Non-linear gameplay Instead of having a series of goals to be completed one by one with the story progressing in distinct chunks after each one (convince the local bridge repairman to come out of retirement so you can cross over to the next part of your journey, that sort of thing), here after we finish the tutorial, we're just given a list of objects we need to collect throughout the game, and then we can go around collecting them in nearly any order we like and the puzzles for them tend to be generally independent of each other. Once you have everything, the game is basically over besides the little ending sequence. Also, some of the items you need to collect have more than one solution, which is neat because there are certain solutions I would have never gotten in a million years, and this absolutely saved me from getting stuck once or twice. Hint system You can get a hint for what to do at any time, and the hints are generally helpful and not overly cryptic, but honestly they could have been tested out a little bit more, because remember how I said you can go through the game in "nearly" any order? Well, that "nearly" is because there's one major exception to that rule, and at some point we need to ride a bus to advance in the game, but for some reason they decided that you can't do that immediately but if you try too early you're just told that the bus isn't here yet so try again later, which is fine and all, but if that's the case, then... why do the hints guide you towards doing that even BEFORE it's actually available to do yet? Seriously, I was trying to beat the game using as few hints as possible and was only using them if I got stuck, and the game directed me towards donning a granny disguise without saying that this was actually not helpful yet and something that only applied to a later puzzle, and I went around convinced that certainly doing this would help me in some endeavor and was the immediate next step to doing SOMETHING but I just had to figure out what, which of course wasn't true and I ended up going around fruitlessly accomplishing nothing for a while, so thanks, hint system, for misdirecting me, I guess? Also, minor thing, but if you ask for a hint in your grandpa's room (because what hint you get depends on where you are and it'll be a hint for a puzzle in the current area, not that the game explains that very well) even after you finish the puzzle in there, it will still give you a hint for the puzzle you've already completed anyway, which isn't a huge deal because at that point it will be extremely obvious you already did that, and so nobody is likely to be confused thinking it refers to a future event, but still, that is a minor bug in the hint system I noticed and another way it needed more work. But these are all in the end not deal-breaking issues, and the hint system overall is good and certainly better than some of the cryptic stuff I've seen in other games, so I'll let it pass. Story and tone and stuff So, the weird thing about this game is that a lot of stuff doesn't "go" anywhere, and there are many minor characters who are just weird without any particular reason for it, and why did they make that one girl a pirate? Who knows? It never seems to matter any and I never saw her again after literally the first room in the game, and there are just many things like that where you go "Huh, that's weird" and then it never comes up again, and, I mean, it contributes to an overall humorous tone to the game and all, but I still would have at the very least liked to see her again a couple of times so that even if nothing ever "happens" with her she still feels like a recurring element in the game and not just a random one off thing, and if I'm honest, the entire game feels like the developers had a bunch of random ideas lying around and they decided to put as many as they could into the game, and a simple example is that one of the side characters here is Agatha Knife, and I don't know much about her game because I'm playing the developers' games in the order of release, but I do know she did eventually get her own game later, so I can only assume the developers had this whole idea in their heads and just couldn't wait to give us a sneak peak now, and so is there some big elaborate backstory in the developers' minds for that random pirate girl or that really brainy kid going on about quantum physics or just so many others that would make them make way more sense if we players knew it? Maybe, but since we don't know it, it really hardly matters. As another slightly more spoilery example, your grandma in this game left your grandpa, and he wants to apologize to her but can't remember what he did to upset her. You go ask Grandma about it, and she says she caught him, ahem, "being intimate" with a goat and she left without a second thought or giving him a chance to explain himself. You have an exchange with Grandpa that goes something like "Do you remember anything about a goat?" "A goat? Aha, that's it! Thank you so much, I know just what to say to make things right!" and he runs off, and I was expecting here for it to turn out to be a misunderstanding, really he was doing something completely different with the goat that looked bad from the angle Grandma was viewing it from, and after he explains, grandma says "Oh, I'm sorry I was mad at you" and we get a happy ending, maybe intentionally played a little cheesy as a joke. That is not what happened. Instead if we go back to Grandma's place, Grandpa is dead on the floor. The end. Plotline over. There's no evidence the goat story isn't true, Grandpa is just into animals apparently, Grandma killed him for it, and that's the end of that, and it honestly left me feeling sad more than anything, and bye, Grandpa, sorry you had to just die off screen with no fanfare. But, I don't know, this was probably one of the more extreme examples, and most of the game is slightly less of a downer, but it definitely leans more on the dark aspect of dark comedy than a lot of other works do. Also, very few of your actions seem to have a lasting impact on the other characters, very few of them have any sort of progression in whatever little subplot they have going on, but instead pretty much everyone is in the same situation at the end of the game as they were at the start of it, and it kind of feels like everyone is more part of a premise than a story if that makes sense, which, for all I know might have been intentional because the main plot is how you're sick of everyone around you and no one listens to you so you're just going to kill them all, then, and if your character were going around resolving problems and helping people and stuff it would undermine the entire idea that the world is just hopeless and there's nothing you can do to change it, so I guess it makes sense in this setting, but that's honestly just not what I'm used to from most puzzle games where your character feels personally responsible for fixing the lives of every single person who so much as stands vaguely near them. Final points Most of the things I said before don't matter, and they're mostly just minor things I wanted to talk about, and the main thing about this game is that 80 to 90% of the puzzles are sensible and something a reasonable human could figure out (as opposed to some point and click games that are 80 to 90% "Just get a guide", and, yeah, it's not perfect, I fail to see why I have to put on my disguise in a photo booth or something instead of going back to my room to get changed or even just popping it on anywhere since I'm wearing it over my other clothes anyway , but mostly it was good), there's a hint system that's actually comprehensible (when it works), and, you know, I thought the game was generally funny, so thumbs up, I guess.
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