Belonging Reviews

unpolished

This game is worthy of more attention. The gameplay mechanic of this game is quite similar to another game called Tacoma, and in lesser extent it is similar to yet another game called Nobody Wants to Die. It is most similar to Tacoma so I’ll compare the game to Tacoma. Both Belonging and Tacoma are science fiction games. Both are short games. It took me 2.8 hours to finish Tacoma and it took me also exactly 2.8 hours to finish Belonging. Both games have nice graphics, maybe a little bit better in Tacoma. If you ask me what game I prefer I would say Belonging. I had more fun playing Belonging than I had playing Tacoma. In Tacoma I lost track of the story, in Belonging I did not. I think it is unjust that this game is less known than Tacoma. It deserves better than that.

Gonna be honest, this is not a good game. First of all, it is short. I left it on overnight, so my numbers are skewed, but the real playtime is under 2 hours. The biggest issue - it is VERY preachy. To be clear, I agree with all the points it made; but it treats the player like a child who needs everything explained to them in very babying terms. It feels like when you teach a kid about telling an adult when people are doing bad things. But it never goes in depth about the cult, it gives you what amounts to a surface level overview of its activities, and information on 4 or 5 members plus the leaders. Second, it's not really a "game". There's no interactivity, you just walk along a line and look at things. It also purposely slows you down - when you talk to your "handler", you are actively slowed down to walking speed, and can't interact with any items. Third, the plot just... ends. You literally never get told what actually happened. This is incredibly frustrating. You get a one line "oh the police got an anonymous tip about the location of the leader" but they don't even make an attempt to explain why the people vanished, where they went, or anything of the sort. And finally, the subtitles are just frequently misspelled and occasionally wrong. It feels like nobody went back and did a QA pass through them. There's even one of the main story recordings where they literally cut off the speaker in the middle of a line and move to the next line (I believe it was the second founder recording when you come back to the main hall.) As the game's been out for over a year now, it seems like the devs have no interest in actually fixing the issues with the game. I would not recommend getting this game at a price point over $5.