I always like to note when games suck me in, so I think it's worth noting that I played this from around midnight local time until the early morning hours.
That said, I think some of the effusive praise likening this to Disco Elysium or other CRPG games like that to be a bit over the top. It's a stretch to even call this an RPG in my opinion, it's much more akin to a plain Choose-Your-Own-Adventure with some very light resource management.
I also think it's worth noting that since it's a CYOA, the resource/time management that's built into the game becomes pretty easy around two hours into the game. The first hour or so where you're scraping by to survive is very cool, but after that it begins to drop off precipitously in importance. I think that would be fine, but I feel like they should have traded the centrality of resource management for more focus on time management (which is also super easy to handle) and put more focus on not being able to do everything with every character in one playthrough.
And in that regard it's worth mentioning that I'm fairly certain I saw every character's story through to the end in a single playthrough. Nice for people who don't like replaying games (me), but it also means there's low replay value here. I do think it's funny that the game autosaves and doesn't allow for manual save(scumming) because the devs want to presumably encourage replays...but then they also allow you to see almost everything in a single playthrough other than the text specific to each ending you didn't choose.
Those caveats aside, I think as a CYOA game, it's pretty great.
The story is generally well written; the story/writing doesn't get preachy, which is a pretty common issue for sci-fi writing in my opinion; the character art is done in a style that I really love; and the characters themselves are largely interesting enough that you'll want to hear most of them to their conclusion.
In particular, there's one side-storyline that I really loved, and the ending I chose based off that side-story was genuinely touching. I won't spoil what it was, but after reading that ending I can say I'm very satisfied with my $20 spent.
That said, I think some of the effusive praise likening this to Disco Elysium or other CRPG games like that to be a bit over the top. It's a stretch to even call this an RPG in my opinion, it's much more akin to a plain Choose-Your-Own-Adventure with some very light resource management.
I also think it's worth noting that since it's a CYOA, the resource/time management that's built into the game becomes pretty easy around two hours into the game. The first hour or so where you're scraping by to survive is very cool, but after that it begins to drop off precipitously in importance. I think that would be fine, but I feel like they should have traded the centrality of resource management for more focus on time management (which is also super easy to handle) and put more focus on not being able to do everything with every character in one playthrough.
And in that regard it's worth mentioning that I'm fairly certain I saw every character's story through to the end in a single playthrough. Nice for people who don't like replaying games (me), but it also means there's low replay value here. I do think it's funny that the game autosaves and doesn't allow for manual save(scumming) because the devs want to presumably encourage replays...but then they also allow you to see almost everything in a single playthrough other than the text specific to each ending you didn't choose.
Those caveats aside, I think as a CYOA game, it's pretty great.
The story is generally well written; the story/writing doesn't get preachy, which is a pretty common issue for sci-fi writing in my opinion; the character art is done in a style that I really love; and the characters themselves are largely interesting enough that you'll want to hear most of them to their conclusion.
In particular, there's one side-storyline that I really loved, and the ending I chose based off that side-story was genuinely touching. I won't spoil what it was, but after reading that ending I can say I'm very satisfied with my $20 spent.