Post by vividity in Transubstantiation Synthesis comments

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Sorry for my very long comment. I struggle with being concise. Oh yeah and spoilers for anyone still wanting to try this game.

I played this game like a day or two ago, and it's still stuck to my mind a bit, as it goes with many of my temporary interests as of late. Some niche interests, like the one this game caters to, can be interesting in both a sexual and non-sexual way, at least to me. I find something oddly profound in it, honestly.

I agree with that one other commenter on the ending being a little less empathic than ideal. While I am definitely the target audience for this kind of thing, it is a little weird when the good guys are like "nope, you can't be a human again." The whole permanence aspect is fun, its just that the good-guy-faction being the one enforcing it feels a bit off, you know? Maybe if they didn't have the capacity to reverse it, but they couldn't have prevented your robotification to begin with, or that your fate would be even worse if left up to the corporations? I feel like the good-guy faction also setting it up in the first place kinda negates the whole "we are morally justified" thing, especially when they're the ones who remove your personality and try to punish you with spanking. I think I would have preferred it if the evil-corporate group was responsible for the robotification and what followed from there, but that the good-guy faction intervened in another way, maybe by replacing a part in the basement (maybe a part for the communication field thingy?) ensuring that you would be able to change things for the better.

Also, I feel it is a bit difficult to tell if the player character still has free will. Obviously they don't have total free will, but it seems to be present, to an extent... I think? The player character does seem to want to escape, but I'm not sure. Perhaps it is meant to be a gray area?

Sorry if that's a TL;DR, but yeah, I really enjoyed this and wanted to give some of my thoughts, and I'd definitely be interested in Reset Day. Oh yeah and now I wanna play these guys in stellaris as rogue servitors... yes i have read every comment

KDRGN2 years ago(+3)

Hey there! Thanks for leaving the feedback - it's not a TL;DR at all, you're making good points. I ran out of time about three quarters of the way through, so there are a few things that got sort of garbled.

It's true that the "good-guy" faction comes across as a bit too morally questionable. That's one of the inherent problems with writing drone/conversion kink, I think. They're meant to be spicy, and a little morally ambiguous, but not evil. I'm not sure I struck the right balance, and that's something I'd try to workshop a little more if I was writing the game now.

The way it worked in my head is that the robotification is happening on a large scale, and has been happening for a while. The good-guy faction is subverting the process as much as they can, but they can't outright stop it (yet). At its core it's being run by actual AIs and not converted humans, and they're meant to have slightly alien reasoning as a result. I'm not sure that actually made it into the game, though.

The main character's level of free will is another one of those things. The way it's meant to work is that they have free will, with the "drone mode" just constraining their behavior sometimes. There should probably be a choice to refuse working with the good-guy faction, which they would respect. Just didn't make it in, in the end.

As for Reset Day, I kind of got sidetracked; this has been a rather crazy year. I'm definitely hoping to get something out next year. It'll hopefully have a better story structure. I'll spend more time looking at everyone's reasoning, at least.

Thanks for checking it out all the same! I found your feedback very valuable.

itch.io

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