I wanted to love this game, I really did. It is exactly my thing! But I simply cannot get this to work properly.
The menus are frustrating. Why does getting to the next or previous option always require at least two arrow key presses, frequently more? Tab works better … when it works at all, that is. Regardless of the options, menus seem to freeze, options sometimes don’t select properly, and just generally I never know where I am and whether I’ve changed anything. I am not against using a mouse to play games if that is done accessibly, so I will test with one later to see if it works any better – I misplaced the batteries somewhere – but if that is the intended way for this game to be played, it really should be mentioned somewhere.
The rate at which events happen is far too fast. I am constantly being hit by this disaster or other, and there is at once too much happening and not nearly enough information. Pausing should help in theory, but is it just me, or do the menus suddenly become even less reliable when the game is paused? Even if that was not the case though, a way to set different rates would help a lot.
Given the large volume of speech, it is great that there is a mute option, although if possible, control would be a more natural choice for that than t. But unless I am missing something, once the speech is skipped, that’s it. There is no way to go back through the history and quickly check which events have taken place. Not that I’d even have the time to do that as it is, granted.
So, here’s an honest question for the developer: how much time have you spent actually play-testing your game without looking at it? It is clear you have put in a lot of effort, but was closing your eyes or covering them with a blindfold a part of that at all? Not that doing so would be the best way to check if the game is accessible – presumably you’re sighted, so if anything, you might have trouble with things that would be very easy for us. But in this case, it would’ve been an easy way to spot the obvious issues.
If you decide to continue developing this game, I encourage you to do some research into how other developers have handled large amounts of information in similar kinds of strategy games. I especially recommend checking out the games from Aprone, chiefly Castaways, whose speed settings, message buffers, settings for disabling notifications of kinds of events, shortcuts to check various stats, sound effects, etc. might be good strategies to copy. But really, you should just play all of them, because they’re very good games! And I’m confident yours could be too, once you make it playable.