This game is not good and frankly it's not even a cat game. Yeah there's parts where you knock stuff over and a couple sequences of walking on keyboards, but the gameplay is largely comprised of obediently obeying NPCs, following them, fetching various objects and doing various tasks. I was looking forward to this game, thinking it would be at least filled with fun gimmicks, or a neat story. It doesn't deliver on anything. It's not even a fun cat simulator (barring the fact it's stylistically more doglike or human) because you can't even platform. The platforming is press A to jump, almost the exact same system as the original Final Fantasy VII. I honestly thought there would be a real platforming system and instead there is nothing.
I really can't stress this. This is a 'cat' game where you have an adventure game inventory and most of the playtime you'll get is doing fetch quests. Sequences where you run for your life? You'd imagine a dog, or something like it right? No, it's just Half Life headcrabs for some reason. You get a flashlight (?) to fight them... and these sequences are the worst. There are stealth sequences later, which are at least a cat thing and aren't too bad.
There are so many NPCs and not a single one is interesting. I actually perked up at the end with the more robotic NPCs, even for a brief moment, being far more endearing than the sheer blankness of the main ones. Extremely boring NPC in any video game, except it's a robot wearing a weird hat! That's all of them. And none of them have anything remotely interesting to say. You can generate more dialogue by showing items but the vast majority of the time I did this I got nothing unique, and if I did, it still wasn't interesting.
Which really hammers the main fault of this game: the sheer lack of thematic depth. It apes the movie Dark City on its sleeve, ok sure, but that movie had tons of detail and thematic depth. I don't even like that movie, but it was far better constructed of a story than this. This is so empty, so tropey, it pulls from such a bunch of common elements of mainstream games but has nothing to do with them. There's the Meat Infection (or whatever they call it) which areas become like meat like Doom Eternal, Dead Space, or any of the 50 space horror games coming out soon. There's a sequence with eyeballs everywhere, which probably wouldn't scare a 5 week old puppy because the eyeballs look like they're from the Legend of Zelda. The game is rich with detail but none of it coalesces into anything. There's not a coherent visual language. A game with lots of intimate settings, that you're constantly crawling around and looking at things intently, you'd think there'd be a lot of visual detail to notice and help communicate themes of the story right? No, not really. There's a big flat goose egg. The most you get is that every robot apparently decorates like a random millennial hipster.
What is the deal with humanity and robots? I dunno, the game doesn't really go into it. It's uh, about totalitarianism. Or uh covid? Or something? A basic 1984 thing? No, it really isn't any of those things particularly, it's just Dark City. Yeah, the underworld is like hell and the upper area is like heaven. I think about Nier Automata, with a similar story, while also being a real game, goes in depth with the subject of humanity. Humans take the place of gods, and both androids and robots take place as commentary for humanity. The longing for a higher power and a higher purpose is expressed continually. The androids represent a sort of navel gazing adolescence that cannot understand themselves. The robots represent the singlemindedness man can have, even if it's a very simple task or an ornate but hollow philosophy. What does this game say? Nothing.
Oh and there's a bunch of very screenwriter-y 'beats' where the developers think you might start losing interest so the cat gets hurt or the robot for like 5 seconds. Overall bad game.
I really can't stress this. This is a 'cat' game where you have an adventure game inventory and most of the playtime you'll get is doing fetch quests. Sequences where you run for your life? You'd imagine a dog, or something like it right? No, it's just Half Life headcrabs for some reason. You get a flashlight (?) to fight them... and these sequences are the worst. There are stealth sequences later, which are at least a cat thing and aren't too bad.
There are so many NPCs and not a single one is interesting. I actually perked up at the end with the more robotic NPCs, even for a brief moment, being far more endearing than the sheer blankness of the main ones. Extremely boring NPC in any video game, except it's a robot wearing a weird hat! That's all of them. And none of them have anything remotely interesting to say. You can generate more dialogue by showing items but the vast majority of the time I did this I got nothing unique, and if I did, it still wasn't interesting.
Which really hammers the main fault of this game: the sheer lack of thematic depth. It apes the movie Dark City on its sleeve, ok sure, but that movie had tons of detail and thematic depth. I don't even like that movie, but it was far better constructed of a story than this. This is so empty, so tropey, it pulls from such a bunch of common elements of mainstream games but has nothing to do with them. There's the Meat Infection (or whatever they call it) which areas become like meat like Doom Eternal, Dead Space, or any of the 50 space horror games coming out soon. There's a sequence with eyeballs everywhere, which probably wouldn't scare a 5 week old puppy because the eyeballs look like they're from the Legend of Zelda. The game is rich with detail but none of it coalesces into anything. There's not a coherent visual language. A game with lots of intimate settings, that you're constantly crawling around and looking at things intently, you'd think there'd be a lot of visual detail to notice and help communicate themes of the story right? No, not really. There's a big flat goose egg. The most you get is that every robot apparently decorates like a random millennial hipster.
What is the deal with humanity and robots? I dunno, the game doesn't really go into it. It's uh, about totalitarianism. Or uh covid? Or something? A basic 1984 thing? No, it really isn't any of those things particularly, it's just Dark City. Yeah, the underworld is like hell and the upper area is like heaven. I think about Nier Automata, with a similar story, while also being a real game, goes in depth with the subject of humanity. Humans take the place of gods, and both androids and robots take place as commentary for humanity. The longing for a higher power and a higher purpose is expressed continually. The androids represent a sort of navel gazing adolescence that cannot understand themselves. The robots represent the singlemindedness man can have, even if it's a very simple task or an ornate but hollow philosophy. What does this game say? Nothing.
Oh and there's a bunch of very screenwriter-y 'beats' where the developers think you might start losing interest so the cat gets hurt or the robot for like 5 seconds. Overall bad game.
mehdigeek
1 year ago