Recent reviews by Asharas

I want to love this game but the tutorial doesn't even work and the cashier is broken..

TLDR; Should've been an early access

I'm very mixed about this game:
On one hand I really like it and it's pretty satisfying, especially once you have 3 currencies and the XXL Sorter.

On the other hand, once you have that XXL Sorter there's pretty much nothing else to unlock, only story progression.

I have about 28 hours in-game, about 15 of those trying to unlock myself after destroying a bunch of bills with a specific mark I was supposed to use in a story quest. In the Steam discussions many people say that the mark type doesn't matter and the game will accept any marked bill for the quest. A dev even says that marked bills can be found in other missions.

Just to give you perspective, you don't need 10 or 100 marked bills, you need 500 and, unlike counterfeit bills there's no sorter to automatically pick them appart, you have to use the bench with the UV light, which is too weak to highlight the red markings in daylight, so you have to skip time to night as soon as the sun rises.

So here I am, painstakingly picking FIVE FREAKING HUNDRED marked bills among tens of thousands bills during about 15 hours. I eventually manage to get 500, I put them together and send them on the conveyer and.... 71 of them accepted in mission completion.

My next actions where to Alt+F4 and uninstall the game.

So for me it'll be a negative review because, as a player, I feel disrespected by those devs:
In post release publications they said, among other things, that they've "started putting together a roadmap", added a feedback button and are taking suggestions from players..

For f*cks sake, these are things you do during an EARLY ACCESS , not AFTER 1.0 RELEASE!!!!
And I'm not even mentionning the rest, like the easiest glitch in the world allowing you to hold any amount of bills in your hands (making a bunch of other objects absolutely useless) or some arguably bad UX choices.
I'm confident in saying this game wasn't playtested.

I love the concept, the art and music, but in my opnion there's a fundamental gameplay issue with controls.
Rather than having key bindings to activate then insert punch cards the game has you navigate the robot's controls up/down and left/right and use space to act on the button or use keyboard and mouse. You have to do this while you keep an eye on the fight to dash right or left, change offensive/balanced/defensive modes, and other tasks. Some of those actions have to happen on the beat, others don't so it makes it a bit confusing. You end up watching your UI more that robots fighting.
Also the robot crafting mini game doesn't seem playable on keyboard.

A bit disappointed by this quite major issue because the game has a vibe that I absolutely love and good gameplay ideas.

Best pharmacist simulator out there!

Gosh darn good game!

Nice push button sim, the Power Generation DLC brings gameplay progression with a load for the steam machine

Overall not really "bad" but clearly infuriating, I ended up dropping the game at the beginning of the last chapter, more on that later.

Could've been a great point and click but some of the puzzles are badly designed:

- A puzzle asks you to talk like a cool kid in the late 80's, but if like me you decided to play the game in another language than the one you grew up with, or if you weren't born at that time, there's a good chance you're going to try a few times before getting it right.

- Another one is a quiz on US presidency, basically the same observation as before, unless you're american you're gonna have to rely on your good ol' search engine

- Spoiler: At some point you have to find a book to talk to the dead, there's an Occult Book Store with gigantic shelves and a ladder you can move. The shopkeeper tells you not to touch the books unless you know what you want, so you'd expect to need to find the name of the book and find it in the shelves, but no, you just have to climb the whole ladder and the book is glowing on the top of the shelf, and contrary to all other books this one you can "Look at", the shopkeeper will tell you what it is and that you can take it for free

- Finally the last drop for me was the hint being in the Kickstarter, this kind of puzzle sucked back in the 90's when I had to find my PSX MGS box to find Meryl's codec frequency, it still sucks now.

Another review I wish could be neutral, but since I'm gonna go for a refund I guess it's negative.

The idea is great, the execution not so much:
for example the alarm module is a pain, didn't need to be THAT loud, the platform minigame require precise jump and trajectory but the controls are as sharp as a butterknife, etc..

My brain hurts but the satisfaction of untangling the available information and discovering a well written plot is unbeatable.

♥♥♥♥ this game, ♥♥♥♥ this company.