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- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
I think the game deserves a thread for being the worst mystery game I played in recent memory.
The first thing you see on starting the game, I should have listened to my gut feeling an refunded it immediately
The game plays somewhat similarly to Obra Dinn (as the dev aggressively points out on Reddit), you track a family tree of heirs to a massive business conglomerate. After the tutorial you start off with an family tree and need to fill in in with each person's name, picture and occupation. Your main source of info is 2000's esque internet and a printer. The gameplay is basically you googling keywords to find more keywords until you get the relevant information.
It looks like an imposing task, but notice that it's only 4 generations. It doesn't even compose a century
Here is the first criticism: The search system fucking sucks. Most glaringly putting name and surnames in the wrong order will fail the search despite not making any difference when searching online. The search itself is barebones, you don't combine keywords together like usual internet search which would have been an interesting complexity. It also feels overly extremely railroaded, with prominent people names somehow not getting hits, while things that appear too simplistic somehow do get, the best example is searching of a "Doctor Wilson" which somehow manages to filter the exact person you want despite being incredibly common. The game also never gives you misleading information (which you would expect from the internet) at most it explicitly states it as such, or lets you personally filter what is relevant or not. This railroading leads to the game being more frustrating than fun, you have to follow the breadcrumbs the dev laid out even when they feel disconnected to what you are actually trying to reach. There are also few cases where you can reach information in multiple ways.
Even 30 years ago text parsers weren't as shitty
To add to it, the game itself is faulty for sometimes marking evidence you have as no longer necessary even when it is still crucial to progress, which is just shit design.
Pretty sure no one would do this political suicide flier in 2000
Also, not directly an issue with the gameplay, while Obra Dinn has a justification for how you know all the relevant information about who you search for through the ship's crew log. In this game you magically know all the family members names despite not making any logical sense. Ditto the family tree is already built for you, removing the necessity of finding familal relations and making a lot of information being through the process of elimination. It is incredibly apparent when using family names to directly limit a specific family branch (why not at least separate given names and surnames in the input?). It's just lazy design of mimicking Obra Dinn without needing to actually explain how it is possible.
I also want to critic the game's art. Apparently, the game originally had AI art but this was shelved (officially due to not looking natural, probably it was because AI is now a boogieman in video game creator sphere) and instead it has absolutely atrocious mobile game level art.
Yeah removing AI sure improved art quality
Now I'll get to why this is worst mystery game I played in years. In short there is no mystery. First, the assembly of the family tree is pointless. It is not that deep or wide and you still have living members who knows absolutely anyone in the family. It only takes long because how shit the search engine is and that you can't pick a phone. Second, and more importantly, a player would assume that the game would be about who caused the death of the title characters (and potentially more considering other people died in mysterious ways), probably as some way to take over the company but this actually doesn't happen, or alternatively, who are the current heirs of the company, as both are leading questions you have from the start and just general thoughts of a sane person approaching the game. But, in a way that probably involves the dev screaming "I SUBVERTED YOUR EXPECTATION" the real mystery is finding that the family had a gay offspring that was disinherited. It's a slap in the face for anyone who invested time thinking of the connection between the members as it ignores basically everything you had until this point to deliver a straight up lecture on the evils of homophobia.
And then everyone clapped!
To put it into perspective, it's like reading an Poirot novel about a prominent businessman with a broken neck, only to discover after 200 pages he just fell a flight of stairs, and that actually the guy's great grandpa once said the word Nigger.
Edit:
* One of the women married into the family is a Torah Burner, which I find offensive. The context of her is a letter sending a shivah candle to another member, which I never heard of and I wonder if the writer never learned about Judaism or it's some Reform bullshit. The idea of Shivah is 7 days to visit after the funeral for condolences for the family. Which is arguably more important than attending the funeral.
* I find it funny that the official way to find the name of a mixed race member is find the stupidest name available.
The first thing you see on starting the game, I should have listened to my gut feeling an refunded it immediately
The game plays somewhat similarly to Obra Dinn (as the dev aggressively points out on Reddit), you track a family tree of heirs to a massive business conglomerate. After the tutorial you start off with an family tree and need to fill in in with each person's name, picture and occupation. Your main source of info is 2000's esque internet and a printer. The gameplay is basically you googling keywords to find more keywords until you get the relevant information.
It looks like an imposing task, but notice that it's only 4 generations. It doesn't even compose a century
Here is the first criticism: The search system fucking sucks. Most glaringly putting name and surnames in the wrong order will fail the search despite not making any difference when searching online. The search itself is barebones, you don't combine keywords together like usual internet search which would have been an interesting complexity. It also feels overly extremely railroaded, with prominent people names somehow not getting hits, while things that appear too simplistic somehow do get, the best example is searching of a "Doctor Wilson" which somehow manages to filter the exact person you want despite being incredibly common. The game also never gives you misleading information (which you would expect from the internet) at most it explicitly states it as such, or lets you personally filter what is relevant or not. This railroading leads to the game being more frustrating than fun, you have to follow the breadcrumbs the dev laid out even when they feel disconnected to what you are actually trying to reach. There are also few cases where you can reach information in multiple ways.
Even 30 years ago text parsers weren't as shitty
To add to it, the game itself is faulty for sometimes marking evidence you have as no longer necessary even when it is still crucial to progress, which is just shit design.
Pretty sure no one would do this political suicide flier in 2000
Also, not directly an issue with the gameplay, while Obra Dinn has a justification for how you know all the relevant information about who you search for through the ship's crew log. In this game you magically know all the family members names despite not making any logical sense. Ditto the family tree is already built for you, removing the necessity of finding familal relations and making a lot of information being through the process of elimination. It is incredibly apparent when using family names to directly limit a specific family branch (why not at least separate given names and surnames in the input?). It's just lazy design of mimicking Obra Dinn without needing to actually explain how it is possible.
I also want to critic the game's art. Apparently, the game originally had AI art but this was shelved (officially due to not looking natural, probably it was because AI is now a boogieman in video game creator sphere) and instead it has absolutely atrocious mobile game level art.
Yeah removing AI sure improved art quality
Now I'll get to why this is worst mystery game I played in years. In short there is no mystery. First, the assembly of the family tree is pointless. It is not that deep or wide and you still have living members who knows absolutely anyone in the family. It only takes long because how shit the search engine is and that you can't pick a phone. Second, and more importantly, a player would assume that the game would be about who caused the death of the title characters (and potentially more considering other people died in mysterious ways), probably as some way to take over the company but this actually doesn't happen, or alternatively, who are the current heirs of the company, as both are leading questions you have from the start and just general thoughts of a sane person approaching the game. But, in a way that probably involves the dev screaming "I SUBVERTED YOUR EXPECTATION" the real mystery is finding that the family had a gay offspring that was disinherited. It's a slap in the face for anyone who invested time thinking of the connection between the members as it ignores basically everything you had until this point to deliver a straight up lecture on the evils of homophobia.
And then everyone clapped!
To put it into perspective, it's like reading an Poirot novel about a prominent businessman with a broken neck, only to discover after 200 pages he just fell a flight of stairs, and that actually the guy's great grandpa once said the word Nigger.
Edit:
* One of the women married into the family is a Torah Burner, which I find offensive. The context of her is a letter sending a shivah candle to another member, which I never heard of and I wonder if the writer never learned about Judaism or it's some Reform bullshit. The idea of Shivah is 7 days to visit after the funeral for condolences for the family. Which is arguably more important than attending the funeral.
* I find it funny that the official way to find the name of a mixed race member is find the stupidest name available.
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