I think I see what you’re getting at, thing is though, if that is how that power is shaping up to be. There needs to be something like that for the other paths too otherwise people might not want the other power sets. If that does happen it’s a cool idea though.
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Chronomancy does seem OP, but personally, I love committing horrible crimes in front of my friends and pretending I didn’t just do that. Thank you Chronomancer for, presumably, approving of my horrible deeds, since they say they’re proud of you while also probably knowing the future.
In general, I love the murders available in the game, which is a weird thing to say. I don’t know, I just find it really funny that the game goes, “Hey, you know that’ll kill that person, right?” and you can go, “lmao ok.”
Personally, one of my favorites is that you can steal Propaganda’s gun, and when he tries to make you shoot yourself, you can just roll your eyes and decide to shoot him instead. In general, I enjoy every piece of dialogue where a character goes, “Wait a second. You’re not supposed to do that.”
I do feel a little bad for distressing Flit, so I prefer playing an MC who puts people into two categories:
- Friend
- Possible threat to friend
… with possible threats being quietly eliminated, because Flit will be mad if you are openly homicidal.
Ironically, I usually feel really bad when I’m evil in games. I think the witty writing style bypasses that part of my brain.
Also, if (almost) everyone on the cover is romanceable… the guy in the Hawaiian shirt. The only Hawaiian shirt guy I remember is the drug lord. I’m going to lose my mind if you can date the drug lord if you choose to deage him. Speaking of which, this part of the game is pretty much unwritten, but I’d love if you can*torture the poor dude and then deage him. It’d be a topping on the “I’m on a powertrip” cake.
In terms of criticism, I only really dislike the sections at the start where it’s just a single onomatopeia or piece of dialogue. I enjoy having screens where the author puts a single sentence for emphasis, but doing it several times in a row for a sound is a slog. I’d prefer if every onomatopeia was compiled into a single screen or replaced with an actual description.
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Are you kidding? Elementalists can fly.
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Hey man I don’t know about you but being the Avatar from the last air bender sounds pretty cool to me 
. I will agree though that sometimes I think the enhanced physical ability can fall a little flat compared to the other two but I’m not mad at it because it’s sort of a call back to old school comics and i think that sort of shows considering that your mentor is basically Superman/Batman.
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Okay. I had plenty of fun replaying the demo just to see the other outcomes of my choices. Which is why I thought it would be nice to give an honest to god opinion on the story so far.
I’m typing this on my phone so excuse whatever ungodly typos I might make.
~PROS:
•First impression? Unsupervised brings me back to a time when I first played Heroes Rise. I only started reading COG/HOG games a couple years back, mind you. I’m quite young but I’ve played almost every available title since then. So for me to come out and tell you that I genuinely enjoyed your game? Means you’re doing something right and I implore you to keep doin it. No pressure. 
•Interesting powerset. I can be Superman, Avatar Aang, or a Chronomancer who can fuck around with father time? Sign me in!
•In the same vein of powers- Super Strength is OP, stat-wise. I love it. Who said you can’t solve everything with oonga-bunga brawn?
•Time Manipulation has plenty of potential if done correctly. More on this below.
•The world of Unsupervised feels lived in, detailed, and has an interesting lore mixed into it.
•Lore dumping. Hell yeah, shove it down my throat. (See cons, too)
•Some characters are generously written with in-depth details about their backgrounds, lives, and powers. Which adds to the realism that these are people who has their own lives and aspirations, and their time doesn’t revolve around the MC all the time.
•Flit, LB, and Derek are fucking adorable. That’s it. Moving on.
•The dialogue written between our super friends feels organic, and flows naturally. There’s subtle history and familiarity present, and I dig that. What’s that? They’re using obscure/popular gen-Z slang like actual teenagers? Author got rizz. 
•When deciding your super team name, specific names grants you these funny easter eggs and banter between your friends which actually made me laugh the first time, and subsequent times, I saw them.
~CONS:
•Costume choices. Well, since we used to be a sidekick to a prominent, now MIA, hero- we should have the option to choose a preset outfit. Let’s say, a costume that we used to wear when we were still being mentored, or just a default option that suits our chosen power. Plus, why do we have to buy our costumes if they’re readily available in the base? Shouldn’t we have spares?
•Lore Dumping. Personally, it’s totally fine. Your writing is great. However, it may be too much for other readers to see walls-of-text and several pages worth of lore during tense moments. Speaking from past experiences with these games, they work better when you place them inside a codex.
•The elephant in the room- Time Manipulation powers. Yeah, it’s overpowered. We could cheese the game with just spamming ‘STOP, HAMMERTIME’, granted you would allow us, your lovely readers, to wreck havoc with it. Here comes the dreaded BUT- it’s stifling to use at times.
