Análises recentes de Serotoninphobe

As it stands now, Sethian is more or less a proof of concept, albeit an extraordinary one, but still, it's a proof of concept that left so much to be desired.

Looking forward to an extended project based on this promising concept.

• Meet historical figures such as George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte.
  
• Interesting puzzles based on mythology, religion and art history.
  
• Political debate
  
• Illuminati-esque secret society
  
• Multiple galleries of medieval and renaissance art for you to roam about.
  
• French revolution and the Catholic Church.
  
• Your choices do, somehow, matter.

• Bad guys were actually parasitized by DEMONIC SPIRITS! (no metaphor intended）
  
• Demonic spirits had been secretly manipulating humanity since the dawn of civilization.
  
• “I am your father.”
  
• Bad guy seeking world domination, by preaching democracy, in order to lead humanity into a brighter future. Other demons think monarchy is better, and thus caused...
  
• ...Domestic rivalry within demon family.
  
• The Lance of Longinus
  
• “I am your father, too.”
  
• Mind control superpower! And telepathy battle!
  
• “Yeah, you two, don’t look around, I am also your father.”
  
• The big bad guy behind all this, the father of all fathers, is also known as, Jesus.

It’s almost as if the initial screenwriter took a sick leave halfway through the development, so the dev team had to hire his 12-year-old Twilight-loving son to finish the writing. Because why not?

• “So bad it’s good” level of facial animation and lip sync.

Pipe Push Paradise is hands down one of the best, if not the best logical puzzler you can ask for in this post-sausage era.

I expressed the dreadful feelings in my review of Stephen’s Sausage Roll that its otherworldly transcendence has made me to believe that no one may ever outdo it in a foreseeable future, or rather, no more Sokoban-esque games are worth existing in the post-sausage era. For a puzzle fanatic whose life essence was obtained exclusively through the process of puzzle solving, such future is unquestionably frustrating, depressing and somewhat hopeless.

Luckily, it appears that the celestial being never shuts one door without opening another. It didn’t take long for Pipe Push Paradise to materialize just in time to relieve me from such existential crisis. It did not surpass nor equal the sausage, however, not by any means, but for the time being, it at least proved that the future of logical puzzler is still worth looking forward to.

To whom it may concern, you have my heartfelt gratitude.

I received this game as a gift from an old buddy.

Receiving gift is an important social skill, normally, no matter how bad the gift is or how much you dislike it, you would at least pretend to enjoy it and express your appreciation to the giver by complimenting their thoughtfulness and the quality of the gift. It's basic social etiquette, a survival skill that all grown-ups should have mastered.

But not this time. I'll spare you all the details and just say this: Even by Warhammer 40K standards - a franchise currently filled with trashy cash grabs - this game is still rottenly bad like a Nurgle abomination. It's so bad to a point that I had to ask the aforementioned friend to refund it.

Breaking social etiquette and being an impolite bad guy somehow relieved me from greater guilt in this case.

Kingsway is a good demonstration of the importance of packaging.

Interesting, I believe that’s what most people would think of it at first glance, as did I. And I can firmly confirm that it’s unique type of interaction along with the retro interface thingy truly is interesting and fun - while it lasts. The sad news is, the fun doesn’t last over an hour, or two hours max. Once you get acquainted with it, you’ll soon realize that under its ostentatious packaging, the core of Kingsway is just a very basic, subpar old school RPG w/ superficial rogue-lite elements, while also suffering severely from the lack of variety, top-heavy difficulty curve and oversimplified randomization algorithm. And ultimately, the icing on the cake – it has those “Unfinished / Early Access” brands all over it.

(if you’re in seek of direct answer, jump to the last paragraph)

