'For the Love of Robots' is a straight up puzzle/brain-teaser game. Though, the story around the puzzle game is quite a fascinating practice in world building. It's well thought out and really out of the ordinary in terms of it being "furry visual novel adjacent" (think if it were planet of the apes met the matrix met fallout). The art is really great, the characters are likable, and there's even some fun bonus content where you get a classic visual novel staple of "beat the games, strip the character". That being said, temper your expectations of reading an expansive narrative, the story feels somewhat secondary to showing off how many cool minigames can be programmed into Ren'py. FdRstar once again showing everyone up by pushing the Ren'py engine to it's limits on what kinds of games and puzzles can be coded into the script. The selection of mini-games range from simple captcha's, hangman, a word puzzle, chess puzzles, and a 'calculate the number of points in a mahjong hand' puzzle (which, if you've never played mahjong, good luck). Is it worth it to beat all the challenges to get all the bonus content? Not really, I imagine folks will either go through the files to find the answers to avoid a few hours of tedium. Does the story have a satisfying ending or some greater theme? Also, not really. But, it's a great showcase of amazing art and coding, and I can appreciate it on those terms.
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Thanks for playing! The minigames really don’t “push Ren’py’s engine to its limits”, they were all pretty straightforward to code.^^ I do hope no one bangs their head on the wall trying to see all the bonus content, because it really was just a small unimportant thing I added for the fun of it.^^ Outside the bonus stuff, the minigames were supposed to serve the bigger goal of the VN, which was left unmentioned (snif^^) In any case, thanks a lot for the comment!
To be fair, I think my play/read time was tripled trying to get to the bonus content (before I went hunting through the files), which I think colored my experience, in that the majority of my brain power went into solving chess puzzles, solving that genealogy puzzle, and looking up "mahjong score calculators" which overwrote most of my experience with the narrative itself. I think I only got like 6/10 of the puzzles in the actual main story and that was enough to progress (was worried that I needed 10/10). The narrative itself really seemed to be all about that world building since there was the history lesson in the first act and then lots of neat *authors notes* when it'd be like "they are not speaking english, this is just an approximation of english that you are reading" to help really sell the environment and setting. The romance(ish) plot of the main guy crushing on the robot deer was cute, but it's also like, 'well, i guess that's it' once you get to the end of it. It is quite funny in a lot of places so I guess this is more of a rom-com than anything. I still had a fun experience (challenge mini-games not withstanding).