Recent reviews by xen0glossy

First, a note: My partner and I did a joint playthrough of this on my partner's Steam account. On this account I've played it only long enough to get Steam to let me write a review at all, but I have in fact completed the game. So, that said, on to the review:

I really wanted to like 2064. I'm a huge fan both of point-and-clicks and of modern cyberpunk that's actually interested in doing social commentary rather than just aping the aesthetic. Unfortunately, this game was a let-down on both of those fronts, as well as many others.

2064 isn't the kind of game that spends 90% of its time making you sit back and watch cutscenes or click through pages upon pages of text. It has plenty of gameplay: point-and-click puzzle solving, dialogue trees, "blocking pursuers in a maze" bits that I don't have a pithy description for, and even a few shooter segments. It's surprising, then, how non-interactive the game feels. In part, this is because none of these things are at all challenging. The puzzles have very few steps and the player is often hand-held through them by NPCs, and which dialogue option is the right one is always blindingly obvious. I got the Golden Ending on my first playthrough without aiming for it--without even really knowing what there was to aim for--simply by choosing the dialogue options that weren't blatantly rude.

The other factor that contributes to the lacking sense of player agency is that the writer or writers are deeply in love with their NPCs, particularly Turing. It often feels like the player is mostly a vehicle to enable conversations between Turing and the other NPCs, the outcomes of which are sometimes determined by what Turing says regardless of what choices the player made. You might've spent this whole conversation making the right polite, diplomatic responses to not get kicked out of this establishment (in fact, you probably did, since it's so easy to do), but Turing decided to be a jerk and you're getting kicked out anyway. This all amounts to an overwhelming sense of "Well, what's the point of any of this, then?" It feels like a game that really wants to be an animated film--one in which Turing stars and the PC doesn't exist.

I might be less bothered by this if I found Turing as charming as the writer(s) clearly do, but unfortunately, I don't. They're something of a self-righteous know-it-all, and that's clearly intentional, but just as clearly, it's supposed to be endearing, and for me, it's just not. Characters who believe they're the smartest person in the room and/or always in the right can be fun, but when the work continually shows that this assessment of themselves is correct, as 2064 does with Turing, I find it intolerable.

Another issue is that basically all of the player's accomplishments in the game feel unearned, particularly when it comes to winning people's trust and getting favors from people. This is separate from the gameplay itself being too easy--it's more of a writing problem. The favors you do for people don't seem to merit the magnitude of favors they do in return (you gave this person a limited-edition anime poster! They will now DIE FOR YOU), and neither do they seem to justify the way that the characters open up to the PC and divulge their tragic backstories and so on after speaking to the PC about three times. This is particularly egregious with Jess, a character who starts out extremely hostile towards you and ends up... not much less hostile, but she still tells you all about her terrible past and does favors for you at great personal risk. (The game does make some attempt to justify why she's doing this, but I didn't find it convincing.) In fact, an antagonist even does the tragic-backstory infodump while trying to kill you--though honestly, that one might have worked if there hadn't been so many similar infodumps in the game.

The social commentary didn't really work for me either. I mean, personally, I don't quite buy that in the hyper-capitalist dystopian future, there's no discrimination based on race/gender/sexuality/etc., only discrimination against robots/cyborgs and genetically modified people--like, what happened to capitalism exploiting the divisions between people to keep them from banding together against their corporate overlords?--but I admit that that's my own hang-up and I can see why it's safer, so to speak, to keep everything allegorical. The real problem is where it's less allegorical--i.e., its portrayal of the genre-obligatory Evil Megacorp, Parallax. There are so many opportunities for clear parallels to real things that real companies are doing, but instead Parallax's motivations, goals, and actions feel about three feet to the left of anything that would have been plausible in-universe, and as a result don't work as a commentary on anything in the real world. Most seriously: Parallax, a Google-esque tech company, has been working on what's supposed to be the world's first AI, but Hayden, an employee, beat them to the punch by creating Turing. They had Hayden killed and are coming after Turing. Did they kill Hayden because they want to claim Turing/the tech behind Turing as their IP and want to make sure Hayden can't dispute this? Do they want to destroy Turing as well as killing Hayden so that there's no chance of a challenge to whatever patent they plan to get on their AI? No, it's some kind of vague philosophical thing about not wanting people to know there's another way for AI to be, other than their creepy surveillance-bot who's designed to watch everything you do on the web--which, honestly, Google already does with no need for an AI, so that was kind of weird too.