Like I said, in spite of its seemingly innovative look, Kingsway, at its root, is just a conventional RPG, so it ought to be judged as per RPG’s standard. Let’s start with Kingsway’s enemy design, which would be a good entry point into the discussion of its lack of variety. All the adversaries Kingsway offered can essentially be divided into three groups: 1)Bosses, 2)mobs that occasionally shoot projectiles and 3)mobs that don’t. While all the bosses are properly designed and customized, we’ll just leave it there. As for the rest two types, well, they are basically the same, both of whom attack with identical speed and deal identical damage, except the latter one was deprived of the projectile-shooting (sometimes spell-casting) ability. Here is the problem: the projectile the former one shoot is able to be countered through a QTE (sort of) which is extremely easy and I believe no one could fail it (at least I haven’t in my 6 hours of playtime, not even once!), unless you’re from an alternate timeline wherein mouse was never invented. Therefore, the projectile feature serves more as a free turn for you, rather than an actual threat. As a result, the diversity of enemies has been further narrowed into: mobs that occasionally give you free turns and mobs that don’t. Thus, despite all the different names and portraits out there, all the non-boss enemies in Kingsway are per se the reskinning of these two basic types. Furthermore, they all got indistinguishable attributes that scale while you level up, so you won’t feel any sense of progression either. This pretty much represented the rest of the game in regard of variety: NPC encounter? Quite frequently but no more than four varieties in total, mostly just that you encountered a (group of) stranger that was 1)in need of health potion, 2)under enemy attack or 3)looks suspicious from afar. After the encounter was resolved, you’ll be given the option to acquire either a rumor or suggestion, each of which has no more than 5 instances … You should get the idea by now.

The lack of variety in Kingsway’s enemy design could have been avoided if the dev had at least provided some backstory to personalize them. And yes, they tried, there is this bestiary thing that keeps track of all the enemies you have encountered, including names, appearances and some flavor text, only in a completely lackluster way: Enemies of the same category share the same freaking description, be it a Skeleton Mage or a Skeleton Brute, a Priest or a High Priest, they all share the same description… Well, you might roll your eyes and think I’m nitpicking at this point since who on earth gives a damn about those worthless skeletons? Now behold the punchline. When I’ve finally encountered a more interesting type of enemy, and decided to look up the bestiary to find out the role it served in the whole schemes, here is what I got:


Wat!?

Mind you, plenty of enemies were described this way… And some of the most intriguing figures who also played crucial roles in its plot, only got a singular freaking “-“ as their flavor text. Yes, no one cares about backstory in this kind of games, but since the dev decided to keep this bestiary feature, left it like this? I don’t know if it was due to the incompetence or unwillingness of the dev to write proper stuff, to me, it’s just like a big middle finger: “Huh, you wanna some flavor text? Here you go, in your face!”

As for the rest sins of Kingsway, such as the top-heavy difficulty curve and the oversimplified randomization algorithm etc., all of which are not uncommon in this genre of games, and are feasible to fix provided the dev ever cared to. That’s why I mentioned that it felt so “early access” in the first place.

Be that as it may, I’m positive that most people took interest in Kingsway not because of its RPG gaming, but rather the innovative mechanism. So now is the time to move on to the elephant in the room: is Kingsway truly that “innovative”? Frankly, I applaud all attempts to reform the human-machine interaction, be it successful or failed. But can Kingsway truly be considered as such? Taking cooking as an example, the most primary method is, of course, using fire. As technology improved, convection oven and microwave oven were invented, both of which offered different approaches to achieve the same goal, efficiently and effectively. Therefore, we may say that convection oven is an innovation, microwave oven is an innovation. But rigging a gimmicky contraption ATOP of some already-existing developed inventions to complicate the accessibility? Like reinventing a microwave oven that requires the user to solve a Sokoban before setting the timer? Well, it’s something new, while it’s also the lamest approach towards innovation … And unfortunately, in my opinion, Kingsway is just like that gimmicky microwave oven.

This is quite a difficult review to write, as by every conventional criterion, Cradle is unquestionably a poorly designed game. It is against almost all proven principles of video game design, not because they were trying to be “experimental” to push the boundary of video games further, nor because they intended to rebel against all commandments to feel cool about themselves. It’s more likely that the devs have no idea how video games work, as if they have never played a video game before, only have had the concept of adventure games thoroughly explained to them.

Gameplay-wise, Cradle is just way too incomprehensible and counterintuitive as a story-driven adventure game, even an experienced gamer of this genre like myself can hardly make any progress without looking up a walkthrough. It’s full of odd design choices that no sane developer would ever choose. The story it delivers isn’t any good either, it doesn’t even have an ending (not a cliffhanger or TBC kind of things, it just… ends, in the middle of nowhere). But ironically, the reason to all these confusions is also the reason why it fascinated me this much that despite all its conspicuous flaws, I am still giving it a thumbs-up.

