Recent reviews by Ailes

Doing a thumbs down only to highlight the more so-so or negative aspects of the game, not because I hate it or anything. Had some good hours with it so far. It's F2P after all, so anyone can easily try out themselves.

It's okay, but imho hampered by it's F2P nature. I wish we players would get the ability back in these games to host our own servers under our own conditions. Like differently sized teams, heavy/mid/light only, longer matches, higher cashout cap, none or more diverse events and so on. Just something to spice things up. Permanently. Not some temporary new modes the devs choose to give us and remove again. Modding and custom-made levels could go a long way but of course this is all impossible by design as the devs want to dictate how we play, earn, fight. But that's a general issue of F2P or online gaming of today, so I don't directly blame these devs here specifically.

Also a point could be made that little of what you do in the game matters for the longest of time. It seems as if it all boils down to how people can do last-minute clutch efforts in stealing a cashout. You can do well for 99% of the match, totally dominate everyone, but then you happen to be spawned in poorly and get stuck between the two other teams or whatever and kiss your cashout goodbye. Might as well be skipping the whole vault unlocking part and have everyone rush directly for the same cashout station.

Or you get a poor team of let's say two light snipers. Might as well not try to capture any cashout then at all. Even worse if one or even two of those disconnect from the match. Playing with randoms in such games can always end up poorly, but I think with the small teams that The Finals has it can be particularily bad if some of your teammates end up making poor choices from start or abandon you generally.

The maps might be imbalanced too. I have the impression that there is always one team spawning closer to the vault than any other. If those are light players and they are quick enough in grabbing it and rushing away, then that might already be an instant loss for you. Especially if the cashout station is one of those floating or suspended platforms that can be hard to reach. Imho those should be deleted, particularily the moving ones. They just don't work well, once one team sets up on top of those and isn't acting totally stupid you seem to have a guaranteed loss at hand.

So yes, the destruction thing is cool. But that can't save it all forever. Otherwise the game feels fairly mid and not necessarily well balanced. For something that I saw some content creators hype up as the next new big thing (same as with Battlebit) there sure are some cracks showing quickly if you just look closely enough. No one said it was perfect. What game is? But for me it's not a 10/10, 9/10 or maybe even 8/10 either. I can have fun with it (same as with Battlebit). But I can see why some people are confused about the apparent hype that it got.

A so far quite impressive, immersive, beautiful-y, thorough experience that seemingly focuses on the pure, momentary, hands-on (singleplayer) survival and less on gimmick-y (multiplayer) features like base building that in plenty other such games can feel tacked on and waters down the actual survival mechanics - if they even existed all that much to begin with in them.

So this game is probably one of the few rare "survival" games that truly deserves the label.

Maybe some slight compromises, small details that you could nitpick about. Like how you don't have to pot water and other liquids yourself into containers/bottles but how the game creates those out of thin air into your inventory. I think I might kill for an ingame map to manually draw on too - but the way the semi-automatic mapping with charcoal in combination with world signs created from spray cans works is pretty cool too.

Not sure about this one yet. More of a "so-so"/middle review than a fully-fledged negative one.

I've been eyeing this one and its sequels for a longer while due to the nice art and looks and relatively low prices. But perhaps it's not my cup of tea. It's F2P and doesn't take up much harddrive space so everyone can test it out for themselves.

But I still want to point out why this (and potentially the sequels) might not be good games for some.

Despite its nice artsy appearance and also quite beautiful, soothing music this is basically a tough-as-nails, tight, mechanically minimalistic tower defense/resource management game.

