Recent reviews by PajamaJordy

Super cute, relaxing, and cozy! No hard time limits (there's only so much you can do within a day but each action costs the same amount of time no matter how long it actually takes you to do it), super easy to just launch right into but also plenty of room to grow and feel like you're building towards cool stuff with how upgrades are set up, with a very charming and chill soundtrack and just adorable design all around. I have plenty of game for the price tag and I'm also a little interested to see if they add more content in the future.

The short version: There's nothing incredibly negative I felt towards this game so generally I'd recommend it, but more so if you like dating sims and less so if you like rogue-likes.
Playing for almost 9 hours got me nearly all of the achievements. For me that makes the 20 dollar price tag fairly worth it, and any sale price even more worth it.

The long version:
Pros: There's a lot to love here. This game has a lot of fun queer representation and a very unique cast of characters. All of the weapons felt good to use in dungeons, and I didn't feel that any one weapon was more powerful than the others.
Gameplay is pretty easy, maybe even accessible? Normally I don't learn combat very quickly in video games but after running the same dungeon floors twice or so it was pretty simple to get through.
This may change player to player, but I was really appreciative of how the dungeon pacing matched the story pacing pretty well. It gets frustrating in games where you're left grinding for several hours to get kinda close to being prepared for a plot battle, and on the other side it's kinda disappointing when your combat is so far ahead of the plot that you two shot the big bad boss in the finale. The "final boss" here had good timing with how quickly I arrived to having a weapon close to love rank 6.
There's only 6 dateable weapons, but I think it's safe to say that their personalities are varied enough that there's more likely than not a character you will be very attached to.
The early game is a little rocky, because I felt that the combat was kinda clunky at first but once I got over that it was easy to put in the additional eight and a half hours.

The cons: spoilers ahead. I will cover the plot related ones, but not the ones that deal with dateable weapons/the dates.
A lot of the weapons definitely feel like shadows of characters rather than characters. I'm not sure if I'm just that far out from dating sims, if it was intentional since the story only takes place over a summer, or other constraints, but it made trying to get through some dates kinda painful. I could barely stand Sawyer, not at any fault of theirs. I went through the whole storyline with Pocket thinking I was missing something and I think I was, but the game sure never gave it to me. I think the fun I've had with other dating sims was meeting a character, having a general feel for a character, then having some sort of wrench thrown in that mix, whether that be something very bizarre like being a secret candle reviewer online or having a double life, literally anything. The characters in this game definitely felt like the proverbial wrench was simply that they have fears and doubts about their life/career paths, which is realistic but really left me feeling like they didn't do much else.
In the same vein, I kinda liked that all of the dates kinda flowed together into a cohesive mini-story, but I also kinda didn't like that. It goes hand-in-hand with what I said previously. Surely Rowan does more in their life besides miss Alice? Sawyer doesn't just go to college right? Valeria has to do other things besides eat breathe and drink art?
I don't think it's a bad thing but I'll put it in this section anyway: the combat is kinda just button mashing most of the time. Sure you can do cool stuff, but usually if you mash Y instead of X.
I think my ultimate disappointment is that I feel like the game could've done just a bit more. There's no penalty for just getting every weapon to rank 6, I guess I'm supposed to presume every character is polyamorous even though only one explicitly states it? You can even switch weapons between floors, so wouldn't it have been interesting to have the current weapon comment on the previous weapon you held in some way, not just jealously but admiration or even ambivalence? "Ah I see you wanted to use a *real* weapon this time" or anything like that? one of the weapons is literally a Kpop star, so when you switch off to a different weapon they can make a comment about how they may or may not know about Seven's career. This isn't even the only thing I can think of! Am I just supposed to believe that even though Verona Beach seems fairly small, that most of these characters have never interacted in any way? I was really left wishing that each weapon wasn't so...compartmentalized and boxed off from each other.
Now...for Eric. I really get what they were trying to do with Eric's character, and those efforts don't go entirely unappreciated it. However. His character can be seen as a comment on the dating sim genre itself, which would be more meaningful if...the rest of the game reflected that in any way. That probably means this was an unintentional comment, but I couldn't help reading the interactions with Eric and thinking, "oh I think I'm supposed to reconsider how I approach dating sim games and how, basically, it's kinda creepy and stalker-y how your character can just approach dating prospects." It's probably an unpopular opinion too, but I wish the game let me decide to hate Eric instead of forcing that he was totally unlikable.
More minor, but still worth mentioning: You're immediately dropped into the game and told that fighting through dungeons is how you can deal with your fears. Not only is it literally stated as plainly as that, it's not really explained further as to why dungeons manage to be both your personal therapy-through-fighting-cell-phone-monsters, and also a genuine hazard to the general public of Verona Beach.
Also. They shorten dungeons as "the dunj." As texting slang, fine, but I'm pretty sure characters *say* dunj instead of dungeon. Maybe I'm old but that word is not hardly worth shortening...
Even after all my complaining, I do still recommend this game, I think the 20 dollar price tag is fairly worth it and honestly, my complaints exist more because I liked the game enough, and not because I disliked it.

murder is kinda epic

Shane :)

It's amazing how quickly this game captured my little rotten heart. Definitely play this with your best headphones on and your heart wide open.

Let me begin by saying this game is a bit of a buggy mess. Sometimes if you attempt to run, your character just halts where they're standing for a second, regardless of if you're actually caught on something on the ground. Gun fighting is just awful because no matter how good your aim is, you're going to miss. There's A LOT of audio bugs—I play Xian mostly and sometimes her heels make a very loud and echoing clack noise that's pretty disruptive if your volume is loud, and there's a cut scene at the police station that had Sam B's footsteps amplified so it sounded like he was tap dancing while talking.

BUT. These are the only bugs/frustrations that I've experienced on this PC release. I see some others experiencing some issues with zombies just disappearing and I've never really had that issue, outside of the rare occasion that my weapons just don't seem to hit creeps.

I originally played this game on PS3 when it was released and I have to have clocked anywhere from 100-200 hours on there, I loved this game so much. This release made a few quality of life changes to gameplay that I really enjoy (mainly that alcohol, medkits, and throwables have their own inventories now, instead of the original unpatched PS3 version put them all in your weapons inventory), but it appears that they've "upgraded" the graphics on this version to something I'm not really a fan of. I feel like this version just looks like someone painted a clear top coat on the graphics instead of making any meaningful changes.

Anyone, I still recommend this game because it's incredibly fun. I appreciate that this game makes the shooting option not very fun unless you're Purna, combat is super fun and the option for manual combat is really neat. Weapon mods are interesting and useful without being overcomplicated or difficult to obtain, and other than the dev easter eggs and collectibles there's very little that's "locked" to certain parts of the story (as in, you don't have to make sure you hit all the points every chapter). While the story is a little flimsy, it's still really compelling and interesting to follow all the way to the end. This is one of the few games that I feel does side quests SUPER well. Every quest you do feels relevant to the situation; even if it's still just fetch or murder quests, it still makes sense—This guy needs an inhaler, this one needs insulin, this guy wants his photo of his daughter back from the place that is overrun with looters, this guy wants you to mercy kill his zombified wife and daughter. Not only do the quests feel relevant, but each quest adds mood to the game's atmosphere—while some of the quests have "happy endings," most of them are just downright depressing and really makes you feel super hopeless by the end of it all. I'd say this game is well worth your money.