I gave this game a couple of chances but it's difficult for me personally to keep at it. Let me know if I'm misjudging the cons in case the game opens up much further in the game, which it doesn't as you get to the middle of the U.S.
The pros: the art and voice acting for each story bit is a good touch... and that's about it. The actual stories are good and well written but they are each criminally short and lack engagement other than "do X" or "do Y" sometimes.
The cons:
- Visuals: The art style outside of the story section doesn't look good personally - seems to try to have a cell-shaded art style but is very flat and bland due to the world being simple. Also, there's this weird shimmering that is very noticeable on the docked display where during story sections, both the text box and the actual image shimmer annoyingly. This doesn't happen in other switch games.
- Audio: the same 3 tracks of folk music, gets pretty grating. Some of the voice-acting is actually good and sounds professional (narrator, hobo boy). Others sound like they're a random dev recording inside a cardboard box lol.
- Technical: performance is really bad for what the game is trying to achieve on the switch hardware. The radial menu to select stories is extremely finicky and at some points bugs out spamming a choice from the analog screen. Additionally, difficult menu navigation during storytelling.
- Gameplay: just.. walking. You can whistle which slightly increases speed and hitchhike, hop trains, and pay trains which is tedious to do (time, health, and money penalties respectively). It's all extremely slow.
- Progression: to complete the game, you have to track down 16 separate NPCs through the huge map of the U.S. (which is already really slow). You have to give the types of stories they ask for but even if you do, you could only progress them if you track them down somewhere else on the map and give them brand new stories they want to hear. This is done for each character, for multiple chapters, running after them a huge map that's tedious to navigate.
Ended up dropping it when I realized how tedious the game was, that it wasn't worth it to stick through for the more interesting micro-stories.
The pros: the art and voice acting for each story bit is a good touch... and that's about it. The actual stories are good and well written but they are each criminally short and lack engagement other than "do X" or "do Y" sometimes.
The cons:
- Visuals: The art style outside of the story section doesn't look good personally - seems to try to have a cell-shaded art style but is very flat and bland due to the world being simple. Also, there's this weird shimmering that is very noticeable on the docked display where during story sections, both the text box and the actual image shimmer annoyingly. This doesn't happen in other switch games.
- Audio: the same 3 tracks of folk music, gets pretty grating. Some of the voice-acting is actually good and sounds professional (narrator, hobo boy). Others sound like they're a random dev recording inside a cardboard box lol.
- Technical: performance is really bad for what the game is trying to achieve on the switch hardware. The radial menu to select stories is extremely finicky and at some points bugs out spamming a choice from the analog screen. Additionally, difficult menu navigation during storytelling.
- Gameplay: just.. walking. You can whistle which slightly increases speed and hitchhike, hop trains, and pay trains which is tedious to do (time, health, and money penalties respectively). It's all extremely slow.
- Progression: to complete the game, you have to track down 16 separate NPCs through the huge map of the U.S. (which is already really slow). You have to give the types of stories they ask for but even if you do, you could only progress them if you track them down somewhere else on the map and give them brand new stories they want to hear. This is done for each character, for multiple chapters, running after them a huge map that's tedious to navigate.
Ended up dropping it when I realized how tedious the game was, that it wasn't worth it to stick through for the more interesting micro-stories.