Im sooo excited!!! It kinda resembles the book titled The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin exept all the elements are present! And u get to choose what’ll happen haha~ this is sooooo cool!!!
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Volatile stat isn’t going up as much as others…
May I ask how you managed to romance them? I tried twice and was always rejected.;;
Is there a specific choice you need to make?
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So… romances are bound to stats??
Ooof… well, I suppose there goes my chance to romance certain characters and my desire to replay.
With all due respect, but to force a specific playstyle to get access to a romance, that’s… disappointing.
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Mechanically, the stat checks in this game felt like they were both too high and unintuitive. In addition, the special stat dialogue options are inconsistent.
Sometimes there’s only a charisma option and other times there’s multiple ones like, for example, wits, speech and artifice, but no charisma. (Speech and charisma are not the same thing.) Combined with the high skill checks, this inconsistency made me feel like I had locked myself into a lose state.
Story-wise, the above made me feel like my character wasn’t allowed to grow and develop along with the realization that the world was much more complex then they initially believed. As-is, if you begin the story as a certain character, you need to end the story as that certain character.
But even that’s not enough. If I play a charismatic pacifist diplomat, I expect to be able to broker peace between the Builders and the Weather Eaters and get Niel and Beck to put their differences aside. Instead, I pissed everyone off except for Niel and Humil, and Beck treated me like a naive yokel who didn’t know how the real world worked when I’m the setting’s equivalent to a god.
If there were some other condition I needed to fulfill to make the above happen, I don’t think it was obvious enough. As a result, I felt frustrated throughout most of the game.
All that said, I do enjoy the setting, and it’s obvious that a lot of work and thought was put into it. I was getting major Avatar vibes throughout the entire game.
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I was able to get a “nice” ending but unable to romance anyone I tried pursuing… if it’s because of stats then oh well, guess that’s a no for me
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Got say though hardest thing for me is to bring peace to all of them
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I haven’t fully finished the game yet, but I love it. Everything from the setting and characters to the difficult stat checks. This feels like a much richer and more dynamic world than that of most games, which I really love! I look forward to replaying many times for all the endings and achievements. I will agree that you do need to play slightly one-note in your character which doesn’t give the opportunity for character growth as they grow from what they were taught as much as I might wish. Otherwise, this is in my top 5 games of all time!
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i was ready to mark this as an engaging game for me in a long while because i was engaged with the characters and seeing how they could grow but then…the surprise difficulty of the stat checks and how unintuitive some of the checks/stat raise became very frustrating to play a character without meta gaming to minmax each points and more so when some of the fairmaths balance knock some options down from 80 to 60 as opposed to how slowly the stats are gained.
Which is a shame because this makes replaying more of a chore due to one (1) single mistake that can ruin the entire progress and force is to replay to try and obsessively check each stat change to try to get some semblance of “good” ending as opposed to encouraging replayability for the sake of fun.
So i definitely echo what the others say about perhaps changing the stat checks to be easier or increasing/making the stat raise options more obvious. If not just let us have an easier mode or some kind of check point for replays because it gets really frustrating when i’ve been trying to get to the end to see if a certain stat will be able to get thru a check or not only to have some choice knock my progress out entirely and having to restart from the first choice again and obsessively check again.
I also wish the flirts were more labeled clearly because when i was trying to pursue some of the characters it was strange how some of the teasing options turned out to be insults while some options i thought were insults turn out to be flirting.
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Alright, having played the game now I wanted to share my thoughts.
Things I Liked:
- The setting and worldbuilding. I felt truly immersed in this world and I really want to see more of it.
- Each of the romance options are really cool! I felt very conflicted with choosing anyone I pursued.
- This MC is probably one of the most fun MCs in a COG game in a long time. They truly felt like their own person, while also feeling fun to play and control.
Things I Didn’t Love:
- As said several times before by others, I felt the stats bordered on unfair at best, sometimes. I played through it four times, and I’m not sure if it’s just because of bad luck, but it seemed the only build I could roll that had actual success was a wits+artifice MC. Everyone else seemed to fail every stat check constantly, and made me feel a bit disappointed, because it felt as if that was the favored characterization. I won’t be playing again unless this gets patched, it was genuinely that frustrating. Which made me sad, because otherwise this is one of my favorite COG games out recently.
- A bit of an unpopular opinion, but I liked that romances could reject you. That made them feel more organic and like they had agency. What I didn’t like was that I had to sacrifice options to level up stats or learn more story information to continue the romances (especially with how sensitive the stat checks were), or that it wasn’t clear when/if a romance was not going well. I initially hadn’t realized that I failed N’s romance til fairly late in the game, or that I should have picked that single volatile option to pursue Shade.
- I was going to say the difficulty in getting a good ending, but I think that’s tied into the stats so I won’t repeat myself here.
All in all, it was a very fun game, but had some visible spots where it needed a few more tweaks. I’d definitely recommend it, but my final score varies. When things go well with proper stat checks and the like, I’d rank it at a 9/10. But when it becomes frustrating, I feel the need to drop it to a 7/10.
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I cannot believe how amazing this game was. Awesome work. Really.
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There’s a coding error.
In the events that determine who gets to be Oligarch, if you exceed success points of 4, you fail.
Please patch this.
