Let me repeat that: I really want to like this game, but... I feel mixed at best.
The graphics are amazing, obviously. I dug the attention to detail and I even liked the majority of the customizable hairstyles and found all of them fitting for the protagonist, which I can't say for a lot of games with customizable protagonist appearances (lol). The music is fitting and environmentally immersive. It is nice that if you stick to the game longer than 5 minutes, you can learn to remove your crippled walk, which itself is cool to see at first.
There are 3 major factors that kill my sense of immersion, though, in this order of pain:
1. The controls.
- It is really weird that dialogue-proceeding (Space) is a different key than dialogue-initiating (Shift). Why is this? It's extremely disorienting when dialogue is forced (as in the event text that appears after minigames), when my gut reaction is to press the initiation key. Why not make them the same? If it's a matter of wanting to make sure one doesn't accidentally restart the same conversation with the same person again, then there can easily be a no-input delay for a moment after the conversation ends. That'd be no problem. But it'd be really nice for all text to be initiated and rolled through with Space.
- If there is a fear that the player makes a conversation get accidentally repeated, then Shift could be converted into a "speed-through-the-text" fast-forward option, like how visual novels do it.
- There is some kind of keypress delay after a new line of text has been displayed; I would press Space right after more dialogue showed, and it wouldn't advance; I'd have to wait a bit to re-press Space. This bugged the heck out of me, as I can be a very fast reader.
- I did like how Right Shift and Right Control doubled with their Left counterparts. It would be nice if Escape doubled with Backspace and Control when it comes to exiting menus.
2. The lack of sound. Yes, this is actually a bigger recommendation-breaker than the minigames (which are issue #3).
- There is a reason that games have new lines of dialogue unfold dynamically for players to read, character by character, in conversations: people make sound when they talk. It is immersion-breaking for it to be dumped, and worse, to be completely silent. The game-accepted situation for instantaneous text display is machines, like TV news and such. I wanna hear the chitter-chatter.
- Your character's walking is completely silent, when I wanna hear the thud of the strain of crippled movement, the "shffff" of dashing, and so on. It makes the game boring. It's putting too much pressure on the music to make it unnecessarily carry too much of the game's audio. Let me put it this way: if there was a menu option to silence the music, there should still be a decent amount of stuff going on, like background noise from the restaurant when you walk near it or the interior of the bar or docks, etc.
3. The minigames are droll, with at least some being particularly way too easy. They don't increase in difficulty. I hope they are expanded upon, with optional ramping arcade-like difficulty (increasingly tough enemies/deprecators until you die).
- Man, I like horizontal shooters. One of my favorites of old was Amanagi and I was looking forward to the challenge that the minigame would pose (even though I knew it'd be underdeveloped). I didn't know that I'd only ever see three 1-HP enemies at a time, from whose damage your health even auto-recovers from. I really hope it gets at least one or two enemy models, like with an enemy that has very high health and actually deals some bullet hell.
- I'm a very fast typist and gaining +10 per word/letter made the games very weak to sustain my interest. I would have preferred for them to generate only +1, and then every 10 seconds, decrement it to +0.9, +0.8, etc.
- The graphics for key selection do not highlight that much. I would appreciate a lot sharper of a contrast for displayed keys versus keys that I pressed.
4. Typos and other miscellany:
- What is the point of taking your sword out, outside of minigames, if it's not even gonna intimidate people or otherwise change their dialogue with you? Your character even puts it away during conversations (and then takes it out again right after, for some reason). It seems gimmicky and unnecessary, unless I haven't progressed in the story enough yet, although I don't even know where to find the guy messaging me about work on my phone.
- The typing game wanted me to spell "queazy," but the correct spelling is "queasy." This immediately broke my immersion and made me wonder: is it pulling from an actual dictionary or were these hand-typed in?
- Some post-minigame text was grammatically incorrect:
"When you arrived to the drop off point" - "When you arrived at the drop-off point"
"It was obvious that they were courtiers." - This should be "couriers," no? - Graffiti examination shows: "for awhile" which should be "for a while."
All of these things could even be kept the same as they originally are, with optional changes, if there was a menu with adjustable settings for sound, dialogue control, customizable keyboard input, minigame difficulty, etc., but Escape does nothing. Man, I really wanna recommend it but I can't right now; it's a proof-of-concept of what the dev is no doubt capable of, but to be a fully appreciated work of art, it has some ways to go still. I look very much forward to the adjustments, though!