You move (ride) straight left or right on a seemingly endless or very large single 2D plane similar to how it works in games like Terraria. And you drop gold coins. That's essentially all you do. By dropping gold you recruit NPCs to work at your camp. You designate trees to be chopped down or fortifications and camp structures to be upgraded the same way (drop gold at/near them). Recruited NPCs are (more or less) automatically doing tasks like woodwork, hunting or farming if you buy the tools they need for that at fixed locations (you guessed right: by dropping gold coins there), where they will go to to pick them up from and then head out. Certain tasks they do like hunting animals gives you more gold coins (they'll drop it for you whenever you pass by them). After each day (there is day and night cycle) you also have a gold coin chest spawn at your camp. Sometimes such chests also spawn in the wild. All that gold you use to recruit more NPCs (out from the wild where they have small, temporary camps themselves), have more/better structures built and ultimately expand your kingdom from your starting camp/base to the left and right and "survive" as long as you can.

You fail "survival" and get "game over" when you lose the crown on your head. The game has enemies that will run up to you and force you to drop gold coins upon contact. If you have no gold coins left your crown is flying off your head to the right or left. If you manage to pick it up/make contact with it before the enemies can you get it back - if you fail to do that it's "game over" and you have to start over. Those enemies are occasionally spawning in the wild near some kind of portals and - most importantly - launch increasingly larger attacks on your camp/kingdom at dusk/night. They'll run into you, your fortifcations and your NPC followers and damage and destroy said fortifications, make you drop gold and eventually your crown and also make your NPCs followers drop/lose the tools you bought for them. They will briefly attempt to pick their tools back up, but similar to how your crown works if an enemy makes contact with those before your NPC followers do then those tools are gone for good. If that happens your NPC followers become neutral again/lose loyalty and you have to recruit them again with new gold.

Now the so-so parts: Since you have extremely little direct means of interaction with things aside from dropping gold coins to roughly order your NPC followers around you are depending on understanding how clever or dumb they are. Want to recruit a few of them to repair fortifications that were damaged/destroyed the previous night? Yeah, good luck figuring out whether they will reach those in time before the next nightly attack launches or whether they will move to the ones you deem more important to fix. The game loop has you keep riding hastily left and right over your entire kingdom, picking up gold here and there and designating repair or upgrade work (drop gold coins) as fast and efficiently as you can. And then you pray that your NPC followers will actually do what you want in the numbers, way and time you want before the next enemy assault takes place. And while they might be able to do all that in a timely, mostly expected fashion, it's possible that they will still happen to stand in the wrong place at the wrong time and have their tools and loyalty stripped away by making contact with enemies that could have easily been avoided if they had retreated further back the fighting lines and fortifications early enough.

But sadly in this game you're just a king with gold to drop, not to actually bark necessary and sensible orders around. Or maybe luckily and this is exactly what makes this game so good? This measure of uncertainty and lack of direct interaction? Again: Not sure yet. I will certainly try again a few more times and maybe edit my review in case I can wrap my head better around it. If you happen to be curious about this game and its sequels you better expect these somewhat RNG-ishy elements to mess with you too regardless of how well you're doing or not. Otherwise frustration might be guaranteed in a game that by its looks and music alone could easily fool you to be relaxing one.

Oh, and there is also no way to keep track of the simplest of things, not in the game itself anyway. You've recruited a bunch of NPCs from the left and right of the world, they're all moving to your camp. How many bows do I need to buy for them? How many hammers? Do I still have one or two free to pick up some scythes and work the farms? Not sure. Let me ride back to camp to see. Oh, wait they're still scattered around and not actually here. Time wasted. Don't wanna waste precious gold coins on tools that aren't needed. Oh, sh*t, night comes. Half the fortifications still down because the NPC follower with the hammer is god knows where. Better grab a pen and a note next to my PC to keep track of him and the others next time. But hey, maybe it will not matter in the end anyway because the AI of my followers will still make me lose the run and give me a "game over" sooner than later. Welp.