Finally, on a more minor note, the game really doesn't know when not to crack jokes/make pop culture references/use memes. There's a kind of game in which, e.g., making puns and referencing Epic Sax Guy at a murder scene would totally work, but 2064 does want you to take the murders and other abuses of corporate power seriously, so the insertion of humor into scenes that are supposed to have an impact in this way is distracting and a little distasteful. (Also, I'm not 100% sure it's intended, but a major twist in the game comes off as a reference to a popular Blade Runner fan theory, undercutting both the tension and the pathos of the scene in which it's revealed.)

Despite these complaints, the game isn't all bad. Some of the descriptions you get when looking at items or attempting to use items wrongly legitimately made me laugh. The major NPCs without tragic backstories were fun and likeable, since they didn't have the distracting artificiality in their interactions with the PC. And the soundtrack is delightful if you like '80s throwbacks, which I do. But the game's problems are so pervasive that these little things can't really outweigh them.

Note: This review contains spoilers for some puzzle solutions.

I loved Goetia as a work of horror fiction. The Gothic atmosphere, supported by the art and subtle but evocative soundtrack, was great, and the game did a good job not only of doling out breadcrumbs of story through various documents, but ensuring that it didn't matter much what order you read them in. It also found an angle on World War II that I hadn't seen in fiction before, which is hard to do with the amount of WWII fiction out there. Most stories about the Blitz are London-focused and, though horrible, mostly give the impression that people are grimly carrying on in the certainty that Britain will prevail in the end. Goetia, however, takes place near Coventry, which was bombed so severely that the Nazis later called successfully destroyed cities "Coventried." Throughout the documents in the game, there's a sense of fatalism--people believe that Germany is about to invade and whatever future Britain has won't be one worth having. This contributes to the oppressive atmosphere, but it's not just window dressing: this belief leads directly to the game's central horror/tragedy. Tying this real-life horror in with the supernatural horror grounds the game and increases its emotional punch.

However, as an adventure game, Goetia has significant problems. First of all, after the first demon is banished, a huge amount of the map opens up to you at once. This means that you get a whole lot of new puzzles, some of which you can solve now without banishing any more demons and some of which you can't. There's no indication of which puzzles are the latter, so you can spend a lot of time bashing your head against something you don't have all the pieces of yet and won't until much later. Another problem with having so many puzzles at the same time is that there's little signposting of which objects/codex entries apply to which puzzles, and it's not practical to try things on multiple puzzles until you find where they fit. This is exacerbated by having multiple puzzles involving number combinations, usually four numbers, which can lead to a wild goose chase trying multiple locks not realizing the code unlocks a thing you haven't even found yet.

The lack of signposting is a problem in and of itself, even in the early game when there are fewer puzzles. For example, at one point you need to take an object out front of the house, but the front door is locked. (The back door isn't, but taking it out that way doesn't work even if it logically should; this world is 2D.) You're supposed to take it through a hole in the wall, but inspecting the hole only tells you "This hole must lead somewhere." There's no indication that "somewhere" is outside (much less the specific outside you need to access.) Once you've taken the object out and placed it, you get a key which you're told is to a piece of furniture. But the furniture, a cabinet, has no visible keyhole and inspecting it gets you "This book looks important," referring to a book you can see through the glass door. I was expecting to have to find something to lever the cabinet open or break the glass. This could have been easily remedied by having the PC say "A breeze is coming through this hole" and "This book looks important, but the cabinet is locked," but it feels like the developers were intentionally leaving these things out to lazily create difficulty.