Cradle is a game that doesn’t feel like being artificially “designed”, and moreover, it’s a game in which you can barely feel the presence of the developers behind it. (This impression has been further strengthened by its credits, which is simply just a list of names, without mentioning who did what at all.) By saying “presence”, I don’t mean to imply that Cradle lacks of personality and artistic touch, no, Cradle is actually brimming with such things. What I mean by the word, is the “string” controlled by game developers, under which you, the player, are hung like a puppet.

Video games are increasingly manipulative these days, because game developers like to play the omnipresent God in their own creations. It is understandable, since it is the common dream of all creators of all art forms. But considering the fact that video games are so far probably the most interactive medium of art, which makes it more like a two-way conversation, then its manipulative nature become something that’s hard to ignore. All your involvement in video games (especially in story-driven games) are indirectly controlled or influenced by the omnipotent and omnipresent God AKA the developer, when should you cry, when should you get stuck, when should you take a pause, when should you feel like a pro, when should you need a hint, when should you pay for microtransactions et cetera, et cetera. Yes, almost all your interactions within a game are “designed” and expected. Nothing magic, just an aggregation of countless playtesting and user research sessions. It’s okay, and it won’t make video games less fun, it’s just that in some cold, lonely nights, you just can’t stop wondering: “what’s the point of playing video games?” Once you start to look at it this way, it’s hard not to relate oneself to a guinea pig, that being observed and manipulated by a bunch of puppeteers in lab coat through a one-way mirror.

Somehow Cradle is different, if we keep using the God metaphor, the developers behind it are more the reclusive kind of God, who prefers to leave his world after created it. However, it doesn’t mean that he isn’t a responsible God, on the contrary, he put a ridiculous amount of effort into fabricating every nook and cranny of the world: all these minor details that most players would simply ignore, all these unrelated places that no one would ever consider going to. For instance, almost every environmental prop that would normally appear as background texture in other games, is fully textualized in Cradle. Wastepaper that randomly scattered over the floor, posters and newspapers that were used as wall patch, even decorative stickers and stamps, all of such things were made as clickable documents in Cradle … Yes, they are all useless details, but isn’t the very foundation of the world we’re living in consisted of such useless details as well?

What truly confirmed the impression of the absence of the reclusive God was that unlike regular games in which all things were designed in a constitutive manner (like which direction should a spotlight point to show you the right way, how key item should be highlighted through the composition of its surrounding objects, where and how frequently should a spark flicker to seize your attention), everything in Cradle existed so naturally, just like how things should be in a self-consistent world. They just, “be there”, as though how things should have always been, instead of being purposely put there by a force of divine origin.

Furthermore, the world of Cradle is not only self-consistent but also self-interpreting. Every aspect of it makes perfect sense in its own context, from the beautifulness of its overall art design to the stupidity of its minigame sections, albeit some of which may seem inappropriate on their own, it is just impossible to untangle and find better solutions for them, because all the aspects of Cradle were connected so tightly and systematically with each other, and were properly supported and explained by the narrative. Thus, despite the rather unusual setting they chose: “a neo-Buddhist Mongolian protagonist in a post-apocalyptic transhuman society that values beautifulness over everything.” (Yeah, I know it’s kinda overwhelming), through all the practices I mentioned above, they successfully managed to make it convincing and intriguing.

There is no telling that the end result was whether due to their incompetence or a deliberate design choice, either way, the result stayed the same. That Cradle is not a properly designed game no doubt, yet the world it created - a world that I can spend hours within just aimlessly walking around and looking at things, is certainly among the most believable and immersive ones I have seen. I enjoyed my every second within it.

You can never go wrong making a Lovecraft-themed game, right? It has one of the most dedicated fanbase and pretty much everybody likes it, if not loves it. So here comes the Conarium, admittedly, it did a great job appealing to those die-hard Lovecraft fans, but saying so is not really a compliment, ‘cos you know, devoted fans are easily turned on even by the slightest reference to the original, which is exactly what Conarium was focusing on: being “seemingly” faithful to the original. But other than that, for audience not that “dedicated” to it, Conarium is a disappointing overreach.

It doesn’t take long for one to realize that Conarium is a low-budget project, from the size of the developing team to the lack of details and the repetitiveness of filler props, it is written everywhere. That said, does it really require a great deal of budget to make a decent Lovecraft-themed game? Not necessarily. The Last Door (The Game Kitchen, 2014) served a great example, by choosing a rather budget-saving art style, they successfully avoided the budget issue and fabricated a convincing world through the maximum utilization of limited resources. However, it is a completely different story in Conarium’s case, in which the budget thing did become a critical issue ever since the devs decided to do it in a photorealistic 3d way.