Beautiful, short, easy. No needless fuss, a straightforward, linear, basic experience. There is a slight element of resource management, but it's super forgiving and somewhat arbitrary, don't expect something elaborate or difficult. It's more of a barebones, artsy, low-difficulty platform-puzzler and absolutely not some kind of tough-as-nails resource management strategy whatever title. The store description might be a little misleading on some parts, like about upgrading your vessel. Yeah, you do that. But it's all predefined, a story/narrative element, it's an on-rails game with no way for you to meaningfully influence anything. Keep this in mind when buying this. So just relax for a few hours with an easy, immersive experience. I still must say that I'm not sure if I necessarily recommend this at full price due to its short length and nonexistent replayability. But I guess if you don't mind supporting a charming artsy game/dev studio then go ahead even if there is no sale. :-)

A kinda cute, kinda soothing game so far. Art is nice, music too. Everything seems handcrafted, at least the main island as well as the dungeons? So I guess you'll eventually hit a definite "end" as far as exploration goes. (11.1 hours played; WIP review).

It's okay-ish. Nice art and some nice characters and also some nice music I suppose if you're into a whole lot of repetitive Jazz-y tunes calmly splish-splashing around.

Far from "overwhelmingly positive" though. Even for a visual novel-esque kind of game your means to influence dialogue and story are extremely limited and obvious.

It's also a very short game. My at the time of writing 9 hours in it I was 1-2 or so afk and maybe another one I spent in some grindy, boring "endless" mode to unlock drinks in some mini-encyclopedia of sorts.

The drink-based gameplay is barely worth noting either. You choose a mixture of three ingredients, some of which - if you choose the right ingredients in the right order - will be presented as drinks that actually exist in RL (which is sorta nice I guess). Others are just auto-combining the names of the ingredients. A lot of times what the customers request is super easy to do, a few other times they want drinks you cannot possibly know without being a total coffee and tea nerd yourself or by googling them. But that's basically it: Click on three ingredients, press button, wait for comic-like "animations" to finish, click another button to serve. That is the entire gameplay other than just reading. (That "Latte Art" thing is just a glorified MS Paint and serves zero gameplay purpose.)

And even if you mess up orders: There is no time limit, there is no money or anything to pay attention to (story-wise you are the owner of this coffee shop and apparently already doing well enough financially, so you basically don't give a f*ck.) At worst you'll be missing out on some slight variations in dialogue and if and how certain customers reappear on certain days. But this game is super short and it saves each day so unlocking the few things you miss in your initial playthrough should be easy enough afterwards by precisely loading into the moments where you messed up.

And you don't even serve much per day anyway. Like, only two or three cups at best, if even that much, because sometimes some customers narrative-wise are already sitting there with their coffee when it starts for you (it's a bit messy when you go through the night into the next day) or they don't feel like drinking anything at all. So even what little options there are gameplay-wise are easily thrown out of the window for the sake of narration and to maybe make this game even more relaxing than it already is?

There are also odd inconsistencies and missed opportunities in lore/setting/ narrative.

The game takes place in 2020 in Seattle in an alternate reality with humans, orcs, elves and a bunch of other fantasy creatures living together. Lore-wise that has always been so; yet when some characters enter your coffee shop you and others are reacting totally surprised - as if they or the writers of this game forgot for a second about this alternate reality and assumed it was our own actual one where the appearance of such entities would probably indeed drive us crazy.

Then the game is scraping cringe- and pretentious-territory at times or just has moments of poor writing generally, like with how there is a lot of relationship nonsense going on, a lot of characters being either indie game devs by profession or artsy hipsters (everyone with their cellphones out while sipping their coffees, of course) or how there are short-stories in-game that often make no effort to obscure the names/titles of stuff from our reality being mentioned (like Tinder, Uber or Game of Thrones) while strangely enough turning someone like "Haruki Murakami" into "Maruki Harukami". Like, why? Are you worried he is gonna sue you over this but Tinder, Uber, GoT etc. won't? I don't get it. (Also, of course 90% of those short-stories are only about relationship, love, heartbreak and such as well - is there really nothing else most people care and worry about? Geez...)

