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1 person found this review helpful
Not Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 1.0 hrs on record
Posted: Jan 14, 2024 @ 8:14pm
Updated: Jan 14, 2024 @ 8:20pm
Product received for free

#tinygamereviews
Not much to say about About Gretel, because there's not much there.
    • Overall Score: 1/5
    Curator: Nostalginauts
    Full Review
    Playability
    2/5
    Moving around is easy enough, and for an open world crafting/building medium, it's surprisingly straightforward and stable, but even most of the basic funcionality - chopping wood and combat - is persnickety at best.
    Difficulty
    2/5
    This isn't a hard game, it's just a hard game to play sometimes.
    Graphics
    2/5
    Some of the environmental detail looks pretty good, but the character/animals and the structure art all looks out of place by comparison.
    Sound
    2/5
    Satisfactory at best; annoyingly repetitive (ugh, the footsteps) at worst.
    Story & Writing
    1/5
    Poor English translation aside, there's really not much here. We're told there is, but I didn't find it.
    I was admittedly surprised with About Gretel at first; it opened up and graphically looked okay and the sound was all right. It seemed of a higher quality than its low-rent, early-aughts-looking pre-rendered cover image lent it toward.It wasn't five minutes before it let me down.I'd normally gripe about bad writing, English is probably not the developer's first language, so I'll give that a pass. But the potentially-intriguing plot in the game's overview about Druids of the forest and your twin brother (HANSEL?!) is just...absent. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places. Maybe I just spent too long chopping at trees (chopping at, because aiming for a tree that's right in front of you can be a task in itself) and gathering bushes (only some bushes, but not the ones that actually look...bushy) and running into wild dogs. I don't know.There's a lot left unexplained. Is this set in the modern day? Gretel's attire suggests it is, but the setting and props suggest otherwise. If it is, why is she out here alone and with nothing?I wandered around for a bit and found some things. Mostly empty things and what seemed like glitchy terrain; it's easy to get stuck in places where rocks are close together, for example, and while there's water that you can go into, you don't swim in it - you just continue walking along the bottom.I found neat places to build rudimentary little shelters in with the surprisingly-competent building tool - but it got old because I don't know why I'm building anything in the first place. I just know I can.So, I wandered around some more, found some mostly-empty places and dispatched some mostly-dumb people (enemy pathfinding is pretty bad - and are those the druids?), but I didn't find much of a game, here - just some features of one.This feels incomplete. Since I'm writing this a good while after it's come out, and with the developer's steady stream of updates early on, at this point I'm assuming it's abandoned and forgotten.It's not the first game with this same story behind it, with these same features, to meet this same fate, and it won't be the last.
    BEST
    WORST
    The developer's apparent spirit and love for making the game at some point in time.
    The developer's apparent abandonment of this seemingly-unfinished game.
    • In-Game Purchases: None
    • Learning Curve: Easy, sort of
    • Replayability: Medium-low: There seems to be a lot of freedom, but it also seems...pointless?
    • Recommended Purchase Price: $2
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