Recent reviews by __m__Yn_F_onY__d

The biggest issue with the game is the walking part of the walking simulator–it just feels tedious. Dear Esther remains nicer to look at, and if you've been spoiled by Miasmata, the gliding around, railed paths and offensive collision boxes just depress. The story is meh, suspenseful, but the pay-off is flat with a self-aware delivery. There are a few seductive hints of something worthwhile, but altogether the experience feels incomplete in the shadow of games which executed better.

Persistent upgrades, random drops and minimal control consort for a luck-based grindfest over anything gamey.

Immersive in some childlike, unadulterated way, a few minutes reprieve from loneliness.

Too bad I stopped playing and it's back.

You can play any card in your hand.

Kept waiting for the game to appear, but apparently there isn't one. The story itself is just blah. It's shallow and slow. There's texting sim and emails—already boring stuff IRL made worse by artificiality. It somehow moves VN UI in a backwards direction. There's a lot of clicking a single forced option to say something (surely justified by "immersion"), which when coupled with the forced typing effect requires a triple click dance every line to hope to read at a decent rate.

Far from the standard of flavor text in Zach's actual games.

It's a glorified scene gallery, but more strange than sexy. The succubi are a bait, hell's denizens are a weird and grotesque cast which make ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ the devil seem tame. The setting and lore is neither cool nor intelligent. Underwhelming on all fronts, barring one vaguely cyriak/Terry Gilliam-esque animation that was kinda neat.

It's a blatant parody of The Stanley Parable, but with more features, better voice acting, and an actual ending.

>be me two hours into the game
>discard a painting. it disappears
>fire an artist. it doesn't disappear
>fire the artist again
>keep trying to fire the artist
>notice the pop-up. confirm firing the artist. it disappears
>the pop-up doesn't disappear
>confirm firing the artist again
>keep trying to confirm firing the artist
>cancel firing the artist
>confirm firing the artist. the pop-up disappears
>put an artist to work. it doesn't work
>put an artist to work again
>keep trying to put an artist to work
>save the game and reload
>only have one artist
>realize you just fired all your artists
>uninstall game. hide game in library. it disappears

There's some darkly unapologetic writing, but much more achingly trivial monotony. Everything about the gameplay works against the player. Player actions are stipend. Progression relies on random, repetitive card draws and dice rolls against tediously incremented stats. Debuffs are severe, ofttimes longevous, while buffs are considerably fleeting. There's plenty of flavor and ample immersion, but the realism comes at the cost of throwing the player into very dark corners and screaming at them not to play because it won't be fun again for a very long time.

I was finally able to play the game again thanks to an update a few months ago. Unfortunately, the update also broke many galleries, by outright removing or otherwise affecting assets placed in galleries, changing lighting, and removing shadows. Most shadows have been restored since then and it wasn't too much work restoring missing assets in my small galleries, but I don't have any motivation to build while my galleries look totally different than intended due to lighting changes. Besides looking different, the new lighting just looks bad, missing a lot of prior definition.

The design direction is increasingly unpractical. There were already many UI quirks that made navigating the game systems tedious, but the recent update regressed in several ways. The interaction indicator became a mess of spastic lines obscuring whatever asset you're trying to place. The character controller gained an unintuitive momentum system leaving the player feeling out of control. Asset lists were paginated making it even less convenient to browse large collections of items (since a patch you can at least scroll through the pages). There has been some slight progress in usability in the last 8 months, like the grid alignment system for placing assets. It helps, but it misses the underlying issue that asset rotation and panning is controlled directly by character movement, unsuitable for precise adjustments.

Plenty of users have suggested improvements for all aspects of the game, but community management is often unreceptive, suggesting what the user wants is impossible or unneeded without apparent relevant knowledge on the topic. As one example of many, I was told shadows were removed to provide faster gallery loading and it was either one or the other. I might've been naive about their architecture, but I couldn't imagine how that would be true given shadows were a client-side setting. I tried to make a strong case for the importance of shadows anyway. Turns out, we got shadows back while still having faster gallery loading. Even when reporting bugs and issues, community management can be argumentative suggesting the issue doesn't exist. This all makes engaging with the development of the game rather unappealing.

I've still put in about 40 additional hours since being allowed back into the game. If I had my galleries back to normal, I'd have played a lot more despite the list of issues detracting from the experience. That's how fun the underlying concept is. But to have all you're prior work marred while also dealing with a user-hostile UI and dismissive community management makes the uninstall button more attractive.

Partly outdated prior review:

The root concept is fantastic. I've always appreciated technological innovations that make art more accessible, and the brilliant thing here is the melding of discovery and personal creativity. Unfortunately, the current implementation locks users out of their accounts for engaging too fervently.

I haven't been able to play for the last five months, for apparently collecting too many artworks. The game performs some processing relative to the quantity of collected artworks every time you load a gallery, and I have enough that my client is disconnected from severs before the processing completes. A fix was supposedly in the works five months ago, but it's a persistent issue at present. The community manager did offer to remove all artworks from my account; an anti-solution for getting back into the game as a significant time investment was required to collect them all.

DAISY, the lauded art recommendation AI, does not work for discovering art. It quickly narrows what kind of content it displays and will maintain a filter bubble for the rest of your time in-game. It recommends the same old items ad nauseum, while novel categories of art remain largely out of reach despite prodding from the user. Once you've found an artwork, you can browse all works by the artist, but there is no interface for browsing undiscovered artists or general categories. Random suggestions would be far more efficient.

Additionally, there's no sorting and minimal categorization for artwork in your inventory. You can filter by artist (which includes false-positives), and broadly by size. Otherwise, you must carefully scroll through everything collected to find what you're looking for.

Acquiring building assets is also a slow drudge. The vendor offers a selection of five assets available per day, plus 4 assets available per week. Assets are otherwise unavailable indefinitely. Items will reappear that you've already acquired while other items won't appear for months.

To acquire art or building assets, to place those assets or expand your gallery, all require spending an in-game currency. You earn currency when other players visit your gallery, but generating it reliably requires opening your gallery at thirty-minute intervals. Thus, progression in any aspect can devolve into a tedious waiting game, particularly poignant in the early stages.

The positives? A fairly flexible building sandbox with nice assets, and of course the art. Players have made grand galleries ofttimes totally infeasible in the mundane world, reinventing art within the spaces they divine. The creative aspect is fun enough to overlook the annoyances … as long as the game lets you play.