Against my better judgment, I decided to give the demo another try.
Right of the bat, we get a taste of some of that brilliant subversion of player expectations that everyone keeps talking about. The two paths you see in the top left and right are actually blocked off by an invisible wall and instead the correct path is through a black section near the bottom right. I guess consistency in the relationship between art design and level design is too passe for indie hipster trash.
After encountering the flower, you spend a few minutes following a character through a linear corridor like in every shitty linear AAA game. Oh but it's ok here because the character quite literally holds your hand so it's just a self-aware jab at mainstream gaming. Seeing as the game is supposedly big on subversion, why not subvert something that should actually be subverted? Maybe the goal here was to subvert my expectation for the game to subvert something that should be subverted.
Pretty much all throughout the demo, the level design involves just following a linear corrider until you reach the exit with repetitive combat encounters along the way. Occassionally, you'll drop down an invisible pit, at which point you just take an exit to the previous room, this time trying to cross the room while avoiding the pit. So whenever the game attempts to do something to spice up its boring level design, it fails miserably.
There are combat encounters against the same few enemies every 10 seconds (no exaggeration). Each combat encounter lasts about 30 seconds, and involves the exact same set of actions (click fight/act option for genocide/pacifist run respectively, followed by one round of bullet hell minigame, followed by clicking on mercy option for pacifist playthrough). The demo was a repetitive chore to play through, which is inexcusable for a game that supposedly only takes about 5 hours to finish.
As for that "expert characterization and storytelling" through bullet hell combat, this is what it basically amounts to: Dodging flies when fighting frog monsters, tears when fighting sad ghosts, vegetables when fighting vegetable monsters. The bullet hell patterns are different but considering that each round lasts about 3 seconds, it feels pretty inconsequential one way or another. I don't know why the combat encounter rate wasn't drastically reduced while making each round of bullet hell last longer so you actually need to master each pattern. As it stands, as long as you put yourself in a decent position at the start, you're pretty much set because of how brief each round is. If it lasted longer, constantly scrambling to reposition would make for a slightly more tense and fun experience. I mean it would still be a terrible bullet hell game, but anything is better what's there now.
The combat interface is horrible. There's no reason why all the options shouldn't be available in a single screen instead of hidden behind 4 different sub menus. Older games and handheld games did this because they were restricted by resolution/screen size. What kind of braindead idiot thinks this is actually good design that should be implemented when there's no need for it? Also, it does the whole JRPG thing of each dialog prompt containing like five words with slow text crawl, so you constantly have to keep spamming the Z and X keys, one to go to the next dialog and the other to skip the text crawl.
As for the characters and writing, it turns out that our initial impressions that they come across as a teenage girl's attempts at being quirky/random was pretty much completely accurate. There's the evil flower, a motherly goat, a sad ghost, a talking rock with who refuses to be pushed onto a floor plate like the other rocks, a "spider bake sale" which amounts to a couple of cobwebs you can interact with to buy an item. Truth be told, I think if some of these character concepts were handed to a better writer and if there was more interaction with these characters, they might even be able to come up with something funny and charming. As it stands, the concept is all there is. Take the ghost for example, you come across it pretending to sleep, you initiate combat, you press the "cheer up" action a few times (for pacifist run), it puts on a top hat and calls you nice, and that's it. Don't expect any amusing Monty Python-esque exchanges. At best, the writing is innocuous. At worst, it'll make you roll your eyes. If you're expecting something charming and endearing like in the old Lucasarts adventure games, you won't find it here.
So there, I tried it and it's shit. Considering that several people have been praising the game for how consistent the game is, it's probably fair to assume that the whole game is just as bad. Also, fuck off with that "oh I guess you're just not a fan of these types of games" excuse. Shit design is shit. I don't see anyone here making those concessions for Bethesda & Bioware games (nor should they), which are enjoyed by a much larger population.
