Here to Stay Reviews

Enjoyable party simulation game, nice settings, but remain hopeful for mods in the future.

personally, i just did not enjoy it not a ton of hours, but the lack of a tutorial (a clear good one, not written general terms without any guidance thru the UI), an unclear UI, and unclear mechanics just made my first impression instantly just negative i wouldn't recommend this until the game has a tutorial or a QOL UI update cool concept though, similarish to Law Givers

Here to Stay is a game where you compete with other political parties over control of a small, unnamed country. It is a hidden gem when you look past its undoubtedly numerous, but largely superficial, imperfections. The game centres around your party members, without any members, your party cannot rule, you need to assign them to the right jobs and slowly level them up. There are a finite number of members in each region, so you need to fight your rival parties over the best members through bribing, deceit, and intrigue. It has a fairly steep learning curve, but after a couple of hours of gameplay, you receive the reward of developing an intuitive understanding of its mechanics and inner workings. I had a lot of fun slowly turning my country into a fascist dictatorship over around 10 years, I eventually managed to tighten my grip over the political system, sideline my opposition in the Parliament, and remain in power indefinitely. This is not a game for the faint of heart or impatient, but the rewards are immense if you give it the chance to shine. Pros: - Surprisingly in-depth features for a game of it's size - Good party management mechanics - Short Election cycles, allowing you to get power quicker - A good number of well-made, deeply interconnected mechanics. - An effective, if somewhat painful, economic simulation Cons: - Somewhat poor english - Simplistic yet slightly confusing UI - Unintuitive ideology mechanics (Ideology has very little importance)

Amazing idea for a game, love the concept and core gameplay loop. Could have been one of the best games of its kind. But it is ruined by many unpolished and unecessarily annoying things. None of them are by themselves so bad as to warrant a negative review, but all together they make the game feel unfinished and low effort. I know there was a lot of effort put in this game since it is amazing if you ignore all the problems I am about to list, and even more that I forgot to list. 1. Saving does not save your favourite characters, the game has a usefull feature of being able to favorite any character, it helps in finding them later among the 100 characters you possess and even more characters the other political parties posess. The problem is, if you save the game, close it, open it, load your save, THE FAVORITE CHARACTERS ARE NOT FUCKING MARKED ANYMORE. WHAT THE FUCK. This game contains too much caracters to waste your time finding the important ones again and again every time you start up the game again, this has lead to me developing unhealthily long playing sessions because I dont want to lose my precious bookmarks. 2. Unecesarily high performance requirements, due to a tiny fucking window. I could not believe how hard my computer was blowing from this type of game. I believe its due to the fancy window that covers 10% of the screen and provides no gameplay purpouse, there is no option to turn it off or even turn down the graphics. The only reason I noticed it even exists is because i was trying to understand how this game can consume so much resources. 3. The ingame guidebook is unfinished and contains many obvious typos, yes I know this review contains typos too, but I am not selling this review to anyone. When you click on some new gameplay feature you dont understand It leads you to the guidebook, which does not even have a description of the features you clicked on. Yes you can understand the features by thinking about what they do, but why have the link to the guidebook if a chapter about what you clicked on does not exist? 4. There is a riot in this building. There is no riot in this building. Masterclass of UI design, took me 10 hours before I understood this masterpiece wombo combo. 5. Too easy to take everything with a propaganda strike team in the middle and late game, dont even need to take any buildings, just send 2-4 dudes with a good trait to university until you have enough power to buy acces to the next city, send them in and in your first election cycle you win, because they reached max propoganda before the town hall campaign even starts. 6. Stability generated per turn is never a problem. Might as well just set it to be 100% every new turn, I got 1000% per turn without even trying, just from having max amount of headquarter buildings, because they increase how many dudes you can have in your party, internal affairs dudes work for free, they should cost something. 7. Duplicate characters, I was suprised that my tag team for winning the capital election was Igor from the propoganda department and Igor from the security department, both had matching surnames and portraits, even though its a bad thing from a quality perspective, it made taking the captial much more fun, since i realized that my top dudes are actually replicates, and I finally understood my confusion all the times before when I thought Igor Y. was in a different department. 8. Description of laws does not match shown modifiers. Example: Increase security, make it more expensive to send people to prison and less likely to succeed. +20% Cost to send to prison, +20% chance to succeed in sending to prison. Unless this was some meta commentary about the justice system being a toy of the government, it is just another example of inattentiveness to detail. 9. Effect that laws have on the state budget is not described until you change the law. In the late game you care about getting a budget surplus, laws have different cost at different stages, problem is that you can only see the current cost of the current law. And once you have enough power to experiment with which law has the lowest cost you dont care about the cost anyways because you have maxed taxation and increased private industry to the point you have a surplus no matter what. Sure you can figure out from context that decreasing the cost to enter a new city costs the state more money, but for some laws this context does not work. 10. Game is not balanced, once you try out all your options you will just be spamming remove from party to all economists that are not yours, hire them to get the money to keep spamming remove from party on all characters you want, send them to university if you dont have access to a higher star dude and use your strike teams to become the most popular in every single district without even needing to fight for buildings, which was the most fun part of the early game where bullshit propaganda couldnt win everything. Things like prisons, churches, schools, ect dont really matter if you know what you are doing. So much potential, ruined by countless tiny problems, if only the set as favorite character disapearing issue would be fixed I would change this review to positive, thats how good this game is, If it was only a little better I would recomennd buying it, despite all the flaws. If the dev continues working on this game then it can become truly great. This is why I wrote this long review, because I hope that the developer reads this and plays his game two or three times and fixes all the offensive mistakes that hold this game down.

