Recent reviews by creatrixtiara

I love bartender/barista games ala VA-11 Hall-A and Coffee Talk where you actually get to know your customers. I've also wanted a game where you play an innkeeper that collect quests from people to give to others. This is a great meld of those ideas!!

So I was one of the backers on their Fig campaign. This review is largely coming from the perspective of being heavily involved in the theatre and performing arts industries in Melbourne, where this game was primarily made. My exposure to musical theatre specifically is limited, but there is a lot of crossover.

I think there was a ton of missed potential in engaging the Australian performing arts scene, especially Australian musical theatre, in the production of this game.

Montaigne (who is Melbourne-based) is part of the songwriting crew, which is great! But it seems they prioritised getting Famous Voice Actors in, mostly from outside Australia, and who didn't necessarily have experience in musical theatre - perhaps because it felt like that was the main way to get people to get this game ("look! we have This Recognisable Person here!").

These VAs definitely have skills. However, for a game that was centered around being a _musical_ - one of the first of its kind to boot - those choices of VAs missed the mark. Musical theatre demands a particular power and energy in its performances, which the songs here didn't quite have. The songs are OK - though, like some reviewers have said, not particularly memorable (especially since the audio mixing made the songs oddly quiet, and in one scene disappear completely). Part of that is the song composition, and another large part is the performance itself. I tried picturing this game on stage - and it felt like chunks of it would need a rewrite to make it compelling enough. Everything just seemed too **sublte** - there's no subtlety in musical theatre!!!

There were so many talented performers (musical theatre or otherwise) right in the city this game was made in that could have been cast for these roles. Even local legends like jazz cabaret chanteuse Mama Alto (she would have been an amazing Aphrodite!). If their chosen VAs did have musical theatre experience, it seems to be underutilized - but again, that doesn't resolve the local talent issue.

I'll also echo some other comments here about the game not being as interactive as it could be (not really much role-playing happening) and how the detective/investigative parts seems a bit tacked on. I was pleasantly surprised at first by the story being a murder mystery (I love such games) but it felt much like I was being put on rails.

This game has a lot of potential. I just don't think it really realised it. The focus on Recognisable VAs, I believe, took away from making this a true musical experience - especially one that could have highlighted and platformed a thriving local performing arts scene, one of the biggest in the world.

My heart.
(spoilers ahead, I don't know how to write this without spoiling anything)

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I played this game while in recovery from COVID19, stuck at home for days on end because even though the worst of the virus is gone, the fatigue and lethargy and brain fog remain for who knows how long. A body that was already breaking even before the pandemic, already pushed close to the limit before this latest shove. Now I have to recalibrate how much I can still do what makes life worth living without pushing myself too hard to the point of not having said life to live.

I've also felt for a very long time that the closest I have to a spirituality is the profound connection of information, data, bits and bytes across space and time, connecting any brain anywhere just through electrified rocks.

The endgame hit me like a ton of bricks. Vix's disintegrating body, pushed to its limit after pursuing long-held dreams despite a body so similarly broken, despite every warning and concern. The mission to "rest your body" hit especially, especially close. And then the beautiful afterlife (purgatory?) of data, just so much data, bits and bytes. free floating information...the picture of my soul.

But what especially hit me hard, what's left me in tears writing this, was Tin. I too have a best friend who I adore with every bit of my being, a friend who I've butted heads with over concerns of safety, a friend who looks out for me as I do him, two salty sassbuckets joined at the hip. When Tin re-emerged with Vix and EM made a comment about two souls so intertwined that they reemerge together...I thought of him. When Vix tells Tin in the epilogue that they love being stuck in the same room together, I thought of how he kept me company while I recover from COVID, or from whatever random health malady I happen to be dealing with that week, how if I was destined to be stuck in a room forever, at lesat I'd want him around.

And then the decision to pick either the medbay or toss it for a life together with Tin. Usually in these stories the "ideal besties" route would involve sacrificing the possibility of better health to keep the relationship, and I was tempted. But I thought about how I wished I could get a cartridge to fix my broken body. How I don't want to be stuck in a room forever. I looked at Tin and I thought, surely I could bring you with me?

And when I made the choice to use the medical cartridge, and Tin frowned for a second before wishing us "good luck", I remembered my best friend, and how he'd want me to be better more than anything.

And now I'm sitting here crying, writing possibly the most personal and vulnerable video game review ever. I don't even write that many reviews. Maybe it's my weird knack of picking exactly the kind of "escapist" media that ends up reflecting the very thing I'm trying to escape from. Maybe it's a lot of things. But this game...this game will hit you where you least expect it, and it will be worth it.

I enjoy games that have a lot of "help this person out" style quests and this game was entirely that! Overall I liked this game though there are some pros and cons.

PROS:
- Gorgeous artstyle
- The Docks music is a banger
- Well-written dialogue
- The investigative/detective quests are fun
- The Wytch is a pretty solid character
- Creative and occasionally funny crafting items
- YOU CAN PET THE CATS

CONS:
- Some of the crafting requirements are way too complex (like 6 levels or so when accounting for things you need to craft to capture a monster/animal that has the thing you need)
- I wished the story had interspersed more of the Witch's memories between each soul target, since it's implied that they all abused her and nearly killed her in the end. For instance, while you're working on a particular soul target, you start getting familiar memories of what happened between you and the target. That way there would be more personal investment in the questing, rather than it feeling like you were just going random errands for a goat that misspoke.

This was a very creative take on detective/mystery games. I really liked how you could gain information from senses and how you can use that information to then influence people to make different decisions. I love how rooted it was in Chinese mythology (and not just some vague exotic stereotype, but actual Taoism) and how a lot of the puzzles were rooted in the real world! Using an actual abacus to calculate earnings, using an actual scale to work out weights - it felt very _real_ in the ways a lot of point & click style games don't quite manage.

One complaint though [MAJOR SPOILER - tl;dr there is a Quick Time Event just randomly in game]:

The QTE where you have to escape Spider Lady's clutches was unnecessarily difficult and made me cry!! I'm in it for the story and the mystery solving, not for having to work out what button to press when I couldn't tell whether the onscreen prompt was Q or Mouse Click. I wish there was a way to skip it - I don't think it really added much to the game asides from maybe a sense of suspense, but at what cost? T_T

Anyway: Highly recommend, especially for detective/murder mystery enthusiasts that want a different experience. Just beware the random QTE.

I first played this almost a year ago on a laptop that was _fine_ but not really meant for gaming and it _chugged_, Heaven's Vault became my benchmark for finding a new gaming computer - finally I got myself one and started a whole new game on this new PC! (Then annoyingly I hit a bug but the Inkle crew were nice enough to resolve it for me.)

I really liked the core mechanic of translations - especially getting to figure out the internal logic behind the language. Some of the characters are really endearing too, and I really like exploring around! I want more things to translate all the time.

Some of the choices in characters were a bit weird (a dark-skinned Black woman as a slave trader??? really???). There were some delays in conversation, so sometimes Six would warn me of turnings when it was too late. But it does run way smoother on this new PC for sure.

I know in the forums there was some discussion about having a destination-free flight mode and that would have been grand, I see there's a book out - looking forward to it!!!