This is one of my favorite games to come out in the last few years. It has immaculate vibes. I like the ATV, I love the loop and experience, the concept is divine and the cool machinery for signals and processing is great. The new base is AMAZING, honestly one of my favorite bases in any game. It feels so unique, interesting, thematically appropriate, and it's cozy enough to provide comfort at night but open enough to still be spooky in it's corners. It rocks!
I do, however, think the default days/decay rate are particularly punishing and geared towards experienced players and wiki-divers. The first version I played had time to do tasks and experiment, money was tight but there was enough to still take some chances with purchasing things and find your way. I'm not saying it's dogshit but, it's clearly balanced for people that already play it and are gaming the mechanics. Sit some people that have played plenty of games but never heard of this down in front of the computer and I guarantee they will not operate at the capacity you are assuming and designing for.
The game is at it's hardest at the start, and only gets easier from there. It's a strange balance. It's all the more strange when the commonly accepted answers to figuring out how to get enough money to surpass breaking even and working towards that point, the answers all sound like they're adderall-fueled answers from schizophrenics. 'Obviously you need to get a hacksaw and break down the dumpsters, find the hidden log with 43 MREs in it that we all know about. buy burger ingredients and ship burgers back at 9.5 credits a burger (assuming you are collecting gibs and growing tomatoes, of course). If you don't have a lemon plantation by day 5 and a cryptofarm at day 10, what are you even doing??? And you better have towed the generator at the hole (obviously you know the hole, even though you just started) by hooking it up to the ATV and carrying the ATV by hand back to the base'. Like, c'mon man, it's awesome that you can do all of that, but it shouldn't be the baseline.
I'm just spitballing, but perhaps all the upgrades should come pre-installed (bear with me), and THOSE should burn out and need replacing? That way, over time, the game gets harder if you don't keep up with the modules burning out, and if a part of the grid suffers enough burnouts, THEN that part shuts down entirely - like the fuses, but the rate of decay is based on how healthy the entire grid is. All 'fuses' on the transformers has extremely low decay, but as soon as one burns out, the rest are working harder to compensate. Fix it fast, it only gets worse from here. Or if that's too much, maybe 3/4 of all module fuses are online. That way there's still a optimal point to climb to, but there's way less floundering in place to break even in the first nights. So the first week you should probably be replacing a part every day or so on your loop, and you should know where it is as long as you keep those systems running. If you do a great job it may be even less maintenance, as long as you keep up with it. Or not! But point still stands - its the hardest at the beginning, and it gets easier over time as long as you're fine with cheesing it like the game assumes you will. If you are a new player and not cheesing it, suffer. There's so many chores, you're too busy doing them to have much time to clean the base and explore and experiment, which was a huge part of the charm of the game.
You have to ask what experience you want the game to encourage - exploration, curiosity, a supposedly mundane technical job in a fringe location that you grow attached to and make your own while things around you evolve and reveal that there's more to this than meets the eye? Or a addy-fueled chore simulator that sometimes has interesting stuff happen in between the chores that you can't witness because you're too busy with your dayjob to experience the mystery and adventure? Because originally it was the former, and it moved to the latter, and enough people are on that point that it's clearly not a fringe personal opinion that this happened.
rochambowie
Recent community posts
I do get what you mean, there's rampant staccato writing that has constant line-breaks to suggest emphasis in some scenes and many other tells and common AI phrases that keep showing up. Like, I'm staring at the text for Ashley's later scenes and it's riddled with common tells.
"Ashley doesn't sit again.
She can't.
The shape is different now.
No longer just dense.
It's **round**. Packed.
Her belly drops.
Not just forward-but down.
She tries to straighten.
She can't.
Each step is deliberate. Wide.
Her voice is a whisper. Not regretful.
Just deeply full."
Stuff like that. If one of my projects read like that, I'd want to know the feedback. Especially since it doesn't read like other parts the author wrote.
The dev shows in the roadmap that a lot of the text is placeholder. Since we don't run into any "SCENE NOT IMPLEMENTED YET" dialogue, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that they mean assisted writing in some scenes that will be cleared up later. Either way, they clearly have put in work, so like you I'm not looking to slander, I just hope the more jank writing segments get another pass in the future.
I suppose that would make sense! Unfortunately in this case I have not edited anything - seems silly when you can zoom through with skip. I just went ahead and did that and got it all back. It's a credit to the game's writing that in many spaces I just re-read the scenes! Thankfully whatever went wrong didn't keep me from re-unlocking them. Thank you for the scorched earth trick, if I ever need it for a renpy game I'll keep it in mind!
I'll be honest, I've played through some routes multiple times, every now and then I come back to see the updates and want to revisit memories of those routes...without having to do the entire path over again, since that takes hours for some paths. Is there debug code to unlock gallery or location in the files I can just peek?
I was literally in the middle of writing a full-length campaign that has HEAVY exploration of NHPs, and this just showed up right as I was hitting some hurdles!
This book is amazing, easily my favorite 3rd party book, it's quality enough that it feels first party in production, writing, art and mechanical consideration, great job!