This Game is Rigged from the Start

[Llywylln]

On my first playthrough I had to learn the way things worked and buy the tools but on the second I was kicking butt based upon my methods of reading it... if you added up all of my + markers, I should be + all around the board but it seems that the minuses can outweigh the pluses when it serves the game plot. I had more than 8 positive economy bonuses and then on a day when I got 1 negative it was suddenly negative. I watched as a fully + ridden snow globe was still turning red with chaos and doom... then I got hit with humans who I've never seen before who were nice and sweet people who, for some odd reason, toss out minuses across the board if you let them live. The Shell Game isn't fun for the player, it's just fun for the guy taking your money.

[RobOda]

引用自 Romulus：

The official secret seems to be to keep playing through bad endings until you've encountered all profiles twice (and marked them differently each way) so you can use the lamp to tell you which way to go. In order to get there, you have to basically lose dozens of times. It'd be one thing if the game was quick to play, but it's not, it's tediously slow. :krskull::r3zombie:

Maybe you're just rubbish at games?

I got the world peace and superb tech endings on my second playthrough...

The lamp helps with *some* profiles, especially when you've marked them previously, but for most the part, the profiles are common-sense;


Idiotsenator for example, wants to frack an environmentally protected region for shale gas - let him live, and it's obvious he'll tank the ecology. So you kill him.


Hawking on the other hand is pushing for a greater breakthrough in the sciences - it's obvious that killing him would be a net loss on the progress of humanity in science. And it's clear that letting him live, will benefit the human species.


Some profiles are vague, obviously, but it wouldn't be fun if every profile was spelled out for you. Well... obviously, in your case they need to spell things out even clearer, but I suspect you'd still run off to a third party guide since thinking is probably annoying.


I hate to resort to the classic gaming phrase but... 'git gud?'


----

Anyway, if the devs are still reading this (and you tick me off for being rude, fair enough), I just wanted to say I rather enjoyed the writing and the wit. It was fun going through both of my playthroughs (I grabbed the game on the itch.io justice bundle) and I hope you guys make a potential sequel or something similar but on a grander scale in the future.

[wsbenway]

引用自 Ueno Station 54：

Life is rigged, we're all destined to die. :(

引用自 Llywylln：

You can assume that, but you cannot prove it. :)

He/she does not have to prove that we're all destined to die. It's not an assumption. There is solid proof. If you want to assume that we are not all destined to die then take note that you are making an assumption that is based on beliefs and not biological/medical facts. Thus you are the one who should be searching for proof. One must imagine Sisyphus happy :)

[ozzyoscy]

I've not read the essays, but some people have major impacts on the world, some don't.

If Hitler popped up and you let him live, that doesn't mean the 'game' is rigged to end in a war ending.

[Charles Entertainment Cheese]

引用自 RobOda：

引用自 Romulus：

The official secret seems to be to keep playing through bad endings until you've encountered all profiles twice (and marked them differently each way) so you can use the lamp to tell you which way to go. In order to get there, you have to basically lose dozens of times. It'd be one thing if the game was quick to play, but it's not, it's tediously slow. :krskull::r3zombie:

Maybe you're just rubbish at games?

I got the world peace and superb tech endings on my second playthrough...

The lamp helps with *some* profiles, especially when you've marked them previously, but for most the part, the profiles are common-sense;


Idiotsenator for example, wants to frack an environmentally protected region for shale gas - let him live, and it's obvious he'll tank the ecology. So you kill him.


Hawking on the other hand is pushing for a greater breakthrough in the sciences - it's obvious that killing him would be a net loss on the progress of humanity in science. And it's clear that letting him live, will benefit the human species.


Some profiles are vague, obviously, but it wouldn't be fun if every profile was spelled out for you. Well... obviously, in your case they need to spell things out even clearer, but I suspect you'd still run off to a third party guide since thinking is probably annoying.


I hate to resort to the classic gaming phrase but... 'git gud?'


----

Anyway, if the devs are still reading this (and you tick me off for being rude, fair enough), I just wanted to say I rather enjoyed the writing and the wit. It was fun going through both of my playthroughs (I grabbed the game on the itch.io justice bundle) and I hope you guys make a potential sequel or something similar but on a grander scale in the future.

'git gud' doesn't really apply to a game where you're supposed to read the dev's mind as to what they *think* would happen if a certain person died or not. This isn't real life, it's a story written by one person who is biased and doesn't know every possible factor, and almost certainly has some misconceptions about the world like everyone else. I don't sense that this dev is flagrantly slanting the outcomes to validate a possible outcome, like some other devs have in 'make decisions to save the world' kind of games, but he's still just a human being so certainly it isn't a perfectly fair simulator.