Missed opportunities being for example some orcish union strike happening. You have orcish customers. But is that ever being brought up by them? No. You only read about some stuff in a static newspaper page shown each day before you go to work. These background things could have been used as dialogue content, even to create conflict beyond the relationship/love stuff that occurs in your shop. But the writers/devs totally dropped the ball there and seemingly preferred to stay on heartbreak and shallow kiss-me-despite-our-oh-so-tragically-inconvenient-circumstances-territory. A real bummer, at least to me.

Also, why is it always raining? Is that like a narrative device? You can only feel melancholy and soak in jazzy music properly when it rains outside? God forbid the sun ever shines in this alternate reality 2020 Seattle.

TL:DR: Judging by the "overwhelmingly positive" reviews a massively overrated game. If you want some similar but better bartender-esque gameplay (and also better writing) you should get "VA-11 Hall-A" instead.

Played during a free weekend. It's an okay-ish game. Only marked as "thumbs down" to highlight the mixed feelings I had about it. I can actually recommend this game to some degree, so no hard feelings. (Will Steam ever get a "neutral" review option?)

It looks, sounds, feels, runs good. No crashes. I did however sometimes get a quite annoying bug in which I tried to switch weapons but somehow glitched out and couldn't use anything anymore, not switch back either. I had no other option but to suicide or throw myself into the swords of my enemies.

I was surprised by the various kinds of attacks you can perform (slash, stab, overhead; basic or hold down and release later for more power; counters and parries; kick and jab to interrupt/break block; and a few others I might have forgotten) and how your view (at least the first person one, didn't try third person much) as well as where your weapon is located on the screen (like the tip of it) actually matters when facing enemies. Like if you do a swing this way and make sure to have the enemy in this corner of your screen you're actually gonna hit him a split second earlier than when you would just center him all the time. (There is a fairly quick and easy tutorial that explains these mechanics). I wasn't really expecting that much depth to this. But then this game is totally focusing on melee combat and this is 2022 and not 2002. So, errm, welcome to the future or something something.

However, how much of that technical melee depth is being useful or not and translates into proper gameplay is debatable. My impression was that it's not necessarily that massively important on the larger scale. When facing one, two enemies, knowing these tricks can mean the difference between living or dieing. But many battles were quite messy and wholly uncoordinated, outright clusterf*cks. There are no true roles or anything, just some arbitrarily labelled ones like "knight", "vanguard" or "officer" to differentiate the choice of weapons and a few perks and tools or abilites/"supers" that you can use. But there are no "squads" or anything, no team spawning, no natively supported/encouraged rolework, no nothing. Voice chat apparently doesn't exist or is disabled by default (might buy the game and look at that again, but I don't remember any kids screaming or breathing into any mics). And when two or three people gang up on you even your fanciest camera swinging actions and attack pattern variations will probably not save you - especially not since you can theoretically counter a bunch of attacks and negate the stamina loss you would normally take (most of your actions consume stamina), but certainly not all of them. You're not invincible, you can't fend of two or more enemies indefinitely, you're not gonna pwn the entire other team with your sweaty tryhardness. For the better or worse.

Because personally, during that free weekend, after the initial novelty wore off, it got a little stale. There are like only 5 or so maps. They look really nice, but there is only so often you can see the same fancy things (and the same king speech intro) over and over again until even those get a bit old. The overall messy, uncoordinated combat for large parts remains the same. There is no very tangible strategy to anything other than perhaps some guy saying in chat to push the left big tower siege thingy instead of the right one. Beyond that, it's often "let's meet everyone there in the middle and swing wildly at each other and let's maybe see who sneaks through to the objective to plant some bomb or something while nobody looks". Maybe you're trying to generally walk around a bit and take one or two enemies down from behind. But then you're in the thick of it, respawn waves don't take that long, you will probably suffer the same fate. As an archer/bowman I found it a bit funny to draw the aggro from hostile swordmen and then just block their attacks and pull back to the incoming next respawn wave of my team to have them swing at those enemies with their pants/stamina down. But my impression still was that that wasn't too important regarding the overall progression and outcome of the matches.