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unfortunately I received several unexplained quota exceeded errors which mean I had to restart before finishing the game.
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I am definitely interested to play after reading the replies. Will leave a review after I have played it.
Why does the picture remind me of Attack on Titan instantly?
Congrats to the author, I know this going be awesome 
Really liked the settings, the characteristics, the options, the writing, the peace. Pretty mch everything but I do agree that you’re very much locked into stat-maxing if you want to get the particular outcomes. It was not that bad for me as I liked the idea of maxing speech and having decent wits, but still some relationship stats were almost impossible to get (eg: Your relationship with the eaters changes when talking to Niel about how you feel about them…but…that shouldn’t be the case, you’re discussing your private thoughts)
Truth be told, at some point i just opened the startup.txt and gave me a head start of +10 on several stats and relationships 
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Okay, I’ll start with the good parts! I enjoyed this game, it has an interesting concept backed by solid worldbuilding, and there was enough freedom to play exactly the sort of MC I wanted to. Zapping someone with lightning when they’re being rude? Yes please. Refusing to get dragged into politics and running off to play with the weather instead? Sign me up. Romancing a crazy knife-obsessed enemy? Absolutely. Shade is my favourite type of RO (the type that makes sensible people go ‘umm maybe you shouldn’t’). So I’m not disappointed with the purchase, and will do more playthroughs to try out the different branches and alliances too.
My first playthrough sided with the Weather Eaters, and I didn’t experience the same level of failures as other people, but I definitely agree the coding needs some fine-tuning. The late-game stat checks can be harsh, and I frequently picked choices that I thought were leaning towards one personality type, but they had the opposite effect. My MC started out highly volatile and brutal, and though I tried to play consistently, by the end those stats had swung over to controlled and compassionate. Luckily that didn’t block me from the ending I wanted, but it would help if some of the MC’s dialogue choices had a clearer indication of tone.
I suspect there’s an error in Chapter 6, when you’re trying to help at the Eastern Rains atelier. My MC chose to fight the homunculi, and told Cielo to go through the storm and ask the Masters to continue the Working. This sets the variable working_choice to 1 (if you ask the Masters to stop, it sets working_choice to 2).
I fought them with Speech, which requires 68 to succeed - my Speech was 69. Failure sets working_failed to true, which means that otherwise it’s false.
After the fight, the Master Builders appeared…and commented on how I’d asked them to stop the Working, which was the opposite of what I’d wanted. Here’s the text I saw.
If you have working_choice set to 1, it acts as if you wanted the Working to stop. If you have working_choice 2, it acts as if you wanted it to continue, and the scene you’ll get with the Masters has them praising you for letting them complete it.
Here is another way this scene can play out, if you fail the stat check:
I didn’t receive this text, because working_failed was false. However, here’s the third way this scene can end:
This is the text I think I should have received. Due to the *else, you only see this if working_choice was 2 and working_failed was false. Which means…you need to initially tell Cielo to make the Masters stop, to get working_choice as 2?
So basically, it looks to me like the outcomes for working_choice are switched around.
Additionally, some examples of overly high stat checks. For reference, here are my stats at the start of Chapter 8, after making a deliberate effort to focus on raising Speech and Wits.
And here’s an example of a Speech + Wits test. I’m still one point short of making a fully successful pass on it.
On the Eater path, there’s an important battle where a hidden variable called shade_strength is tested. But there are very few chances to raise this to the levels required. It starts at 50, and in Chapter 7 you can raise it once by either 10 or 15% (giving 58 at best). In Chapter 8, you can do the same again (giving 64 at best, working under Fairmath calculation rules). There’s a last chance to raise it mid-fight, by 20%, but that’s locked behind a subroutine called charisma_gain_loop which requires the MC to have 70+ Charisma. With this extra boost, the highest number shade_strength can reach is 71.
If the MC has 70+ Charisma, then I don’t think they’ll be able to raise Speech past the mid-60s. You’ll need a minimum of 64, to combine with 71 shade_strength and reach 135. It’s not an impossible check to pass, if you leave shade_strength at 64 and have MC’s Speech as their primary stat, which I did - but it’s pretty difficult.
Everything that tests shade_strength as an individual stat needs 65 or more, so without maxed Charisma it’s almost useless (unless you plan to double-cross Shade, and take another route through the story, which means you want it as low as possible).
Conditions like this one above are impossible to meet, because I can’t find any code that would allow the number to get that high (I ran a search for ‘shade_strength’ through several chapters, to see every time the variable is tested or altered).
There’s also a strength stat for Cielo that functions the same way, but I haven’t checked that out as thoroughly, so I don’t know if it has similar issues or if it’s easier to raise.
Correct me if I’m wrong about any of this, of course, because it’s pretty complicated code and I don’t claim to be an expert! And I do want to emphasise that I really liked the game, I’m just trying to offer advice on areas that might need improvement.
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Playing as a friend of the homunculi and (predominantly) a pacifist:
Me: The homunculi have my full support in trying to achieve their independence.
Heart: I don’t believe you.
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This was absolutely awesome loved every second it was crazy cool
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Wow, thanks for researching all this! It’s pretty illuminating.
I had suspected that the game was coded with high stat checks and razor thin margins of error, but this is min-maxing levels of complicated.
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