It malfunctions at the wrong moment making us feel like amateurs even though we’ve been mentored by Chronomancer for years. It has an extreme downside such as rapid cellular aging when overused.
There is nothing wrong with having a broken power on a hero. Example:
Saitama from Saitama (Godlike strength, invulnerability, super speed, etc.), Mash from Mashle (Saitama 2.0), Superman (yk, from Marvel), Alucard from Hellsing (True Vampire, immortal), Ainz (Elder Lich with time stop powers).
On the contrary, the limits are realistic since we’re still teenagers trying to master our powers. But don’t be afraid to make it more than what it is. Trust me, a lot of people love OP heroes.
•And finally! This may be a ‘me’ issue but I feel like Lilith, AKA Ghostling is a walking contradiction. First off, her bio described her as someone who used to be a “popular highschooler with a bright future ahead of her.” I’m going to take that as someone who was quite social, approachable girl who had made plenty of friends. She has an online persona as a Youtuber who enjoys ghost hunting and other spooky activities. She seems to interact rather well with her audience, a bit bubbly and fun, and most importantly- loved.
However, when we rescued her from Rattlebones, and regardless of how we dealt with her kidnapper, her cold demeanor show when we get back to base. Yes. She went through hell and back, starved and forced to divulge her friends’ identities- but Jesus Christ on a pogo stick- she’s a bit extreme, m8. Arrogant and selfish doesn’t even cover it.
There is a rather extreme contrast between her past self and present self which contradicts a lot with who she is.
Lilith acts like someone who was never this popular girl the game describes her to be. She’s acts like she never had friends, or as if she was always excluded by her group. It would justify her extreme distrust, cold attitude, and her willingness to throw a life away so easily. Her dispassionate attitude just doesn’t sit well with me, or at least the way she was written doesn’t feel right.
Adding to that is the fact that we were former sidekicks, too. Shouldn’t we have a rapport ready with her since I asusme that we used to see each other at the summit base all the time before our mentor went missing? I think it would be nice if a friendly!mc/caring!mc would have a history with her.
She can be the Ice Queen, sure. But she could be more, too. You know? (I can FIX her)
I’m sure there’s more to her that we, as readers, haven’t seen yet. I do like the ‘coming out of their shell’ trope. Story is still young and there’s a lot more to see. Fingers crossed.
/Rant about broody e-girl that I can TOTALLY fix end
•I have a theory about Derek, but I don’t want this to become a something something Rhivenia theory shitposting again. 
•AND THE MOST IMPORTANT PART. The game isn’t finished, yet. O, woe is me. I have to wait for the proper release? Why must you make me suffer, you monster.
All in all, I, excuse my french, fucking love this. Please continue writing and shaping the wonderful world you’ve created. I’ll be watching with keen interest.
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Well now I’m curious what your theory is. I love trying to figure out how the story is gonna go.
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Thanks for the report, I think I found the bug. Just to make sure: you first chose that you’d bring him to the base, then when you were alone with him you killed him, right?
Thanks, I think I found the bugs. Should be fixed as soon as we update the game later today.
When you first select your power, there’s this:
These powers however, are not entirely reliable and usually can only be activated in short bursts.
I mean, you can’t use it all the time because you often get sick/pass out/get old/suffer unexpected consequences.
But the game does tell you a bunch of times. Also, you can age anyone, but you need to be touching them, and you need to concentrate (the game tells you this, too).
I think you might be confusing the start of the game (which is in the future, and you are meant to be overpower) with the rest of the game (in which you are still kinda overpower, but you have plenty of limitations)
Let me give a few examples.
These can happen during the fight with Thaumaturge:
ignoring the headache, the hunger, the dizziness, and the blood coming down your nose.
That is when your powers fade away, and you are thrown back by the wind and pulled down by gravity.
The migraine that often comes when you overuse your powers kicks in next, worse than it has ever been. You find yourself on your knees, gritting your teeth. The world is spinning; the shapes, losing focus.
This is from the fight with Claire Voyant:
But, uh… why aren’t the projectiles stopping? In fact, why do they seem to be going faster and faster after the initial chronal dilation?
$!{shit}. There’s something wrong with your powers. You try to move inside the temporal anomaly you’ve just created, but the incoming slugs adjust their trajectory and speed up with each dull step you take. This isn’t going to work.
These are from Cryptozoologist’s party in Marseille:
You get past the security guard, each step taking an eternity, the world growing darker as you move. Visible wavelengths gradually diminish as the photons seem unsure of how to behave in this anomalous scenario you have created. When you finally reach the stairs, there’s only darkness.