Don't get fooled by the screenshots or cinematics or anything. A lot of what you see there is ambiant fluff. There are siege engines, yes. But most of them are in fixed places, only usable during very specific stages of the maps, still kinda hard to use and/or are arbitrarily pushed just by being around them. There is nothing much to gain from using them other than doing some mandatory objective work. Not that I would have noticed anway. You don't get to pick routes of anything. You don't get to choose where to deploy ladders or not. Everything is happening strictly on a rail, in a very predefined manner. This isn't a medieval Battlefield or anything, absolutely not. For the very most parts you're gonna be stabbing and slashing and following fairly predefined routes and not much else than that. This is barebone infantry combat through and through. Even as a bowman hitting enemies really isn't that easy and you may actually be more of a burden than help for your team if you think you're gonna be sitting there all cool sniping hostiles with well-placed bow shots left and right. Not gonna happen.

So, after the novelty wears off, this game might be good for some few matches every once in a while. I might purchase it for that exact reason, to be able to just fairly mindlessly swing my sword at some guys for one or two hours. Or to actually be that lazy bowman in the background and getting some rare lucky head- or backshots. But if you expect something that will keep you occupied with a varied experience over a prolonged time or with meaningful strategies or anything, then maybe reconsider your choice. Or wait for another free weekend and test yourself first if you feel okay with this kinda superficial, streamlined, basic, fluffy nature of the game.

More like a neutral review, but I want to highlight the negatives.

Essentially a glorified side mission "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" simulator.

It can be a relaxing experience with fairly good immersion, nice and colorful and photo mode-worthy graphics/panoramas and even the background story/narrative although only mostly told in text doing same-ish chores over and over again isn't too bad. I genuinely felt bits of sadness, wonder, isolation or despair at some points of the story and the great music/soundtrack helps a lot there too, so I appreciate what the game did there.

However, let's start with the direct contradiction to the relaxed nature: its survival elements are bordering on being nonexistential. And while it's functionally working well and is streamlined enough it's certainly not free of bugs and for some players (me included) FPS drops and crashes really weren't that uncommon.

But the true, genuine problem with NMS is that despite having like one or two dozen systems/gameplay angles to tackle in place that those systems are often relatively barebone and void of depth. If you for example have seen a certain type of planet or planetary outpost once or twice or if you have fought sentinels or pirates or random animals once or twice you basically have seen all there is to that respective discovery or encounter. And there isn't exactly a truckload of different kinds. And planetary outposts and space stations are always flat, lacking structural depth and always look the same. There are no cities, far from it. Everything is so shallow and flat. The loot is always the same too. There is almost no variation to anything in this game. Even the way some discoveries or encounters are being triggered and how they play out is heavily patternized and textbook copy & paste.

For example random fleet defense battles always have a chance to occur when you warp into a different system. It's always a total of five pirates you will fight then. And those will not scale anyhow in difficult - if you managed to shoot down one of those pirates in like five seconds of continuous fire from your photon cannon to kill their shields and then one or two rocket volleys to finish of their hull/health with, then every pirate you will ever face off against in the future will always die just as quickly, regardless of whether you're two hours into the game or a thousand hours. And remember: it will always be five pirates. And it will always happen when warping into a system. It will never happen under other circumstances. It will never play out differently. It's quite literally always the same. There will never be more pirates, There will never be any sudden suprise elements to freshen and mix things up. If you managed to survive and endure before, you will be able to do so always. No variation, no challenge, just the purest form of repetitiveness. And this freighter battle encounter is just one example: everything else in this game is heavily patternized and super repetitive like that too.

