Bots Are Stupid Reviews

I want to like this game, it is right up my alley. however, other than the many small complaints (tutorial is missing A LOT, UI has a lot of hidden stuff, etc.), making a tool-assisted speedrun without the ability to use hotkeys and save states just isn't fun. it brings it straight from a smooth experience to a bad and tedious one. I know about the ability to speed up to certain sections by setting a mark; that feature is a) unintuitive in where it decides to place you, b) not explained in the tutorial, and c) unable to skip straight to where you want to let you try a bunch of things in quick succession at a critical point. instead you have to edit these stupid delay values. and on top of that, the way you set the mark to skip to a certain point is by *right-clicking* and this cannot be rebound. finally, there's a little intro thing where another bot pops out when you want to retry, as if the game is trying to force the experience to slow down. think about that: the game whose fun is refinement into an optimized product has major and omnipresent decisions that make the game slow down. I don't know if I'm precisely the target audience, but I don't think an experience with so many seams is going to increase the potential audience. this is a frustrating experience that feels like it was made from the ground up on the idea that it'll be more intuitive to have this linear instruction system - but all the most important frustration comes back to that. maybe playtesting went better with that design compared to traditional-style TAS tools; if so, then I suspect this game has two different target audiences: one the concept appeals to, and another the design process was aimed towards. they do not overlap very much. I have allowed comments on this review! if anyone believes that I'm being unfairly harsh, let me know and I will listen