You stumble and fall, and the world goes back to what it was. No one seems to have noticed you yet, so you try to proceed upstairs before they do, fighting dizziness and struggling to catch your breath. As soon as you get there, you puke. Perhaps using your powers on so many people at once accentuated the side effects of the chronal displacement.
All you have to do is get out of here while they remain in slow motion. You move sluggishly toward the entrance, feeling a throbbing headache that gradually intensifies with each step you take. Just as you are about to reach the handle, you sense the asynchronous field you had projected dissipating. Footsteps are coming your way.
*if (chronalSickness >= 1)
That’s when you realize you aren’t moving anymore. Your hand remains a few inches from the handle; your legs refuse to answer your commands. You can’t even turn around to see who’s behind you.Somehow, your powers are having the opposite effect: time is catching up to you, the rest of the world going fast while you remain stuck in place. A pair of hands grabs you, then another, and something hits you hard on the head.
A sudden headache invades your brain, the pain throbbing at an increasing rhythm with each passing second. Breathing becomes difficult, then impossible. As if the air couldn’t reach your lungs. The peripheries of your vision go dark, and the last thing you see before passing out is the world returning to its normal speed.
Further tests down this segment also check attributes (meaning you can’t just get away from the place without enough agility or strength)
“chronalSickness” means you have been abusing your powers, which leads to lasting consequences throughout the game.
Enhanced Strength makes you near invulnerable, and you have more points to spend on other attributes since you don’t have to spend them on Strength and Agility. And I feel Enhanced Speed is arguably even more overpower than Time Manipulation unless you are being directly countered by something specifically designed to deal with your power.
I honestly think that all powers have the potential to be overpowered in theory, but that’s okay, because we write the game with that in mind and try to give challenges that fit the MC’s powers. They don’t need all to be martial, either, and sometimes just a moral challenge does the trick.
Others have mentioned similar things, we are leaning to having the first costume to be free at the base.
Can you give us a few examples of where this is done?
The narrative states a few times Chronomancer wasn’t the best of mentors, and was often absent. Also, these downsides are there for balancing purposes, too.
I think a few of the previous posts on this thread seem to disagree with you 
Lilith was a popular teenager, but after she got her powers things changed. She was thrown into this crazy world of superheroes–and mentored by a dark one on top of that. She doesn’t have full control of her abilities, either, and they might turn her into a “living corpse” at any point without her input, so that made her REALLY anxious and resentful. She can’t just have a normal life anymore, and the one person who could teach her how to fully control her powers didn’t do a very good job at that, and now they are gone.
Part of the reason why she made the YouTube channel was that she needed the money, but it was also a way for her to have interactions with people in a “safe space”. She’d have full control of the situation, and if she felt like her powers were about to activate on their own she could always turn off the camera.
She is kind of a walking contradiction, but I don’t think that’s unrealistic. In fact, I think it makes her even more believable. She has a lot going on and, as a teenager, is trying to deal with the situation the best way she can. This doesn’t mean it is the most healthy one, but hey, teenagers fuck up. Adults do that, too.
Now add to that the fact that she has just gone through a traumatizing experience with a supervillain who tortured and made her betray her friends, and the fact that her family was being threatened, and the fact that another sidekick already lost her entire family because of people like Rattlebag… I’d kill him too, if I was in her shoes.
Feel free to post any crazy theories, we love reading those. Someone posted one about the rejuvenated mob boss in the Hawaiian shirt being the character from the cover and I honestly thought it was pretty fun.
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Meanwhile, me and Lilith highfiving over Rattlebag’s corpse. Best friends support eachother through all endeavors! Including supporting them down the dark path of: homicide and bloody vengeance.
(tbh my actual playthrough was more “I’m okay with murder but I don’t think Lillith genuinely is, so I’ll just do it when no one’s around!” But I would highfive Lilith over Rattlebag’s corpse. While Flit isn’t looking, obviously.)
I do want her to open up though We could even team up so I could do funky SFX for her videos.
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Agree about Lilith, but I’ll do it in front of him. Was ready to join PARENT before this preacher teleported us away cause he got mad.
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Pretty good story, I like my time manipulation powers, thought it would be OP, but it’s balanced so far. Also poor doggo 
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An oversight/bug with the Lilith scenes
Looking through the code, there are a few interactions with Lilith that I’m pretty sure are not possible for the player to access, largely because her relationship stat starts at 30, unlike Amir and Sawyer (whose corresponding stats start at 60).
