Tracks of Thought Steam Charts & Stats

I would love to give this game a good review: it's adorable, inclusive, positive, and fun! The problem is there are too many bugs (I mean the game bugs, not the character bugs). I found it hard to progress because I gave the IOU Note to the guy and he gave back my scanner instead of the necklace. Now I don't know how to progress without completing the necklace quest. :( On top of that, the battles were fun but the HP is clearly "bugged" as well.

This game was on my radar for a while, but I didn't get it before because of all the bad reviews. However, well aware of the risks, I finally decided to give it a try myself. And well, I have to say that I wasn't able to finish the game... but I really wanted to, which may be why my review is positive. I had the exact same issues described in some great reviews, from the health never going down in combat to some side quests being impossible to complete. However, I didn't mind it that much since I was really enjoying the adorable art style, the astonishing character designs, the train room designs, the variety of puzzles and the fun dialogues. That was, until I got to the museum/clue room which reward (spoiler: the IOU paper) blocked my game. I still managed to play the next room (the concert one) by using the cheats one of the devs said existed in one of the comments on the forum (that you can access by pressing F1). Unfortunately, as I said, I couldn't finish the game since (even with the cheats) I couldn't do anything in which i presume is the last room of the train. Now, the studio site and their discord disappearing aren't great signs to expect for a game patch... but the thing is that I would have loved to see how the story unfolded, and I did love the part I could play (which I think was plenty!). I think the game has a lot of heart, and you can really see the effort and love behind it, and that’s why I still wanted to leave a positive review. I understand why some people left bad reviews since some errors might prevent players from finishing the game and that’s very frustrating (been there, done that!). But, if I am being honest, I feel that while the game is clearly lacking some testing and polishing it could have been fixed with some more time. Plus, I think some of those bugs might come from the saves, which are always a tricky part of development, especially in narrative games and with such a small team to do the testing. So, what’s bugging me (pun not intended) is the fact that maybe those bad reviews that were actually bug reports might have been the reason why people stopped buying the game (I know it prevented me for doing so for months!). And maybe that’s what leaded to the devs not having the resources to actually finish it. It might not be the case, and I still understand why people would get mad by expending money in something that doesn’t feel finished… but that’s how I personally felt and I still think the game is worth it so I wanted to support its team while explaining my reasons. So, thank you for reading!