Disagree with you
Rean. Player skill would still be reading the text, undestanding what it means, and acting accordingly. There is enough of that in the choices you are presented, sadly game is terrible on giving you information you are supposed to base your choice on. T
Having to strain my old eyes to read shit I didn't even found cool when I was 11 is not. Especially in a game where you have professions like "Programmer". If I had to read such crap irl I would make a script to fix it right away. The in-game explanation for why you can't use in-game skill, that the player has invested points in, is just a horribly written cop-out. This sequence feels like writers were so enamoured by their creation, that they really wanted the players experience it, in the one and proper way - their way.
The way this game presents information to you is my biggest gripe. The fabled deduction system is just box ticking, making sure you talk to as many people. It even summarizes the conversations into small tidbits, clues, so you don't have to think too much about what was said in any given conversation. It would be much better if you had the whole conversation log for each clue, so that you could get back to it at any time and make your own conclusions. Now that would be the good use of player skill, as it would allow you to actually play the detective. I'm still of opinion that relevant stats should provide additional hints as to resolution and understanding of the clues, so that stats matter. If stats don't matter, then you have an adventure game on your hand, not an RPG.
Small digression:
I generally don't like involving "player skill" too much. Imagine, on a systems with more traditional attributes you roll a char with low intelligence. In the game world you encounter, let's say a cypher. You, the player, being a person of reasonable intelligence, can decode it. However, the idiot you're suppsoed to Role Play at should not. So allowing player skill to override your character skills removes the meaning from the character system. And if it is ok to use player skill for intelligence, then why not for strenght or dexterity? (The simple answer here being is that computers lack periferals for easily performing test of those qualities).
I also don't see anything non-trivial in this game. It's usual min-maxing tripe, pick an approach and stick to it, to get to the highest tiers of your chosen tree. It's nice that puzzles have a lot of solutions, but lots of them seem not to make a difference. Here's an example: first investigation I incorrectly deduced to go to Paradise Beach, due to not stick to one direction of interrogating the whiny boy, so never learning the final secret. The moment I logged into PB, immediately I get info where the young miscreants actually went. As far as I can tell, that made zero impact on what happens in the world.
Anyway, just as the devs responded to my steam review, you of course have right to your opinion. If you like and enjoy this game, great. I consider it at best a mediocre game, plagued by techincal issues. At worst, I feel this is shite that will be sold for 5 quid come the next steam sale.