And to top it off some features like sending out your own fleet frigates on expeditions/missions is in gameplay terms little more than what trashy mobile or browser games would offer you: click like two buttons, wait a day, read a bit of text what your frigates presumably have done (discovered, fought, traded etc.), rake in a bunch of random rewards, repeat. Or managing your own planetary settlement: it's just you pressing a button at a terminal, picking one out of two administrative choices aka pressing another button ("citizen dispute" or "what do we build now?") with almost zero impact on anything at all and occassionally shooting a few sentinels of which you by then will have murdered enough of already. Oh, and dropping materials at a building site (= another button press). Beyond that you get to decide nothing. In some cases you are even forced to tear down one structure and replace it with another just to keep the daily terminal button clicking system flowing. You can't just say "nah, it's okay the way it is, let's do something else here". No, it's always a simple binary choice the game wants you to make unless you decide for yourself to just ignore the settlement.

So, you have these glorified, timegated minigames of sorts too. That's not good or deep gameplay. This is basically just the laziest kind of occuptional therapy. Even if you care only about the rewards of your settlement - you only get a bunch of stuff every once in a while from it to sell at a vending station. There are already many other, easier ways to rake in cash - and you'll soon enough fail to find any proper use for it anyway. You might as well be swiping random, irrelevant sh*t on your cellphone while being half-asleep in your bed instead of bothering with these highly superficial, tacked-on gameplay elements.

I've played my fair share of randomized, procedurally generated, repetitive games. But stuff like what I just described is just bad. There is no way sugarcoating that. Even for a game depending as heavily on procedural generation as NMS does, the way a lot of things in this game are designed, I don't want to use the word "lazy" but I just can't hide that notion. I had been engaging with people on the Steam forum a bit, and some seem to have resignated and basically accept that this game will never provide much depth. Or they even legimitely defend the devs for their inability to properly flesh out the game. Because "bUt bRuH, tHoSe ArE iNdIe DeVs, jUsT pLaY a DiFfeRenT gAmE!" Let's be honest: if this weren't Hello Games but Ubisoft or any other AAA publisher doing this kind of "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" open world copy & paste recipe with mobile and timegate methods sprinkled in, then they would hear the worst from you.

In any case it's just a genuine shame that the good foundation of this game isn't being used the way it could be. It's underwhelming at so many corners for no good reason.

A funny detail: I was basically told to just get lost and download mods if I want a better, deeper experience. But guess what: NMS doesn't support mods per-se. The Steam workshop isn't supported. If you want to mod the game, you'll have to find external sources. In the year 2022. Way to miss a chance and waste potential. There is this promo page by Hello Games on Steam which advertises sharing bases between players, but even there the game makes things needlessly complicated. So the devs are obviously unwilling or unable to outsource fixing up their game to their playerbase, despite parts of it using the "jUsT uSe MoDs" narrative as a convenient excuse for the shortcomings of the game.

My last hope was the multiplayer. And boy, did the game underdeliver there as well. I haven't even done proper "coop" with friends if you even want to call the extremely barebone and superficial multiplayer that, so I can't even comment on the seemingly massive synch issues that other people are getting when playing with their friends. But just doing the multiplayer "missions" which there are semi-solo (basically super low-effort rewrites of the rudimentary fetch quests you do in singelplayer too) are so boring and repetitive that I couldn't bring myself to play more than like 8 or so of those and ultimately call it a day. And difficulty, or challenge, where are you? Why are you hiding? Those nexus missions always told me that I shouldn't tackle those solo, that it's "highly recommended" to find a group of other players to do them with. Yet I cheesed them solo yawning all the way through. Many other shared-world/live service online games manage to save some face and provide a bit longevity with their multiplayer. But no, of course NMS does not - because there too it's fancy looks on the surface but already at second glance a fragile, thin skelekton underneath that crumbles if you just slightly push against it.

TL:DR: Take everything the devs and the diehard fans of NMS tell you with a grain of salt.

