Sir Questionnaire Reviews

very simple and fun time waster. short sessions

Cool and a simple game with great pixel art. You have so many items to choose in your inventory but you have only two options to choose. There are various areas of dungeon. I would recommend it fully.

I'm digging it! It's an easy-to-grasp mini-RPG that's perfect as a pallet cleanser in-between longer gaming sessions (or boring movies). The core game-play consists of you making one of two choices during every stage, which might consist of fighting a creature, speaking to an NPC, buying items, and searching an area. There is an area to the right where all of your items are stored - navigating this takes some getting used to, but you'll be a dungeon-conquering master when you do! Do yourself a favour and grab it.

Sir Questionnaire is a game I've had on my wishlist for awhile. I love traditional roguelikes and I love chill games that give options forward. This game is really neither of those things, though. It is a mobile game that was not adequately ported for PC. It is mechanically disjointed and the gameplay lacks any real meat or strategic input from the player. It's very random and you will die for reasons that make no sense or are completely out of your control. (Like popping a healing item only to have it kill you because it was "bad"). Most of the rooms you can do nothing with and after my first twenty-minutes of play (ten runs or so), I did not see any more unique rooms. Highest I made it was floor three. There are no guaranteed ways to heal. No description or damage indicators for various weapons to know what to use & what is strong. There is no difference between ways you walk or move. There is no backtracking. There is no sense to the enemies or the progression at all. It's very much a mobile game and acts like it. It's meant for playing for 5min on the toilet & being done. After playing for just under an hour and attempting a good 20 or so runs I cannot play this any more. Here are some things that stood out to me about the game that I question the design choices on. This is mostly a brainstream of thoughts/notes for the dev, moreso than part of an actual "review", but each of these certainly contributes to my poor experience. --- In fullscreen (default & not an option in settings): - Alt-tab closes/crashes the game. - ESC closes/crashes the game. (not always) - Clicking to another monitor closes/crashes the game. - Hitting the Win key closes/crashes the game. protip: alt+enter for windowed mode & no more crashes - Tab does not do anything but hide UI elements and change the font on the inventory back button. - Why is there a giant "BACK" button on the bottom left of the Inventory but it does not do anything when clicked? Also why does inventory take up half the screen and never go away? - Left/Right controls do not work with the old man dialogue. You have to grab the mouse & click Next to get past it. - No way to pick up dropped items (I tried to drop the hellgate key when the old man said he needed something to unlock the chest & I cannot get it back) - It would be nice to have a button animation for when your mouse is hovering. They currently sort of lack "impact"? for lack of a better word. - My biggest wish for the UI is to have consistently "attack/search/" on one side and "escape/walk/" on another side. They swap around and it's disorienting. Sometimes you even get a "walk" on both sides. What's the difference?? - When you equip something, rather than saying what you equip, it says "You mount a ". So if you equip a shield when you had no shield before, it says "You mount a null". Also how do I unequip a shield without equipping another one? - Difficulty ramps up QUICK and all-at-once. You are one-shotting things with cane and then suddenly you run into an unescpable room with 2 skeletons that take 4 hearts in one attack, ending your run. This happened on every run I attempted. Not always skeletons but always a surprise one-shot. - Escape mechanism is available on seemingly all fights but the hard ones. Almost seems pointless. - So many rooms with "this is locked!" but you never see them again & then you go to the next floor. What's the point of them if the items to open them are not dropped prior to encountering them if you'll never be back to that floor anyways? Seems there should be some logic that only spawns one of those rooms when you have the item needed to actually interact with it. OR a way to backtrack. I've made it to floor 3 a about ten times now and I've never been able to buy a single thing from the merchant, open a single chest, or open a single locked room. - Rooms with >1 enemy will have you kill one and then loot before killing the other. Really silly. - Some of your own items will randomly kill you (like milk if it's "bad", which is lame to have on an identified healing item to begin with...) - The old man rooms are ALL stupid. The "better place the right item on the altar" one needs a rework. How do you place something on the alter?? My only options are "pray" and "walk". Same with "weight of an is your price" rooms. His "tutorial" messages are useless. "Locked chest? Find a key!". Thanks. I would've never known! - Enemies are heavily re-used and there's no way to predict how powerful they are this time. Vines might be cane-one-shot at the beginning and then be damage sponges that hit twice as hard in the very next room. Zero predictability. - RNG can and will screw you. This isn't good RL design, it's random programming design. Player should not be able to encounter an enemy capable of killing them in two hits in ROOM TWO of a run. No items, no heals, and escape is blocked. What is the intended action here? "Ah well, dang RNG!". That's not how RNG should be used. --- The main problem with Sir Questionnaire for me is that it does not play like a roguelike or a game at all, for that matter. The player has so little control or input in how things go that it's like you are not even playing. I could set up a script to randomly hit left and right arrow keys & hit enter every once in awhile and probably have just as many good/bad runs as when I am in full control. How is that good design?

I can tell that this game is made by a true roguelike lover. It lacks a littlebit of polish here and there (some sorting order for enemies and environment elements) and there is quite a few stuff which are not explained and that may lead to you to death in a pretty frustrating way from time to time. But, it has many elements that i really love from this kind of game: - unforgiveness - thrill of exploration - understand things by their context I wish orangepixel could just invest more in polishing some really minor detail but the game is really fun and a high recommendation to all roguelike lovers.

It's a bit... egh. Time and time and time again do I wish we had a middle ground option on Steam. It's not "terrible", but neither is it all that good. Maybe with a lot of refinements and tweaks it could be a good game, but as it stands it's just a bit too... Mobile janky.