This information withholding continues throughout the game. Later, there's a puzzle that's obviously a cipher, but as far as I know you never get any kind of key to it. Since it's a Caesar cipher, you can brute-force it by shifting the alphabet by one repeatedly until you get the right answer, but it's tedious. Again, this would have been easy to fix by having a book on ciphers with a note on it saying "P = I" or something like that. Since this is an optional puzzle needed to get the "good" ending, the devs may have felt that it should be very hard, but "hard" and "tedious" are different things.

And then there are the "read the devs' minds" puzzles--e.g., how was I supposed to know that turning a photograph right side up would make the writing on the wall change into completely different writing?

There ARE some good puzzles as well, including some that are complex but fair. I particularly enjoyed finding the combination to a briefcase by cross-referencing several codex items and making some logical connections, and repairing an organ and memorizing + replicating a tune. I didn't need walkthroughs, didn't have any "how was I supposed to guess that?" moments, and felt accomplished when I was done. (There was also a puzzle with learning how to construct sigils that I liked, but this was immediately followed with a "read the devs' minds" puzzle also involving sigils, which soured me on it a little.) This made the poorly designed puzzles all the more frustrating--I could picture a version of the game in which all the puzzles were as good as those, and wished I were playing that instead.

In addition, the game needed more playtesting. If you drop a small enough object on a stretch of floor that sigils are blocking you from passing through, you can't pick it up again because the sigils won't let you get close enough (even though they're only supposed to prevent you from going THROUGH the floor, not near it). Fortunately, the puzzle I needed that object for didn't need to be solved before banishing the demon causing the problem, but I can see this soft-locking the game in other circumstances. Something that can definitely soft-lock the game is that it's possible for a particular item to, when dropped, clip through the floor into the exact location that requires that object to unlock. Because the game autosaves constantly, each save overwriting the previous one, I couldn't undo these things. Also, while it's my computer's fault that the game crashed while autosaving and corrupted my file, forcing me to start over, this wouldn't have been a problem if the game had kept a couple backup saves, giving me the option to load an older one.

There are also some quality-of-life features I wished the game had. I would have really appreciated possessable objects being marked on the map once discovered, and having names of rooms appear on the map on mouseover would have been great--I had trouble with a puzzle because I had no idea which room was the "smoking room." Making the "you are here" indicator less subtle would also have been good; half the time I couldn't see it at all. Also, the text in text boxes was very small, and the handwriting fonts were often hard to read.

I wish Steam allowed for a range of options greater than "recommend" and "do not recommend," because there were aspects of Goetia that I loved, but it is also seriously, deeply flawed as a game. Ultimately, yes, I think it's a story worth experiencing--but unfortunately, it's one best experienced with a walkthrough open.

I bought this game on the strength of some screenshots of particularly weird/funny lines that made it look like a parody. As I played, however, it rapidly became clear to me that it was just a played-straight dating sim with added sarcasm, swearing, and faux self-awareness (you know, "we're doing this dumb trope/cliche, but it's funny and different because we're POINTING OUT that it's dumb and cliche! And then doing it anyway!"). Added to this is a soupcon of teenage-boy edginess, wherein several characters are into drugs or casual sex in a way that feels less like a natural part of their characters and more like the game wants to keep reminding you every few seconds so that you don't forget that it's edgy! And transgressive! And not like other dating sims!

The characters generally are very flat; they have maybe two personality traits each, and most of those traits are annoying. I didn't really find myself wanting to spend time with them, which is pretty deal-breaking for a dating sim. In addition, while I appreciated the option to play as a female character, I realized from the moment that I saw my starting inventory was a dirty magazine and a box of tissues* that rather than making any attempt at being gender-neutral, the writers had just written a male character and then find-and-replaced several key words. In fact, they seem to have missed find-and-replacing some of them.

(*I am not saying, mind you, that women don't read dirty magazines, but the tissues are generally only necessary for men.)

I will say that the Candy Crush-type "date" minigame was weirdly mesmerizing, even though I don't usually play that sort of game (at least, not since my youthful obsession with Pokemon Puzzle League). So that kept me playing for a while, but once I put the game down, I had no real drive to pick it back up.

So for anyone who's looking for something clever, funny, subversive, or even just enjoyable as a dating sim for people who aren't twenty-something straight guys who like anime but, like, ironically, I recommend giving this game a miss.