This sucked. I’d heard of it around for years now as an indie gem and I couldn’t be more disappointed. Firstly, Niko. His character is liking you, liking pancakes, and missing home. Nobody in this game really talks much, including him. There was never a reason to really care about Niko nor any bonding with Niko. The relationship between the player and the character, despite this game attempting to make it’s metaness the core of it, is very weak. Occasionally it will let you say some very short things to Niko, some minor back and forth, and that’s all you get. Speaking of the metaness - I was really expecting things to ramp up as the game progressed. The most this game does is change your desktop like twice and give you some windows prompts to click. You also get to look at a file on your computer like, twice. I was thinking, oh, this is a meta game! Maybe it’ll open other windows at times, make me engage with Windows controls and the file system in a more intricate way, and so on. Nope. I’m pretty sure even I can code a program that just opens a Windows prompt. What the hell am I supposed to get out of that as a player? Everyone says that you have to play this in windowed mode - which, by the way, is too small on 1440p so you have to change your monitor to 1080p - because of the awesome stuff this game does with Windows. I got eye strain for that? It did some things outside of the game itself solely for the sake of it rather than for anything in particular with itself. I got eye strain from this for no good reason. I found the puzzles to get more frustrating as the game went on - I never had much trouble in the first two areas but later on I was quite lost for a while until I found the camera place. Then I had no idea had to do that, couldn’t find any hints (apparently you need to talk to street vendors more?) so I just started to brute force every permutation until I finally got it. The door puzzle was the most infuriating for me - I didn’t figure out lining up the clover was the thing you were supposed to do until I got to walking on the tiles. I kept looking at the holes of the paper or the bits sticking out, trying to rotate them in my head to fit the doors, but I couldn’t work it out and had to restart that puzzle a multitude of times. My time was wasted. I don’t know if that’s an oversight on my end or if it’s truly poor design, to be fair. If I knew how to do it from the start, I could’ve blasted through all the doors. However, I still find the walking on the tiles bit pretty unnecessary and a “puzzle” thrown in for puzzles sake - they just needed to give something for the player to interact with again to keep their attention. There was another point, I think before the doors, where you end up in this black void and you’re stepping in water. The solution is to keep walking and you’ll eventually find something but there’s no real hint to do that. I closed and opened the game a few times, minimized the game, threw the game window around hoping something would happen as well as walked around a bunch to no avail. After an enthralling ~5 minutes of just holding the shift key and an arrow key, I finally landed at the object. I think I gave the game more credit than it deserved. I ended up with the “save the world” ending. I thought that Niko would not be happy condemning the world to death - even if the alternative is only a delay, so I made my choice in his spirit. I was stunned to learn the common interpretation is that he dies in the tower from lack of food and water. That never crossed my mind. I figured there would be some way out. The ending sequence was just following pieces of paper until the tower, Niko I guess dying of starvation and a few people seeing the sun. It’s comical. There were a few cool characters you meet in your journey but you barely get to actually talk to any of them. There would be a lot more depth if there were more meaningful interactions with the inhabitants of the world. Their character portraits typically had quite nice character designs too. The red hair girl from the start, the elevator door guy, the plant girl, the two girls from the flowery bit. These things that could give meaning to the experience are largely side notes. The regions of the game are, alright. I liked the Glen, I believe it was called, the grassy region. The red city was a harsh and hostile atmosphere, one that stuck out as an odd tonal shift from the prior two locations. The music was sometimes cute but largely unremarkable.
Overall, this… sucked. I wasted my time playing this. Time and time again, there is one lesson I learn from these types of games: Femboys need to get better taste.
2/5 stars.