Well I finally played couple of hours. First impressions as follows:
The Good:
+ lovely soundtrack
+ excellent art design
+ writing is usually sharp and often genuinely funny
+ unconventional setting and brilliant worldbuilding make you want to explore under every rock and talk to everyone
+ hobocop protagonist is surprisingly compelling
+ political themes are present, but they're handled tastefully with no blatant preaching
+ world seems huge
+ there are some technical hiccups, but overall the game is well polished
The Bad:
- There is no challenge whatsoever. None. You could train a monkey to explore the dialogue trees, click on hotspots and pass skill checks.
- Content for low INT builds is incredibly half-assed. My 1 INT cop somehow understands Latin, French and the voice in my head speaks like an academic.
So much for endless roleplay possibilities, lol. Similar to PST and Numanuma, talky builds are the way to go and everything else is pointless filler.
- I intensely dislike nearly all of the dialogue mechanics and the entire skill system. Skills are goofy and superfluous. Trivial conversations bloat into uninteresting walls of text because your penis is sending you his thoughts.
- Likewise, health/morale mechanic is just bad. I'm sure it was added because they realized game is too easy. But dying in wacky ways was only amusing in the tutorial area, after that it really gets old quickly. So you either keep your h/m topped up to remove any resemblance of difficulty or you enjoy such nonsense as your character kills himself because he couldn't push random door open and it made him sad.
Verdict so far: it's a better Numanuma. As in, content quality from writing to art to music is miles better than TTON, but otherwise it has exactly the same problems - poorly designed experimental mechanics that don't really come together and extremely dry one-dimensional gameplay.
DE does a lot of things really well and as a hobocop larp simulator it seems all right, but it's definitely not a game for everybody and not an RPG, because there is no G. Buyers beware, personally I'm underwhelmed.
i loved it!
