Alright so, I just played through most of the demo (at the least as much as I can handle), and here are my thoughts.
Initial Impressions, and character
The core concept (or what I believe to be the core concept) of the game, I can get behind it sounds pretty cool and interesting, that being; to design, experience, and romance a character of your own making from a mash up of 4 diffrent character archetypes. Which at it’s core to me is interesting enough to grab my attention, and makes me want to read into.
Though this concept is not enough to drive a story on it’s own. Which I believe is what happend here, the rest of the story seems like little more than a MacGuffin to deliver our PC and designed character together. Which is unfortunate because, a MacGuffin can do that well if it’s designed in comprehensible way, that sufficiently gives a character motivation, which in normal stories made to be about characters interacting with each other works perfectly fine. In interactive fiction however that’s a lot harder to achieve, especially if you are giving complete control over the MC to the player. As we the player want to make our own motivations, and choice.
The MacGuffin in this story though, really works against it. As we the player is kinda in limbo of being our own MC and taking the role of a character. The MC of the story is forced down a path, though we aren’t given any information about them, which would lead a semi veteran of interactive fiction to go “Oh, this is me, this is my story.” (At the least it’s what I thought). Though that’s really not true as we have very minimal influence over our characters interaction with other characters, or our actions.
We aren’t given any choice in the matter, we are this person but we aren’t given any information about them. Only that, we are some kind of psionic… being? Person?.. I’m still honestly not sure. On some quest to either stop a AI super war, or find our soul mate?.. Our end goal is kinda unclear, at least to me.
Which kinda devalues any actual interactions with our designed character. There’s no story here that give our interactions any meaning, it’s all very robotic and clinical, it doesn’t flow naturally. We do this, so this happens, and oh no A bad thing happend because we did this, oh and here’s this guy, they’re here because of this… A ocean of a idea, the depth of a mud puddle.
Story
Now the story… I have no clue what Is happening in this game… I’m pretty sure the game is centred around a distant dystopian future, and the author is trying to explore what it means to be human, admits a world where cybernetics are easily accessible, and you can change yourself so vastly. Like other titles have explored, such as Deus X, and cyberpunk, though I’m really not sure what the author is trying to say about the matter.
For the most part though I think it comes from the authors difficulty with the language. As judging from their name and some simple grammatical errors, such as “He commit a suicide”. Make me think English isn’t their first language, which makes my next point on pace and flow much more forgivable.
The flow of the game as I said previously is very robotic feeling. It doesn’t feel like the writer was just writing and worried about making it correct after the thought, it feels like the writers priority was to get their point across. Though the writing is remarkably confusing to me, I have no idea what was really happening.
The beginning of the story is kinda understandable, we the MC are standing in some destroyed city in a distant future. Then someone says were watchers and we aren’t human… I think? And we have to put our soul mates’ soul back together from 4 diffrent archetypes, that split apart during some assanation attempt, because of something with AI and cyborgs?.. that’s the backbone I think from what I gather. Then we are back in the real world, in front of our boss… As to what we do for work; no god damn idea. I think we’re some kind of police liaison, and were investigating a robbery of some bionic leg. Again I’m quite confused as to what the story is about.
Characters
I feel like I could just say unremarkableand and that would get my entire point across, but that’s a lot less fun than delving into it. So I’ll start with our designed character
Our designed character is made from a amalgamation of 4 diffrent archetypes, and I’ll go over each one.
White door: What a believe to be one of the better made background. The cult defiantly makes me interested into their background and how it affects their perspective on the MC and the world… if I can figure out what that is exactly. The angel wings are a pretty cool idea too.
Black door: This one is unbelievable amateuris… The character is dark and edgy for the sake of dark and edgy. It reminds me of someone’s first attempt to make a pen and paper RPG character. Basic edgy stroypes like"I have a super dark, sad background, and I killed alotta people and I’m super bad. Don’t come near me and try and be my friend, I don’t do friends any more…" they’re just so remarkably basic, and if you choose right they’ll even break down crying, saying something akin to “Oh you do understand me! And you do care, dispite all the bad stuff I’ve done! Love me!”. It’s just disappointing, because a character that’s super dark and edgy can be done right. It’s not always good, but it can be done in a way to make them decently interesting. Take M from wayhaven for example.
Blue door: over all meh, nothing really that special about them. They like androids and AI, they’re also part android… that’s about all I got about them, there’s a heart warming scene where they hugged you as a robot.
Red door: Decently interesting, in my opinion. They’re blind from the aforminted assanation, and refuses to get eye cybernetics or something because they don’t like cybernetics. I’m pretty sure they’re the human centric character type, I think… they like red? If you want to count that.
All the other characters are not rememberable to me, at all. The only name I remember is a “Mr Bean” and that’s only because of how ridiculous the name is, and only makes me think of the silent movie guy from kid movies.
There was a faye character in there too. As too why? I don’t know, it’s a werid mash up, and really comes out of no where.
Conclusion:
I didn’t enjoy this story. Nor would I recommend it to one of my friends. Though, I have to commend Ivailo Daskalov for taking the steps to get your work out there. I sincerely hope you get some useful feedback and help better your work.
(Note: this is all my personal opinion)