If you choose not to kill Rattlebag, then when you go to talk to Lilith at the base, she at first won’t respond to your knocking—fair enough. But then the game tries to give you a second chance, having her answer the door if your relationship with her is 60 or above, a value that isn’t possible at this point, meaning that not killing Rattlebag in practice auto-locks you out of talking to her.
Actually, I don’t think even a value of 30 would be possible, since choosing not to kill Rattlebag inherently lowers Lilith’s relationship stat—the highest it could be given the prerequisite of sparing Rattlebag is somewhere in the neighborhood of 25, I think, and even that would require you to backpedal by later agreeing that Rattlebag deserved to die.
The snowball fight is similarly locked behind a relationship stat of 70, which is obviously way too high to reach if you start out at 30. I’m guessing these were written with the assumption that Lilith’s relationship would start at 60 like the other two companions, and then weren’t adjusted when the choice was made to lower her base stat to 30. Given that, I figure the intent was that accessing this scene would require you to have increase her relationship from the baseline a bit, so it seems like 35 or 40 would be a reasonable equivalent?
Regarding LIlith’s characterization more broadly, I like the concept behind the character a lot, but I think I’m similarly struggling to see all the sides of her as a cohesive person. It kind of feels like there’s a disconnect between the character as described to us, the audience, and the person as understood by her peers, the people who actually (supposedly) know her.
The rest of the cast, including the MC, doesn’t seem to know that Lilith was ever more popular/sociable—they describe her video persona as completely manufactured and at odds with her real self, and that she would never naturally behave this way. (One could argue that LB is biased, but the MC does it too.) In fact, they seem to act like she’s always been broody and antisocial as long as they’ve known her. which feels jarring given that her bio—which I’d assume to be based on the MC’s knowledge—contends she was once genuinely outgoing and ambitious. I could be wrong, but I don’t recall this aspect of her past ever coming up in the actual game—which it feels like it should have at some point.
I’m assuming that we’ll later get the chance to understand more of Lilith’s perspective as the story goes on, which I’m sure will help, but it does feel to me like the other sidekicks should already know Lilith a bit better than they appear to.
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How did I exactly beat the weather wizard guy again? Did the cumulative physical pain by the looped punches become too much for him? Also why is my drip so expensive lol
I disagree personally I thought the ghost person was cool and made sense and as I understood it she became jaded and stuff became stuff that happened to her or stuff they saw and they are my favorite character especially how they talk about how locking villains up mostly lead to them escaping and doing more bad stuff which is something I particularly agree in superhero media Batman has been my favorite hero but a lot of people are dead because his villains keep getting out
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The thing with Lilith is that I don’t think it’s necessarily that they’re saying she’s never been a bubbly person but that they’ve never seen her be that because they’ve been around her when she’s had powers which soured her personality as she had a bright future that she couldn’t go back to. I read it more as the other sidekicks are used to her being an introvert rather than outspoken happy bubbly girl.
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Time to wear your thin-foil hat, folks.
Okay so, Derek is a two-three-probably-ten-faced dude who’s working for PARENTS, and working for us but only to spy on us as a mole for Lorelai. This is however Lorelai’s plan to gain control over us if we ever become the world’s greatest heroes, and as some sort of guarantee that we can be put out of commisison if we become supervillains by collecting data and blackmail to use against us.
Derek is certain that he can trick Lorelai long enough to get the full truth of the Starlight Stand out of her by feeding her breadcrumbs of info about us the same way she’s been feeding him tidbits about the Starlight Stand in order to keep him in PARENTS.
Tl;dr wtf did u just say: Derek is a double agent for PARENTS, and a double agent for us.
Is that the FULL truth? We now know that Derek is a fantastical liar who can build layers upon layers of deception in order to achieve his goals. He is fairly intelligent, not on the level of Thaumaturge, but enough to keep track of his other Dude’s activities and memories.
There’s a reason for all of this. Derek has a goal. He only explains this goal at the Museum of Morrow’s Tick-tacking room, and your MC is a time manipulator. We’re gonna ignore the implications that you and Chronomancer are the same person, which is probably a more interesting theory, but hey! We’re veering off tracks.
Derek wishes to change the world. In order to do that, he needed to learn the problems of the world, and he achieved this by sending his Dudes all over the world to experience the problems that plagues every country. But what if these Dudes witnessed horrific and traumatizing things, and brought these back with them when they got absorbed by Derek again?
With that in mind, it’s paramount for him to be able to defund PARENTS because it’s an obstacle for him. He needs to climb its ranks, overthrow Lorelai or find a way to dispose of her, and dismantle the organization from within. Is that the truth, however? Or is that what he would expect us to like to hear?