Adorable and made with a lot of heart, but obviously mildly underdeveloped in some regards. Like you might believe from the trailers, from the depictions in the game and how it comes across as a brawler that you could play a relatively large cast of characters. However thus far only three are playable (in 2021 with the game originally released in 2017). Also, a more "direct" online multiplayer mode might not be wrong, seeing how local multiplayer is there and even a "daily cook-off" as well where you face an A.I. opponent and have your own score compared to those of other players having fought the same match.

This is a bit of an odd one - one of those games where Steam should give me a neutral review option. I'm not sure if I should pick thumbs up or thumbs down, I guess I'll go with thumbs down because I'm gonna mostly talk about the questionable aspects of the game even if I don't hate the short time I had with it.

It's not a bad game per se, but the somewhat ambitious and immersive, partly even outright epic storytelling (chunks of lore, good music and artstyle, some nice although in a few cases perhaps mildly overly philosophical dialogues) feels conflicting with the pedantic, micromanagement-ishy gameplay that has you often act as a group leader juggling around with the needs, actions, health and ultimately lives of the people who depend on you in a very small and numbers-focused way.

Or, to be more blunt: one could get the impression this game expects you to have an excel sheet open in another tab where you overly accurately calculate odds and chances and work up a detailed plan on how to solve the situation at hand with no casualities or at least as few as possible - at least when you play it on the normal or more difficult settings. I tried "normal" but it turned tedious and stale and frustrating fast, so I eventually dropped down to the "narrative" difficulty that is more forgiving. I'm fairly certain that if you don't turn the gameplay into a science, if you aren't writing down stuff and calculating odds and stuff to the smallest numbers, that you will have absolutely >no< chance to beat the game on any of the higher difficulties unless luck just so happens to be on your side. (Playing the higher difficulties is slightly encouraged because that will unlock gallery bonus content like artworks and alternate soundtracks.)

But even then, in a few cases, RNG will just show you the middle finger, run you over, ruin your perfect math sheet, no questions asked. So while mechanically the game is screaming at you to play the math of it it sometimes throws you totally off with random shenanigans. Perhaps fully intended, because the situations depicted in the game are by nature supposed to be not totally controllable. They are meant to be desperate, and you are meant to make hard decisions and yes still fail in ways I guess.

Yet the gameplay just doesn't reflect that too well, at least not in my opinion. I was mostly engrossed by the story, by the characters, the dialogues, the music, and that could have worked alone well enough (although then the game should have been a bit longer I think). But if you are stuck in one level (room, patch of land) for what feels like hours assigning the same few tasks to people over and over and over and OVER again, looking at the same screen for hours over and over and OVER again, being past the novelty of the situation in like a minute or so, just trying to get the balance of stuff right enough so that you can survive and finally get on with things and see how the story continues, with everything boiling down to the pure math and calculative of it, then it can become a tedious struggle real soon.

And without going into details, some of the story feels "off". I'm not sure if I was just too dumb to notice, there were some strange things early on already, but at some point later stuff gets pretty weird and I'm not sure if that was intended from the start or if the developer suddenly decided to push things into a certain, different kind of direction. Let's just say that the game plays a bit with the idea of "choices matter" too, but... never really follows through with it. So, if that is where you are coming from, then get ready to get disappointed. (There even are shared statistics at the end of each level on how players fared and about some of the choices they made in relation to your own, like you may know from Telltale games or other "choices matter" titles.) The story overall still felt a bit more on the strong side, at least with the many characters in it and the dialogues and the music to supplement it all. The aesthetics are nothing to hide either. But, yeah, what the hell?

So, if you actually like to play a game that plays less like a game and more like a math puzzle and if you absolutely don't mind trial and error, then go ahead and indulge yourself. If you want to get a nice albeit short narrative/story experience that might even hold enough potential lore-wise for a continuation at some point in the future, then this could be for you too, but then I strongly suggest picking the "narrative" difficulty and hoping that you are still good enough to finish all the levels without too much frustration (a few of them were fairly tricky and not super easy even with that narrative mode selected).