Environmental storytelling is commonly used in story-driven games these days, and I fairly believe that Lovecraftian horror makes a perfect testing field for environmental storytelling, since its unique type of cosmic horror is best shown instead of told. Unfortunately, Conarium missed the mark severely. Due to the aforementioned budget issue, it seems that they were in great shortage of environmental props, hence they just had to keep reusing those finite resources over and over to fill up all the space, which leads to the fact that most scenes in Conarium seem extremely repetitive and undistinguished, almost feel like unfinished.

Taking the crew quarters of the research facility as an example, although all personals were missing at the time the story took place, a good environmental design could still provide you enough cues to deduce what kind of person used to live there and what was going on before their vanishing. But in Conarium’s case, all the crew cabins look identically tidy and empty with exactly the same room layout, you can hardly feel any human presence in them, nor the absence of human. They are just like some brand-new prefabricated cabins on a trade fair ready to be sold. In my opinion, the charm of Lovecraftian horror resides in haunting details, although Conarium did a great modelling job on all the “Lovecraft-themed major attractions”, you’ll soon realize that there are no details to haunt you with at all if you ever move your eyes away from those “main attractions”, let alone environmental storytelling.

Scattered documents and audio-logs is another crucial element in story-driven video games, which fill up holes between story segments, as well as providing backstory info et cetera. It’s certainly not the most elegant method, even cumbersome at times, but it is proven to be effective and budget-saving. So of course it played its part in Conarium, only did it totally wrong. A good use of such feature, requires a lot of effort to be put into the content, the positioning, and the timing of each document. Good examples can be seen at Bioshock franchise and Alan Wake. Back to Conarium, there are 25 documents plus about 10 audio-logs in the whole playthrough, the problem is, all of them are per se rephrasing the same thing:
“Expedition went wrong! Scientists went crazy! I regret it but there’s nothing we can do to undo it! We are doomed!”
Yet it rarely mentioned any cause to all these chaos, so what’s the point of repeating it so many times without revealing any tangible information?

Without the documents giving me any meaningful revelation at all, the storyline itself is also quite static in its presentation, so narrative-wise, the combined result is a complete absence of progression. You just keep marching through indistinguishable corridors, or caverns, or hallucinations or whatever to the next hotspot to trigger another scripted cutscene with lackluster animation and voice acting in order to push the progress of the game forward. But it barely made any observable progress on the narrative, you start confused and you end equally confused. Well, one might argue that isn’t this the very nature of all Lovecraftian horror? Yes, it is correct, but a proper Lovecraftian story could at least provide you enough details to complete your own headcanon. But details, is another thing Conarium is greatly short of. This pretty much nailed the last nail on its coffin.


Now imagining a once Alien or spelunking theme park has recently been renovated into a Lovecraft theme park. All the owner did was toss away some unusable old stuff, get the remaining props rearranged, put in a bunch of Lovecraft-themed sculptures along with some fake decorative books with titles from the classical Lovecraft book list, then officially declare it as a “Lovecraft Theme Park”. The experience of playing Conarium, is basically like a guided tour within such theme park.

I will only recommend this game to a very specific group of people who:

• Desperately want to have their time wasted and have no problem dealing with the morning-after regret.
  
• Have an inhuman level of tolerance for verbose and childish writing.
  
• Believe in pseudoscience and don’t even bother looking up the validity of it.
  
• Are gullible and believe whatever bull**** people throw at you.
  
• Can turn a blind eye to any ridiculous plot hole and deus ex machina scenario as long as the story moves forward.
  
• Don’t mind their elaborative faculty being questioned and taunted by the devs again and again.

If you find yourself fit in at least four(4) of the categories above, go give it a try, you may have an incredibly fun time with this game. Otherwise you may just end up like me, tortured by regret and fury for all the wasted time and anticipation.

I know, Japanese visual novels (also Japanese literature in general) are well known for verbose writing, I had this in mind before stepping into this game. However, its excessive verboseness still overwhelmed me somehow. You might think I am exaggerating and overacting at this point, so, to sufficiently prove my points, I am going to give a demonstration of two techniques used in this game, two techniques that stretched this game from a story that could have been properly told in 5 hours into an endless marathon.



