Recent reviews by TEOL

Basically like playing an issue of Private Eye.

"Why: Be honest – do we ever know why?"

Yeah, in games that are well written.

The Danganronpa series has long sought to be industry leaders in the field of being tremendously ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up, and by making a game where the primary antagonists are children, they have found new and exciting avenues to explore.

10/10 would be traumatised again

Really enjoyed this game. The gameplay is interesting, the art style and character design is great, the story is surprisingly deep and the game does a good job of rewarding you for exploring. I've seen a few people comment that the game isn't very long (took me about six hours to 100% everything) but the game packs more into those six hours than some big budget titles do into sixty hours. Even the smallest rooms have something in them to find and make the location feel real, and there's a lot of lore and fun details to find if you're willing to look.

Cons: I had some occasional glitches like long loading times or rooms not loading properly (although some of that might be my system); the current system of skipping ahead in the timeline is incomplete and still leaves you needing to spend time waiting; trying to find all the collectibles was frustrating when the game didn't have a list of which ones I was missing. All fairly minor stuff though.

In short, game made a Killer7 reference, immediate 10/10.

Said Pluto is a planet.

0/10 worst game ever.

I was recommended this game by a friend who knows I'm a big fan of story games, and since it was free I thought I'd try it out. Unfortunately, it struck a nerve that I've been having with games generally lately, and that's the false sense of choice that so many games have these days. When your game is a visual novel, when you're not selling it on graphics or gameplay but on the story told and the way you as a player can affect that story, then to have a game where your actions have no effect whatsoever is simply ridiculous.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the point they were trying to make, and I even agree with it (namely that there are some people in your life who in spite of everything you do you'll never be able to have a relationship with just because the circumstances don't work out right). But creating that scenario in such an artificial way, by removing any real agency from the player, is pointless. The most obvious example for me was the fact that you can't choose to kiss Emily at the party. You can't sell me a game on it being an interactive experience where I make the choices about the story and then turn around and say 'oh but that choice would ruin my beautiful, carefully crafted story, so you don't get to make that one'. That's when it stops feeling like a story game and starts feeling like the creator couldn't get their novel published so they made a game instead.

I thought the story was OK and I liked the old school design, and if not for the problem with the endings I might have made this a recommendation (I'd even have been happy if there were multiple endings that were essentially the same but took into account the choices made earlier in the game somehow). But as it is, it's not a game, just a story, and there are plenty of better stories than this out there. Seeing the same people who criticised Mass Effect for the way it ended praise this game is bizarre to me. Thumbs down.

tl;dr 10/10 Emily remembered that I didn't like Coldplay.

Have I mentioned that this is like the best game ever made? Cause it's kind of the best game ever made.