The Dot Reviews

This game was really fun and to me was a lot like the Stanley Parable and Superliminal which are two of my favorite games. I don't wanna spoil a lot but the games were cool. My one complaint I guess is not being able to save your place and you kinda get lost in all the folders opening up. I think I missed some things because of going through so many folders. Overall great game, amazing pigeons.

I've been looking forward to this game for a while now. It's not exactly what I expected, but I was definitely not disappointed. It's similar to games like One Shot or The Stanley Parable. There were a couple of times where I was confused, but then I found a new path to take and kept playing.

This game is as if you befriended a child of Beginner's Guide and One Shot, and the guy has some problems in his life and asks you to be his sitter while he takes shrooms. Then he starts to talk some metaphorical shit about his life, and you are too sober to understand it or even care - and the whole problem is that you also had to buy the shrooms for him.

So I was suffering from a bout of food poisoning the day I decided to play this. From playing through the fever dream that is The Dot combined with the frequent bathroom trips I now believe I have experienced what it's like to have Malaria. 10/10.

This game is very niche and very odd. I can see the appeal for people that enjoy 4th wall breaking puzzle games, but for me personally it wasn't the most enjoyable ride, mostly because the pacing was much to slow for my liking. Certain sequences without subtitles made it hard to stay focused. It's by no means a bad experience, but since Steam only allows Yes/No recommendations I'm going with No on this one.

This game is amazing and has made a comfy place next to some of my favorite games on my desktop I don't want to talk about the game that much because the more indepth it gets discussed the more the game loses a bit of it's magic by knowing what to expect; it's one of those games. The humor is really good and caught me off guard where I burst laughing tons of times. It even managed to get me to show some moments to my friends. The story and emotional aspect of the game is very nice and is personally somewhat relateable. I recommend playing this game and seeing what it has.

Its something. If you like meta games then this might tickle your fancy. But this is NOT worth 15 dollars. Its like the author played one shot and decided it wasn't meta enough for no good reason. Some people might like it but i cannot recommend this.

I followed this game from back when it was called "Dandelion", you can still find the original steam game page. This may not seem valid considering the new information and screen grabs provided by devs but this was not the game I was hyped up to play. In all honesty I was more annoyed trying to actually figure out if that game was going to come along, so I leave it simply that if you ended up here, thinking that this was going to be the "Dandelion" game you'd seen. It is not, sadly it might be amongst this somewhere in some form, however that is what I wanted to play and not all this other folder navigation, EXE, Jpeg nonsense. This may be a great game but for me the disappointment hit too hard too quickly when I tried it.