I don’t know if this game was made for kids or not, but considering it is rated M in many countries, my suspicion might be incorrect. Anyway, the devs seemed to have highly underestimated the elaborative faculty of the players to an almost offensive degree.

As if describing a fact or ratiocination that sticks out a mile by the narrator wasn’t enough, they just have to recapitulate the same thing (indeed, the exactly same thing, no Rashomon effect involved) through the mouth of every character available at the scene again and again, and eventually, to have the protagonist to sum it up one extra time…

Here is an example:
(Note that it’s not an excerpt of any actual in-game scene, but a simplified demonstration of how this “technique” works, as is the example in the next part)

Originalmente postado por Example 1:

You rushed to the door only to found its handle missing.
Where the handle was supposed to be, left only an empty socket behind.
You tried to force it open *BAM* *BAM* of no avail.
People gathered around to investigate it. (“narrator describes the situation” Check ✓)

Character 1: “What are you doing? Let’s open this door and proceed!”
You: “I just arrived and found its handle missing.”
Character 2: “A door can only be opened by rotating its handle, I guess we cannot open the door then.”
Character 3: ”Let me handle this, I’m full of muscle! *BANG* *BANG*”
You: “I tried, it didn’t even budge.”
Character 5: “Let me give you a hand!”
Character 3: “Rawr… Doesn’t work!”
Character 6: “We can’t open the door normally, nor force it open. I figure this door is off-limits to us.”
Character 2: “That’s what I’m thinking, we cannot open this door at this moment.”
Character 4: “Then we are trapped! This is the only door we haven’t entered!”
You: “Maybe there is some other ways to open a door?”
Character 6: “Like teleporting through?”
Character 4: “How is that possible!?”
Character 2: “How about lockpicking?”
Character 1: “Without a handle, there isn’t any lock to lockpick I’m afraid.”
Character 4: “So we are trapped! We are going to starve to death!”
You: “Is it possible to find some explosives to breach it?”
Character 2: “Whew! Yes, we can plant some explosives to breach it through. Why haven’t I figured that out.”
Character 6: “Indeed, it’s a tough door no doubt, but I don’t think it can stand against explosion.”
Character 3: “Good idea! I know I can count on you.”
You: “Is that truly the only way?”
Character 1: “Or we can find the missing handle to fix the door, and open it the way a normal door would.”
Character 5: “Exactly what I was thinking. We can also try finding the missing handle.”
Character 4: “Does that mean we don’t have to die here if we can find the missing handle or get some explosives to breach it?” (“every character recaps the same thing at least once” Check ✓)
You: “So our current objective is clear, we either find the missing handle of the door, or get our hands on some explosives to breach it open. Everybody clear?” (“protagonist sums it up one extra time” Check ✓)

Did you get how painfully annoying it is?
Also note that since every line is accompanied by voice over and character animation, any simple scenario like this one could easily last ages.



As you might have already known, the game is consisted of two parts. One is the “
Visual Novel” part, in which you simply read the story, and sometimes make decisions to push the story forward. The other one is the “Room Escape” part, which plays just like any other room escape game, except for the puzzles being mind-numbingly easy and straightforward.

What truly bothers me is that every character keeps saying sh*t that are either too intelligent and informative, or embarrassingly flirty (both from male and female), which is totally out the realm of their character personas and the overall atmosphere. There is one scene where they were just screaming and vomiting after the discovery of a bloody dismembered body, the next minute, they started flirting and recollecting childhood memories right beside the corpse!?

And that isn’t even the worst part, the worst part is that every character keeps commentating before/during/after your every single action! It might be hard to understand how, so here comes the demonstration.

Imagining yourself entering a room with two other characters, the room is completely empty except for a tea table in the center and a key atop it. The exit is on the opposite of the room, locked. The solution here is quite self-evident, you grab the key, unlock the door and get out, not much to talk about really. However, such simple scenario would evolve like this in this game:

Originalmente postado por Example 2:

(Just when you enter the room, game freezes.)
Character 2: “Oh, this room is so empty, can we just chill out here for a while and take a break?”
You: “Time is running out, I’m afraid we can’t afford the luxury.”
Character 1: “Yeah, let’s find out the solution to this room.”
Character 2: “You men are always this rushy.”


(Game resumes control, you start to explore the room)


(Just before you are about to grab the key)
Character 2: “Look! There is a key on the table.”
Character 1: “Yeah, I saw that too, I wonder what it opens.”
You: “Let’s take a closer look.”

