Tales of Tomorrow: Experiment Reviews

Old skool first go good

Simply put, for a game made by "industry veterans", it sure looks and plays like a game dev's first complete game. I beat it in 1.1 hours with no idea what I was doing, and the ending just sucks. Also, the autosave is too infrequent; I'd have beaten the game in all of 35 minutes had it not bugged out and killed me as if I'd gone out of bounds. I only know that OOB does that because there's a spot in one of the laser sections that you can get stuck, and the game just kills you when this happens, erasing progress that could have taken 30 minutes to get. "Watch where you step" is the death message. A simple jump button would have solved that OOB as well, by the way. And I got that message just... walking in the maze. I seriously do NOT recommend this. Usually I'd try to get all the secrets, but it's going to be more fun to datamine them out than playing it long enough for RNG to decide to give them to me. At least datamining is a challenge sometimes. Oh right, everything is RNG, did anyone else mention that? The maze appears to be RNG, the time you get on breaks is slightly randomised, it's everywhere.

Seems like a good concept, but it's a little confusing sometimes and the whole game seems to be based on a timer.

Sadly I can't recommend this game because it is full of bugs, and the autosave got me in such a position that I have to restart all over to complete the game; for which I don't find the motivation.

Oh my. This simple concept that has puzzles, and a race against time. It is a short little game and it may take some time before you get the hang of it, but I like this. Its one of those games in which you want to wipe your memories of this game and play it again.

Thank you for participating in our experiment. Enjoy your reward *buy in sale because its a very short game as stated in the description but nice short portal like game

You might be thinking this is one those evil AI stories like in the Portal games, or in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's not. For a start, the AI is not an AI. It's a computer that simply recognises when you have completed an assigned task. That's not an AI. That's just a computer. But that's small cheese, the real issue here is that it's not a story at all. It lacks any of the things that actually make a story. Change? Conflict? Escalation? Discovery? Characters? Nope. Nothing. It has only a premise for a story. A premise that is stated explicitly by text at the start of the game. Along the lines of: "You wake up on ship with no memory. You realise something is wrong and that you must escape." What follows is a tedious fetch quest to find the keys to the exit. That's it. Throughout the game, i was expecting something to start happening. Some kind of new development. Maybe the computer will start noticing that i'm trying to leave and try to stop me? Maybe there will be some crisis? Some new circumstance. A character. An event. Something, anything, beyond the basic premise that was literally spelt out to me at the start. Nope. Nothing. Devs, if you're reading this. Rule number 1 of storytelling: SHOW, don't TELL. Don't TELL me something is wrong, SHOW me something is wrong. Let the player discover that themselves. Then you have a story. By stating it at the outset, you rob the player of even a single moment of discovery and intrigue. Delete that text at the start. Add some dialogue to the AI that makes it sound like it has some actual awareness and personality. Introduce some kind of escalation as the player comes to realise the situation and begins to conflict with the AI. You don't have a story yet, only a premise.