[Charles Entertainment Cheese]

引用自 Oakwarrior：

引用自 Llywylln：

As I see it, the game is designed to be lost, over and over and over in the guise of winning... during this onslaught of frustration you are supposed to take comfort in the fact that you feel something. Eventually after being beaten into submission many times over, if you haven't been smart enough to escape the abuse, you might be able to win by using all of that experience to trick the game once. I'm not a fan of the design model.

I am a fan of the GOOD OMENS / DISCORLD style of Death Character and that is what brought me to this game. My disappointment is only partially due to that and for that part of it, it is my own fault. I have already cast this off into my game attic...

Fair enough.

Well, at least we had an animated discussion about the game, which I do appreciate. And it does signal that you care about the game, even if you dislike it - otherwise I doubt you would have stuck around to talk about it ^_^

I pretty much agree that this game is designed to be lost. Getting a 'good' ending is way too delicate a process to be done with just some intuition, it basically requires extreme luck or closely analyzing a bunch of meta information for every single decision.

Obviously this game draws heavy inspiration from Papers Please, which I think provides an example of a near-perfect branching plot in this sort of model. In Papers Please there are something like 8 or 10 endings (with various modifying factors) and the good ones can't be obtained just by 'making the right choice', there is actual skill involved and arguably still some luck, but the way you get to them is clear and intuitive. You just have to work efficiently and keep track of 'sneaky' details.

I think this game technically has 4 endings but you have to REALLY work at it and give up a lot of fun options to get anything other than the apocalypse ending. I'm sure there are some options and details I'm missing but I'm kind of running out of energy to keep screwing around until I stumble on them, my first playthrough only added a few weird details my 2nd one didn't and now that I'm on my 3rd playthrough I'm barely finding anything enticing me to try new things.

[ozzyoscy]

To the developer, keep in mind those that don't like it are going to be the most vocal, and the customer isn't always right. Like the guy talking about the game beating him into submission... the heck? What a weird viewpoint

Plus this has very positive reviews. Only 80 out of 900 negative, and that's considering how easy it is, and more driven people are, to leave a review if there's something to complain about i.e. a negative review!

It was fun. Could've been a simple Papers Please rip-off, but it did its own thing and really well. Liked the voice acting too. I played through it twice. The first ending was bad, but I set things right the second time, so different experiences.

[Charles Entertainment Cheese]

引用自 ozzyoscy：

To the developer, keep in mind those that don't like it are going to be the most vocal, and the customer isn't always right. Like the guy talking about the game beating him into submission... the heck? What a weird viewpoint

Plus this has very positive reviews. Only 80 out of 900 negative, and that's considering how easy it is, and more driven people are, to leave a review if there's something to complain about i.e. a negative review!

It was fun. Could've been a simple Papers Please rip-off, but it did its own thing and really well. Liked the voice acting too. I played through it twice. The first ending was bad, but I set things right the second time, so different experiences.

Oh come on don't be a sissy, the dev is an adult and doesn't need to be constantly bathed in positivity about his work, criticism is a very valid thing. Most of us criticizing it did like the game but thought it failed on some key elements that could have made it much better.

[cipco2]

The dev of one of my favorite early access games quit because of the negative reviews and left the project. Devs are human and the more they care about the project, the more the vague but negative comments hurt. The obviousness of the mechanics in this game means that the dev would have to think about dumbing it down and losing some of the elegance or keeping it the same and risking some people not understanding the role of characters interacting with events.

[cipco2]

Aha. I think what is confusing some people is that they aren't interpreting the news on the phone which shows what issues are popping up and how certain character actions might combine to produce a dramatic result. The character events interact with each other and you can see little bits of a larger story in the character profiles and in the news on the phone. For example, a character who wants to go to a frozen region will trigger a certain set of events if there is a bit of news about that region.

By reading the news on the phone, you can predict some of what might happen but not all. Things are just going to be different because the profiles you get are semi-random.

First game, I got utopia. Second game I got apocalypse. Read the phone.

[ozzyoscy]

引用自 Yossarian：

Oh come on don't be a sissy

Smart to start your post with this. *skips over the rest, rolls it up, throws it in trash*

Don't be a snowflake next time.

[Radene]

I like the game. It's fun to play and I'll replay it a bunch just to see what outcomes I can still get. But the entire philosophical/moral aspect is too mechanical, and also difficult to relate to - I was literally cooked up in a cauldron in order to fulfill a task, and the recipe wouldn't have included a "moral compass".

I, as the Reaper, have no social context, no socialization, no experience with humans, or plants. There is no reason for me to "care", especially since there is no need for me to understand or contextualize the course of events through the persective of inherently human concepts, dilemmas, and moral stances. And since I'm an artificial construct with a clear purpose in the mind of my creator, I will not think about "life" the same way these creatures who spend their entire lifetimes searching for purpose.

