oolongstains
2019
Weirdly physical in a way that's almost compelling. The creator's clearly only heard of humans secondhand so all the "convince people to come visit your shop" scenes are deeply strange. The only game that lets you create a hybrid women's clothing, canned goods and mobile phone store.
Really, really interesting mechnically dense social backstab-em-up.
As a country woman engaged to a minor baron, you move to Paris on the eve of the revolution only to find out he's disappeared and left you to your own devices. If you're going to climb the social ladder clearly you're going to have to do it all yourself.
The gameplay is surprisingly open-ended for a game with such a fixed gameplay loop. Every day you can do exactly one action and then go to bed (relatable!), be that going to a party to build relationships and collect gossip; selling gossip for money; or hanging around Paris to build your influence. There's a lot of different ways you can approach it, and having seen a friend play the game with very different outcomes, it's clear you have a lot of freedom to approach the game.
The writing is pretty shallow, and your relationships with pretty much everyone are purely transactional. In a purely story-focused game that'd be a problem, but here it's thematic. Of course your relationships are transactional, of course you're interacting with people purely to get your way. If the story outcomes of your actions feel shallow, it's because that's how you the player and you the player character are engaging with them. I'd be nervous about playing one of the developers' other pure-story visual novels if the writing is like this game, but in this setup it works really well. I haven't gotten deep into any of the romance plots yet but I'm worried that the writing wouldn't be able to support them, though.
As a country woman engaged to a minor baron, you move to Paris on the eve of the revolution only to find out he's disappeared and left you to your own devices. If you're going to climb the social ladder clearly you're going to have to do it all yourself.
The gameplay is surprisingly open-ended for a game with such a fixed gameplay loop. Every day you can do exactly one action and then go to bed (relatable!), be that going to a party to build relationships and collect gossip; selling gossip for money; or hanging around Paris to build your influence. There's a lot of different ways you can approach it, and having seen a friend play the game with very different outcomes, it's clear you have a lot of freedom to approach the game.
The writing is pretty shallow, and your relationships with pretty much everyone are purely transactional. In a purely story-focused game that'd be a problem, but here it's thematic. Of course your relationships are transactional, of course you're interacting with people purely to get your way. If the story outcomes of your actions feel shallow, it's because that's how you the player and you the player character are engaging with them. I'd be nervous about playing one of the developers' other pure-story visual novels if the writing is like this game, but in this setup it works really well. I haven't gotten deep into any of the romance plots yet but I'm worried that the writing wouldn't be able to support them, though.