I doesn't exist - a modern text adventure Reviews

I thought long and hard whether this is a “thumbs down” game. There’s great stuff here – originality of the gameplay mechanics, cool visuals, mix of genres, horror element…but all of this could be summed up with the word “potential”. What we actually have once it gets going is a bit of a jumbled mess, restrictive parser, slightly deceptive demo and a “poof!” of an ending. So, despite it being a promising title, if I ask myself a question Steam asks me when I write reviews – “Do you recommend this game?”, the answer, unfortunately, would be a no. What worked: - A blend of text adventure with graphics on top is a very neat idea. It’s almost like a point’n’click added to the mix. The demo of this game (something that sold me on it) is fun. A bit nonsensical as far as the tasks go but Fun with a capital “F”, nonetheless. - A fusion of visuals nicely reflects horror theme; think of [b]Buddy Simulator 1984[/b] (a brilliant game [b]I Doesn’t Exist[/b], probably, took inspiration from). There are colorful pixelated parts that add an eerie charm, and green-hued ones that speak of retro-horror. There are green 3D psychedelic-like environments too. We spend very brief amount of time in them, but the change from one to (often unexpected) another makes everything extra mysterious. - The idea. The idea is novel and funky and spooky. It looked and felt like they were going to crush it with this one. What didn’t work: - Text parser which is supposed to be the core of this game. After downloading self-hosting AI that brings this text adventure size to over 10 gigs and loading times of several minutes, you get to play with a fairly standard set-up common to any IF for a bit (the demo part). Then game switches to open-ended questions which are [i]incredibly[/i] restrictive. Any deviation, however slight, from a straight as a railroad track question it wants you to ask met with “[blank] doesn’t exist”. I see what you did there, game. Haha. It was funny for the first 5 times, but after a while you start asking yourself what is the point of this? Just present me with what you’d like me to say, and I’ll press a button, as in your standard dialogue tree, since you aren’t letting me play around with it; otherwise, it’s an immersion-breaking exercise in frustration. - Very short length (you can finish it in an hour and a half, and demo covers about half of it) for what this game was trying to incorporate. It’s a text adventure that is also standard adventure with a maze and a puzzle; a pixel graphics adventure that is also 3D adventure; a horror that is also meta that is also about mental health… It’s a tall order to deliver it all in a coherent manner, and I wish there would be more time to showcase all these ambitious ideas developers had, but after that first 45 minutes or so, everything just wizzes by in a flurry of drastic changes, and it ultimately turns out underbaked. It's telling that in a 90-minute game that promised to be so much fun, I didn’t really want to go for a different ending. It felt like a chore, and I blame it on the raw implementation of the most important part here – the text parser. If the AI-fueled wonder would have worked as intended – I could have spent, potentially, hours more in-game, just testing the limits of what I can do and playing around with it, transforming a short disappointing experience into a longer satisfying one. As it stands, this game had enormous promise and potential and turned out to be a letdown precisely of how high it was able to set my hopes up at first. Strong start warped into a fizzled-out ending. Still, the talent is definitely there, so I’d love to see what they have in store for the next one. Let’s write this one off as a shaky debut.