He lies, deceives, and resort fo treachery even though he preaches moral high ground. He acts as if he’s a man of virtue, when all he’s ever done was fool everyone. After all he is the one who killed Rattlebag if we choose to spare him and send him to the authorities instead.
What guarantee do we have that his other Dudes hasn’t committed atrocities? Nada. I think he doesn’t consider the other Dudes as himself, but as separate entities. If they commit crime, that’s their fault, not Derek. Plausible deniability. (It was explained that his clones tend to develop personalities of their own.)
All he’s ever cared was reaching his goals no matter what. If he has to deceive everyone including their friends, and kill people to achieve it, then so be it.
I think Derek would eventually take over PARENTS, or lead an organization equivalent to it in the near future. What better way to make a better world if your organization’s reach encompasses the world? A world that he wants to change.
(This sounds so crazy that I’m having second thoughts about posting it lmao)
The Starlight Stand conversation with Derek when he ‘defected’ back to our team.
You know that scene when you first enter Old Port with the gang and your MC starts reminiscing about the Dozovian terrorists? But you can skip it should you choose to do that, so I guess it can be excused.
Blair did it too nearing the end of the meeting with them. It caught me off guard. But granted, it is connected to the drugs. He kinda cray cray, tho.
Christopher’s monologue about that one time he was called ‘Crazy Chris’. This one was the longest so far.
Like I said, it’s totally fine. I don’t have anything against it, I’m just pointing it out.
I think that’s fair. I’m a walking contradiction myself. Oh god. Was I just relating to her attitude this whole time? Jk. Hopefully, since she’s an RO, the MC would be able to help her deal with everything she’s going through. Maybe bring out that once cheerful girl back into the limelight? She’s shown moments where she’s just herself, smiling and joking, and I think that’s good.
She deserves a break.
We just wanna spam time stop, and time stop with a kick, and time stop with a flip without repercussions, tbh. We’re spoiled like that.
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I don’t mind powerfull MC’s, it’s cool. Its just looks a bit unbalanced compared to other powers.
You are right. Game does tell you later on. When i write that i was at the very beginning when you buy your clothes from the tailor.
Correct. I chose to bring him back to base, then kill him in private.
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To be fair, almost every power-set works great (I dunno about super senses - haven’t played it yet) for a power-fantasy, if that’s what you are looking for.
As someone who played speedster I wasn’t going “This is just time control but worse” so I think the author managed to have a good amount of power-sets without there being obvious better choices.
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We are still not sure what the starting stats will be, but you are right that the subsequent checks should test for values that are possible to have.
They met her only after she already got her powers, so she was already struggling with that and wasn’t the same person she had been in school. Then they spend a lot of time without seeing each other, and meet her again after a traumatic event. She’s still dealing with the fact that she had been in captivity for a while, not to mention the disappearance of the ORs.
The characters’ bios (and the rest of the info on the stats screen) need to be worked upon, and are based on the outlines we had for the characters when coming up with them–so they don’t necessarily reflect the MC’s POV.
But the one for Lilith does say that she “struggles to control the side effects of her ghost-like abilities”, that she is “gloomy and distrustful”, and that she “She takes a while to open up and even longer to trust other people”, and those are the guidelines we have when writing her.
So to me, it make sense that someone like her wouldn’t go saying “hey, do you know that before I met you guys I was actually happy and popular and had a future ahead of me?” and instead this is the kind of backstory that the MC might learn through interactions down the road. Again, she takes a while to open up.
You punch him and create a loop where you punch him countless times in the span of a second, and each time you punch him you are also reverting your biology so you don’t get killed by the electricity from his armor. You manage to hurt him and make him leave, but you also get severally hurt yourself.
Dunno, it’s a big mystery and I think people actually want to know what happened in the Starlight Stand. When you said “tense” I was thinking about lore dumps in the middle of fights.
Similarly, this is before the action starts and the info is important later down the road. I personally prefer to learn this kind of thing during the course of the story than to read about it somewhere else. Keep in mind that you can use that information to convince Snorter to change sides, and that it gets mentioned again by the end of the scene. So, while it might be a bit of a wall of text, it is not gratuitous IMO, as it connects to other things in the scene.
The conversation with Blair is full of variations and chunks of text so I don’t know what wall of text you are referring to precisely
It’s important info, though. It moves the plot forward, reveals some things about the organization behind the superdrug, explains how the operation in Vera City was set up, and hints at how you might be able to solve the mystery later on. It’s the “reward” at the end of the scene.
Either way, it’s one of the parts of the game that will have modifications eventually–so we might end up not making it obligatory.
The idea is that Ghostling will be one of the characters who can go through the most character development in the game, and influenced by the MC on top of that. You can make her into a real hero or drag her down the abyss with you.
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