Hi. I never write Steam reviews. This game is going to change that, and I am going to need to dish out at least 10 positive reviews to tip my karmic scales to neutral after what I have to say about this game. Before I start, I want to write a brief foreword to the lead developer. Viktor - there is some very cool potential in here, mostly in assets/art and a little bit of gameplay. I took your words to the player during the game at face value - so, if you are as scared and fragile as you portray yourself in the game to be, please do not read any further and just keep doing your thing. Spoilers for the game ahead. TL;DR - this is not worth any amount of money or time, move on. Google "games that are meta" and play the top results instead to enjoy a much better experience. TW - suicide and violence. The Dot is less of a game and more of an experience, consisting in no small part of traversing directories on your computer, interacting with various file types including images, videos, text notes, and .EXEs. There is an overarching metanarrative present, and there is a written out conclusion to that narrative (which I will get to later). Because of this, I believe that people are quick to compare it to games like OneShot, Undertale, The Stanley Parable, and The Beginner's Guide. TBG in particular seems to be the most accurate comparison to stack this game against. Now, I unfortunately have not played a lick of TBG (I will definitely get around to it at some point), but from the very limited gameplay I happened across years and years ago, I can tell you with confidence that this game is NOT TBG and Viktor Dunets is most definitely NOT Davey Wreden. Please, play any of those games, especially if you haven't already been worn out by the beaten-to-death idea of video games being meta and/or existing outside of the game window that you are playing them in, and do not waste your time on this. So what is this "game of a bunch of games" really about? The overarching narrative seats us in the role of Egan, Viktor's estranged friend who has happened upon a folder on his computer. Over the course of diving into an ever-deepening chain of directories, Viktor paints a story through text notes of the circumstances that led Viktor to drift apart from Egan. Viktor wanted desperately for Egan to play the games that Viktor himself loved, but to no avail - Egan was not interested. One fateful day, Viktor asked once more for Egan to try one of these games, and Egan finally caved (for inexplicable reasons). Egan loved the game! And yet, this reaction prompted Viktor to recede into his shell, hiding away from Egan. That's it. This is the entire introduction and rising action to the actual "story" that this game has (barring any sort of metaphors that I missed within the various "subgames"). The ending reveals that the other characters we encountered throughout our journey through the folders and subgames are mere extensions of Viktor himself, and that the game that Egan played and reacted to so positively was actually a game that Viktor made. Pained by the realization that Viktor was hiding behind his own work, as well as the fact that he as a person has no more control or connection to the player of The Dot than any one of his fictional diegetic game characters do, he stabs himself in the stomach with a knife and kills himself. This story, which can be boiled down to a quick paragraph without losing any nuance that I am aware of, is stretched out and interspersed among a seemingly endless delve pit of folders. With each pit stop, you find something new, whether it be a note, an interactive game, or a "game" which is really just the developer talking about himself, life, and the creation of this game itself in general. Allow me to touch on the lattermost of these, because these seem to be the other key concept the game is hoping to impart on the player. Viktor takes breaks in the storytelling via "Intro"s to explain his creative process behind The Dot... as you're playing it. Hip and meta, I know. He does this by locking the player in place, focused on his avatar in 3d as he speaks using his voice. He comments on how the game "is him", and that he is inseparable from the game and that creating the game and the creation of himself are one and the same. That to play the game is to experience not only Viktor Dunets, but life itself - constantly taking twists and turns, not ending up how you may expect, and with no clear ending anywhere in sight. These are the roots of some potentially interesting ideas, that get the player asking, "Okay, that's very cool! And...?" But the "and" never comes. Let me take this time to interject and ask a question. Why do we play video games? There is an endless list of reasons; to get lost in a fantasy and escape from reality. To live out our wildest dreams and answer our biggest "what-if"s. To challenge our ideals and worldview. To bond with friends. To feel a rush of dopamine after taking down that boss, or making that difficult jump, or climbing your way high up a progression system. To achieve something by means of a very unique medium. The Dot, in my opinion, does not meet any of these reasons sufficiently. There is "immersion" - but the moments are extremely short, extremely few, and unrewarding. There exists philosophical commentary in the game, if you want to call it that - but nothing beyond "Woah, the human condition!" and "Everything is everything". There is no multiplayer component, aside from the railroaded "experience" that you have while "interacting" with Viktor himself within this process. There are some "challenges" in the game - but they are either simply testing your patience/tolerance for tedium, or just plain stupid (6 seconds). The Dot tries (very halfheartedly in a lot of segments - not even a swing and a miss, but rather a limp flick of the bat with the arms barely raised), but fails, at the "everything" that it promises it contains. Another overarching piece of the narrative is player agency - chiefly, how the player has none and the developer has it all. The dramatic ending to the metanarrative flips this idea on its head when Viktor realizes, seemingly for the first time as a result of the process of creating this game, "Oh no! It is actually I, the developer, who has no agency at all! The player is all powerful! I can't bear to live with the pain of knowing that I will never be able to have a real connection with my player(s)!" I'm running out of space, so I have to keep the rest of this brief. You need to write a compelling character to get a player to care, and to have a "connection" with them. And even then, this connection is usually one-sided - games are generally about telling "your story", not a back-and-forth between the developer and the player. What Viktor wants is a real relationship with a player - and that is impossible without true live interaction. Games that create a remotely good enough facsimile of this do so with much, much more care, effort, and intelligence than Viktor was able to display. My penultimate comment is that this experience really plays out like an actual suicide note, and I hope Viktor Dunets, the real human, is OK. I did a bit of social media sleuthing and I haven't seen any activity since The Dot's release. Maybe I got "trolled", like the subgames in this game do so many times to the ever-patient player. Maybe Viktor isn't serious about any of this. If so, I'm sorry for caring. Rest assured that, aside from a Twitter DM to ease my conscience and maybe do some good, I'm done caring anymore, and urge that prospective buyers and players never start caring in the first place.

If you are coming for the pigeon, this is not a place for you (false advertising). Also if you don't like getting pranked/trolled/bullied, this is also not a place for you. --- For the starter, the promo-video is mismatch with the real game. Well, the promo is quite a mess. It suggest that there're plenty of game style: 2D platforming, top-down explosion, FPS, etc... Which made it confusing on what is this game actually? Turns out that The Dot is, as advertised itself, not just a single game, but a collection of games of variety genre. Sound good? Here a caveat: those games are too small and unfinished. No, I don't think they should be considered as [i]games[/i] at all. They are, in fact, just prototype for levels. The "separation" of these traditional levels into their own "games" are just making navigation/progression annoying. The navigation, on the surface, looks [i]smart[/i], since it hijacks Windows Explorer to do a trick of infinity directory. But, for me as a programmer, this [i]hijack[/i] is a very bad practice, which could lead to malware/virus. In other words, the game try so hard to break the 4th wall. Sadly it fails hard since, instead of keeping the 4th wall an ultimate move with revelation, it use them everywhere to the point it became common. But the unforgiving part is in its "trolling" aspect. Launch the game and you'll see a loading screen, which loads nothing. It wasn't until you try to interact with it, so you get an "error" message pop-up and say shits, lots of shits. The dialog drags on and on until it finally say "clicking this button to proceed". But clicking that button plays a fart sound instead. Or going into some "game" will not feature a proper level to play (like, walk from point A to B by solving puzzle). But you'll spawn in a room with hundreds of hands floating around, all of them have the one and only gesture: pointing at you. And the background sound effect is that they're laughing at your face. Honestly, what that fun? It maybe fun in the eye the troller. But is it [i]fun[/i] from player's perspective? Sigh... Normally, I don't wanna make fallacies, like ad hominem. But the developer is stepping out of the line too much to the point that I suspect they is either social inept, lack of empathy, or just purely immature. Which is not suitable for being a gamedev, but should go see some psychiatrist instead.