A typical game in this category starts off promisingly and then just keeps going downhill from there, leaving a bad taste in ones mouth. Disappointing.
It's hard to believe that a story so slow and grindy, supposedly has fifteen endings for you to hunt down. Despite many attempts over the course of ten weeks, I have yet to stomach this long enough to find even single one.
There is a lot of unnecessarily filler text that doesn't actually contribute to storytelling or immersion, but just drags things out and make them hard to digest. And the audio certainly doesn't help either - definitely turn that off despite the game's recommendation not to - which is a shame because the music isn't unpleasant, just distracting and detracting from the experience: the sum of the parts is less than either of the parts.
The milestones do not make you want to progress, on the contrary they get in the way every time by grinding your momentum to a halt without any pay-off. And the background story (i.e. recovered memories) is perhaps the worst offender: where I was initially mildly curious about my characters background, one memory of the two bozos from my past left me hoping I wouldn't remember anymore. If you're going to play this, please make sure you aren't doing so for the plot.
So, what's good about it? It is exceptionally pretty for a Twine game. A lot of care has gone into the UI and backgrounds images. And the concept, including the setting, the theme, even the synopsis, has potential. All in all, it sets up a good framework for a CYOA; however, all the stuffing, the story, the filling, the content, the fluff, the prose would have to be replaced by something strong enough to support that structure.
Never before have so many words been used to say so little! OK, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but Eye of the Moon is truly so verbose as to be kind of ridiculous, especially when the same things are expressed over and over again without anything new being added.
This problem is exasperated by the small cream lettering on a red background, the sparse and superficial choices, and the fact that images and button do not load in unless you allow 3rd-party image embedding.
But even without those considerations, it's too much. And worse still, since it is a work in progress, currently it's all for naught, everything builds up to nothing, there is no pay-off waiting at the end, not even a cliffhanger.
With the exception of the MC's parents, who are merely uninteresting, none of the (present) characters are likeable - not even Apolaki, with whose objective of taking Mayari down a few pegs, I sympathize.
Are there then no redeeming features? Well, sort of: It was intriguing to experience a neopagan reimagining of Philippine mythology that bears little or no resemblance to any of the myriad versions of the real thing.
Speaking of which, the claim that "The story is immersed in pre-colonial Filipino culture and history; it purposefully sheds Western concepts around gender, sexuality, and religion", is an outrageously blatant lie:
On the contrary, the story forces postmodern Western conceptions about gender, sexuality and religion onto a very superficial wire-frame that is only related to pre-colonial Philippine culture in the most tenuous and superficial way.
This may come as a shock, but there weren't any LGBTQ+ barangays, if Siamese kathoeys ever made their way to the pre-colonial Philippines, it never caught on, and polyamory was restricted to some maginoos' polygyny... lol
Hopefully, at some point in the future, it will be possible for the reader to side with the aswang against the diwata. Unfortunately, I don't have the requisite patience to either wait for that update nor to replay the game when, if ever, it drops.
Sharing a sexretary with your father... Supposedly, Ivan Grozny and Ivan Jr were into sharing women, but I can't say that it seems like something that would appeal to many...
Also, MFW my one-night-stand tricks me into getting a sex change ಠ_ಠ
Compared to Stay?, this is a much more on-rails experience, and the characters feel less genuine and sympathetic. There are no options to react in a natural way to the strange circumstances MC finds themselves in; and picking the least unnatural options available, leads to strange inconsistencies and non-sequiturs, as if the reader is expected to have made different prior choices. I wish I could give 2.5 stars, since 2 feels too low and 3 feels too high.
Putting the player into the shoes of Robert Francis Kennedy Jr, Dexter Scott King or Sean Ono Lennon with all the corresponding family relations and drama, is certainly a creative premise; perhaps even a bold one. But unfortunately, every time you try and play the part seriously, woke virtue signalling rears its ugly head to ham-fistedly punch you out of it:
The MC is required to be stupid or evil enough to fall for racism masquerading as civil rights, lgbtq+ masquerading as victims, animal abuse masquerading as animal shelters, child abuse masquerading adoption agencies and youth charities, etc.; but at the same time not too stupid or evil to have an internal monologue observing how wicked their family is.
Is MC supposed to have a split-personality disorder?
Every page, every section, almost every sentence is a non sequitur, making it very hard to follow. The writing is so disjointed that one has to wonder if it is produced by a generative pre-trained transformer.
But the store page is nothing like that, so I don't think it's a result of the writer not being a native speaker. Besides, that's hardly ever a problem with other games, and I can understand what the sentences are trying to say, it's just that they don't mean anything: they are just strings of words in more or less grammatically correct order. Nor do I think it is a deliberate device, because then it would be a transient thing, but it isn't, it just keeps going without ever resolving.
It's very queer, like looking at a painting through a kaleidoscope...
