamfall knew at all times what her next step would be, even if it was wrong.

Zoe Castillo in Dreamfall Chapters doesn't know jack about anything and any time she's about to reveal something important, we're told to decide what it's about instead.

What was the 20% point for the average playthrough of TLJ or Dreamfall? Surely it's different from this. Looking over various Steam reviews it appears the average time to completion of Book 1 was somewhere between 4-8 hours (mine was 6 at time of writing). I took 13-14 hours to get through Dreamfall and about 15-17 to get through TLJ. I've seen a lot of defenses about how gameplay time isn't representative or whatever and this is true but the flow of the story is undoubtedly different and whether by percentage or by absolute playtime (which cannot be completely ignored) and in basically any story you see by the 20% point or in any game/movie/TV series/book by 4-8 hours in (unless the story is several hundred hours long) you have a fair idea of what is going on. At any time the audience can feel disengaged and you always have to have something around the corner to keep them turning the page or whatever it might be in that medium.


I don't think it is reasonable to say that Dreamfall Chapters is good. I have no real reason to come back to it except for the fact that I backed the game and want to see how things turn out. I cannot recommend this game to anyone who has not already played TLJ and Dreamfall, and even to those who do I cannot really say it is a worth spending money on.

For all the reasons that can be said about releasing a game in chapters, it is undeniable that RTG thought that this first book/chapter/part of their game was worthy of releasing to the public and thus fair for any and all criticism. It is not an alpha or a beta or an early release. It is a public release of a section of the game.

Unless the design philosophy changes quite radically I don't think I will be changing my recommendation.


It's like RTG forgot "Show Don't Tell" is the key to immersion.