When you buy a cheap game, you take a small financial risk. Sometimes you find a hidden gem. Others, you are thankful for how little the game cost you. This game cost me about a buck or two, and even at that small price, I feel ripped off this time around.
Story: Well, you are here. You didn't mean to be here, but here you are. Your spaceship crash-landed on this alien world and so, here you are... alone and lonely. You are in fact very lonely. And desperate for "friendship."
With this base in mind, you will play through 36 mini-episodes, each of which will have you meeting a new troll (the dominant species of Alternia, where you find yourself) where the goal is to befriend them by it's end. These episode run the gammut from actually kinda funny, to uncomfortable, to straight up boring, but they are all fairly self-contained even if they are sequential in nature. But nothing is going to be strong enough to really make you stick around.
5/10
Graphics: I also can not say much against the look of this game. Being more of a visual novel then anything else, you will spend most of the game looking at the backgrounds of the world from deserts to the deepest city and they all look pretty good, as will the characters who populate the world and you will spend time talking to/seeing. Each and every mini-episode will feature at least one new character with several expressions and poses to go with it, and they are all drawn very well!
But at the same time, the game has a duality here as the title screen and end scenes to each one takes a look much more like it was drawn in a base graphic utility to come with an OS like MS Paint. It's not by chance as the comic it is based on was originally referred to as one of the "MS Paint Adventures" titles, so old-school fans of the source (Homestuck) will likely appreciate this, but it stands out in the wrong way against the rest of the game.
7/10
Sound: Definately a weak spot of this game. As a visual novel, I did not expect any voice acting, and I got none. What I didn't expect was to have almost nothing (if anything at all) for sound. I do not remember hearing anything at all outside of the music, which while nice enough, was both fairly forgettable and not constant. There are many places in this game where you will be met with dead-silence.
5/10
Gameplay: But this right here is the absolute failing of this game... or rather series of visual novels. In order to be fair to it, you have to understand that a visual novel is not so much a game as a form of interactive fiction: You are not coming to this title and expecting to do more then make some choices to guide the story you are here to witness, and this title is true to this form. However, it is also incredibly skimpy with these options as well as formulaic. In the each of the 18 volumes, you can count on 2 episodes which will last about 30 minutes when you answer 2-3 choices correctly to reach an ending where you "befirend" the troll the episode centers around. If you miss a choice, you will read through anything from a single screen and line of text to hit a bad end to several pages to reach the same goal, but you will not get any further branches, making each of these episodes brief and simple to the point of actually boring. I do not exaggerate when I say I decided to stop playing and start writing because I was inspired by my time with the game while streaming to stop the session and take a nap.
3/10
Bugs: For as bad as this game is, it actually ran just about perfectly. The only issue I cold find was with the save system as the page selection for this (which you should never need to touch) did not match up to the numbers it should, making it very difficult to swap between pages of saves.
Score: We finally have a game that literally bored me to the quitting point. It took many years, but it finally happened. If you are not a fan of visual novels, stay the HELL away from this game. If you are, I can't imagine you don't have better choices... much better choices.
3/10
System Requirements:
- anything running at 1.66 Ghz or more
- 1 GB RAM
- Any graphic card that runs Direct X
- 200 MB hard drive space
- Windows XP or later
- Ryzen 7 (2700) 3.2 Ghz
- 16 GB RAM
- Nvidia Geforce 1660 (6GB VRAM)
- Windows 10 (64 Bit)
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