(Right after you pick up the key)
Character 1: “Hey, what’s that you’re holding? A key?”
You: “Yes, I just found it lying on the table.”
Character 2: “Oh, it looks so stiff and hard.”
You: “Wait, can you say that again?”
Character 2: “Say what again?”
You: “The one you used to describe the key.”
Character 2: “Oh that’s awkward, please forget about it!”
(“ridiculously unnecessary flirting” Check ✓)

(While you attempt to further search the room)
Character 1: “Since there are only two doors in this room, one is the one we just entered, the other one must be the exit, why don’t we check it out.”
Character 2: “It looks locked though, but maybe you can unlock it with the key you just found?”
You: “Only one way to find out.”

(When you approach the door.)
Character 1: “Oh, this door is so strongly fortified, there’s no way we can force it open, got to use a key.”

(After you insert the key and open the door.)
Character 1: “Man, you are such a talented door-opener, I love the way you insert the key into the lockhole, how fierce.”
Character 2: “You guys are disgusting!”
(“ridiculously unnecessary flirting again, seriously?” Check ✓)
You: “Just shut up and let’s get out of here.”

Are you feeling it now?

Ticket was by nature like a talented student who could easily score an A in any exam. However, he is also a rebel boy who hates the system like poison.

“Fʌk the system! Don’t you ever try to standardize me!” He thought.
Getting an A was nothing short of associating himself with the system, that ain't never gonna happen. Hence he decided to get an F - which would probably be enough to declare a clean break with the system.

In order to guarantee an F, he passionately dropped all sort of doodles and swears onto the paper.

Strangely enough, in the end, he still got a solid B somehow.

Would he feel contented or frustrated about it? I simply don’t know.

The store description says it was “inspired by Gone Home and Dear Esther”, which sounds like a promising start. Unfortunately, Scanner Sombre captured neither the immersive storytelling of Gone Home nor the contextual depth of Dear Esther. The end result was a total mishmash: trying to grasp many of the proven and popular elements, yet failed in its every attempt.

I suppose most people get attracted to Scanner Sombre for its unique visual mechanics, so did I. However, Scanner Sombre is a game best enjoyed through screenshots and videos. If you want to keep your good impression of it, watch the trailer over and over instead of actually playing it, since the trailer accurately captured 90% of its highlights while leaving all the disappointments out.

Again, as the store description says, Scanner Sombre is supposed to be a “cave exploration experience”. This statement seemed true for the first ten minutes (which I really liked it), until the so-called horror elements started to pour in. Calling them horror elements might be misleading, unless you find rainbow-colored t-pose figure horrifying. Even the protagonist himself doesn’t react to those anomalies at all, except some emotionless soliloquies popping up on the screen in pure text. Anyway, all the horror elements were just so crudely implemented, as if some last-minute resort to appeal to the younger audience. They were randomly stuffed into the levels with barely any backstory or explanation, needless to say, the result is “odd” at its best, and fairly goofy at its worst.

Scanner Sombre is also a game filled with mysterious logics:

• Why all the scattered equipment and switches, the handheld scanner, and the phosphorescent cave walls are visible in visible-spectrum (rendered normally, even being illuminated with point lights), while everything else need to be scanned to visualize the geometry?
  
• Why would the simulative color dots dissolve in water?
  
• Why would the simulative color dots fall from phosphorescent surfaces like pulled by gravity?
  
• The strangest one of them all, how could the simulative color dots reflect on the surface of water body?

It might seem I am nitpicking, but the fact is all those unscientific logics combined only make the scanner device more like a paintball minigun rather than a proper caving equipment, which has further attenuated the intended “cave exploration experience”.

Oh, and I just couldn’t stop myself from mentioning the profanely artificial twist at the end, it’s so bad that I feel no shame in spoiling it. No story building, no foreshadowing, no nothing, just “BAM!” right in your face. No doubt it is just another last-minute resort, how desperate could they have been to have come up with something like this in hope to make the game “story-rich”?

In the end, I just can’t make myself believe that this was from the same talented team who made Darwinia series and Prison Architect. It could have been fun as a 10-minute gamejam project or tech demo (which it originally was, as mentioned in-game), but stretching it into a 2-hour full game is nothing but disappointment.

Nevertheless, any creator should be encouraged to step out their comfort zones for better or worse, better luck next time, Introversion Software.