As a player, sure, I can debate all that, but the game leaves little room for it, because I don't get to interact with it "as myself", instead I am locked into a rather linear discourse without any way to influence it - the game doesn't "care" about what I have to say, it only pushes its own stance on me, take it or leave it. The "conscience in the mirror" tries to break the fourth wall and address me directly, by being all smugly, passively-aggressively sarcastic and "you really suck, don't you" all the time, which is exactly what a healthy conscience should not be doing - that kind of arrangement, in a human mind leads to self-destruction, not self-improvement.

And in a Reaper mind, yeah, you can just tell it to get lost, since as a Reaper you're not supposed to have one in the first place.

As a concept of "Death as office job" and with the quirkiness of characters, this game is brilliant. But I want a moral discussion about the topic and social commentary, I'd prefer to read Terry Pratchett some more instead.

[Charles Entertainment Cheese]

引用自 cipco2：

The dev of one of my favorite early access games quit because of the negative reviews and left the project. Devs are human and the more they care about the project, the more the vague but negative comments hurt. The obviousness of the mechanics in this game means that the dev would have to think about dumbing it down and losing some of the elegance or keeping it the same and risking some people not understanding the role of characters interacting with events.

Wow, your favorite dev accepted a huge wad of cash on the pretense that he would make a complete game and then used 'internet meanies' as an excuse to cancel his promises and keep the money.

引用自 ozzyoscy：

引用自 Yossarian：

Oh come on don't be a sissy

Smart to start your post with this. *skips over the rest, rolls it up, throws it in trash*

Don't be a snowflake next time.

impressive

[Charles Entertainment Cheese]

引用自 Radene：

I like the game. It's fun to play and I'll replay it a bunch just to see what outcomes I can still get. But the entire philosophical/moral aspect is too mechanical, and also difficult to relate to - I was literally cooked up in a cauldron in order to fulfill a task, and the recipe wouldn't have included a "moral compass".

I, as the Reaper, have no social context, no socialization, no experience with humans, or plants. There is no reason for me to "care", especially since there is no need for me to understand or contextualize the course of events through the persective of inherently human concepts, dilemmas, and moral stances. And since I'm an artificial construct with a clear purpose in the mind of my creator, I will not think about "life" the same way these creatures who spend their entire lifetimes searching for purpose.

As a player, sure, I can debate all that, but the game leaves little room for it, because I don't get to interact with it "as myself", instead I am locked into a rather linear discourse without any way to influence it - the game doesn't "care" about what I have to say, it only pushes its own stance on me, take it or leave it. The "conscience in the mirror" tries to break the fourth wall and address me directly, by being all smugly, passively-aggressively sarcastic and "you really suck, don't you" all the time, which is exactly what a healthy conscience should not be doing - that kind of arrangement, in a human mind leads to self-destruction, not self-improvement.

And in a Reaper mind, yeah, you can just tell it to get lost, since as a Reaper you're not supposed to have one in the first place.

As a concept of "Death as office job" and with the quirkiness of characters, this game is brilliant. But I want a moral discussion about the topic and social commentary, I'd prefer to read Terry Pratchett some more instead.

Absolutely. I thought it was a great idea for the story to make you a non-human entity that was invented by Death Co. (or whatever you call them) but it seems like the dev sort of forgot he established that and has the game treat you like a human soul for almost all purposes. In my first game I tried to play as I thought an actual office drone would (doing exactly what I was told with enthusiasm) and was irritated at how the game didn't seem built to accommodate this as an option and the guy who built me was somehow surprised and annoyed I wasn't making decisions that violated his orders.

[KKaiTheDragon]

Hey guys, was this game harder back in 2020 or something?? And there were balances to the tables of good / bad people ratios??? Because I literally got "Goodest Ending" on my first play through and I didn't even buy the lamp and didn't know what the snow globe did because by the time I bought it, it was already shiny and blue.

So basically yal's complaining is just coming off as a massive skill issue to me. That or yal angry at "letting oil frackers and fraud CEOs live will ruin the world" as a concept.

[Llywylln]

AS the OP, I quit this game about the time I made the post. I have no clue if they made changes to it, but it makes sense that they did. It seemed easy until the rules changed on you. Good was good until it became bad when it suited the story.

If you had a best game on your first try, I'd say they must have dumbed it down a lot. In a way, that means you got shafted the experience of how it was in the beginning. If it's that easy, then why would you keep playing? My original complaint wasn't that it was hard to master, it was that it gave me rules, and then it broke the rules it gave me. It triggers me in a way like an RPG that has rules for combat, and then you win a combat, but the story says you are supposed to lose... so you win and then you lose because it is scripted to lose. That's what it did to me, it gave me the impression that I was scripted to lose because I had gotten 'too good too fast' and I was supposed to have to replay the game twenty times before that happened.