For the People Reviews

Lovely music, decent art, and written with lots of talent, love to the characters, and understanding of politics. This is not necessarily a game, but a visual novel experience with multiple endings. What I loved about this game is that your decisions are informed by reading about the situations the game presents to you. If you invest attention you are rewarded by receiving an expected outcome. Some other games from the same genre throw at you deus ex machina curveballs to keep you playing other runs. This one was fair.

The game isn't BAD, but it's *shockingly* short. I had initially started a playthrough last year, but then didn't get around to finishing it. On a whim, this morning I decided to boot it up again, restarting from the beginning. Even though I started completely over, I still finished the game on the same day, in maybe five hours... The gameplay isn't great, which is expected from a visual novel, but still, the UI could be made less clunky. It was annoying to have to manually allocate resources each day - it should at least default to funding everything when possible rather than me manually adding resources to each sector every day (or just have a "fully fund" button or something rather than me having to press the +1 button several times... and yes, there's a +10 button, but why? most of the sectors don't need that many!). I also did not like that the outcome of things you send your agents to is not revealed until the following day, so if you're like me and try to neurotically optimize everything even if it means save scumming, that's made more tedious. If preventing save scumming was the goal, it should have been through some way other than making it annoying to do. It's also not clear what the various metrics actually mean. My approval with the city residents definitely was going down despite my efforts, but it never seemed to amount to anything. I had to phone the party for money multiple times, but it never seemed to have any impact beyond the immediate reduction in party approval (in fact, this was the only way I ever got money - is this really how the budget works??). Some of the characters also felt a bit shallow. The Chesters were too obviously evil, and it felt weird that the characters we met at the bar seemed to simply disappear from the story. In general, the choices were either too obvious (fund the people who very clearly need help, or fund the openly corrupt police? hmmmm) or completely opaque (I still have no idea how you were supposed to know which person to accuse for the retired journalist's letters). Also, some of the text seemed to have clear typos (ie, paragraphs would just get cut off mid-sentence), primarily in bad outcomes for agent events. However, the setting is quite good. I appreciate that the game portrays a socialist society realistically - not a shining utopia, but still good and with the hope of becoming better with the hard work of its people. The revolution is not perfect, but it is made clear that it was necessary and a vast improvement over what existed before.