The game is no longer being developed and unfortunately it is still monotonous.

The game is horribly written, with very bad English. I understand that is not a native English speaker writing it, but it is very hard to understand what the game is saying to you when you're trying to do anything. It doesn't help that this game is so small scale in terms of popularity, there's no support to be found on the internet for any issues you may have. The concept is brilliant, it's just not executed well, especially in the only supported language

A political sim reminiscent of old tycoon games. It has lots of potential, but because of the price its still worth buying for those who are into this sort of thing, even if there seems to be lots of elements lacking. Its not a game for hard and fast adventure, but more a management style player. It could be too dry also for those who like the roleplaying element. But for its target audience, it does a decent job.

I wanted to like this when someone said there was no tuturial, when i turned on the game i went to the youtube video... i invested 18 min .. while the idea is good,, this needs help with a hand on tuturial sorry but refunded this...

This is a fantastic game if you have the time and patience to learn how it works. There is definitely a learning curve, as there should be for a game like this! It's kind of a mix of Suzerain, Democracy, and Crisis in the Kremlin. It's pretty light on the roleplay, and heavy on party politics and grinding your way from breaking into a city to running a whole State. The negative reviews are clearly people who gave up early. There's a lot of thumb twirling in the very beginning, and there is not an in depth tutorial. Use your first several hours in the game to figure things out, experiment, unlock actions, and work your way toward running a city, which took me about 3 hours of gameplay. From there, things get a lot more fun, especially once you get into Parliament. I'd love to see a lot more ruler customization, more flavor for your party members, and "events" that you can deal with in a roleplay sense, but otherwise I've had a blast with this and recommend it to anyone who enjoys political sims.

In the first hour or so I was tempted to sway towards a negative review. However, watching the (old) tutorial video I was able to make some sense of what is going on and how to make progress. The game has no hand held tutorial, so can be a bit overwhelming at first - but within a couple of hours I had managed to figure most of it out and started to see my actions actually making a difference. By day 200 or so I had managed to get my first party member elected to the town council and am now making progress to expanding influence into another city. If you give it time and are willing to put in the hours you will slowly see how the mechanics all fit together and affect each other. It is actually surprisingly deep once you start to advance and your party gains more influence and power. My only gripes would be that the generic names and photos do not seem very Eastern European at all, given that the game is set in this area of the world the choices for the names seem quite bizarre. It would be great to see some sort of editor or mod support for this in future and would really add to the immersion. In summary, the game attempts to take an abstract look at the political machinations of Eastern Europe in the 70's and does so relatively well. It is a game that very much focuses on the party members and attempting to get the best "team" put together to gain as much influence and popularity as possible to advance. The UI isn't the greatest, but it does it's best to put all the relative information and actions in the correct places. I did see a few placeholders in some of the text, and it could have done with a bit of spell-checking in places. If this era and geographic location of politics is of interest to you, at this price point it's a fun little challenge and time sink. I hope the devs stay active and add some more polish and a much needed editor or mod support - but looking at the activity in the chat I'm not so sure any of this will ever happen. I'm leaving a positive review as at no point have I considered a refund and have enjoyed most of the time I have spent with it so far. [edit] Since writing this review, I am happy to see that the devs have changed the in-game names to be more Eastern European. Such a simple change, but makes the game more immersive. Kudos to the team for listening and changing this so soon after release. Thanks! All we need now is an in-game editor to be able to change other things (flags, logos, country/city/district names etc) ;-)