Banishing You Steam Charts & Stats

This is a strange one. On one hand, I can't say I didn't enjoy it at all, but on the other - I can't bring myself to recommend it, because the game doesn't deliver what it seems to be promising at all. To start with the good stuff: - It's beautifully drawn and very pleasant to loot at. - It has lovely music - and for the length of the game surprisingly wide variety of it. Next, here are the things I'm mostly meh about: - The writing wasn't bad, but it didn't really work for me. The narrative starts off as wistful and melancholic, and then you meet all those whimsical characters who somehow turn out to be very plain as soon as you start talking to them. Like, you were whisked into a dream realm, wandered through the mystical grove to the moonlit meadow, and there you met him: your neighbor Fred, walking his dog (but in a slightly cryptic manner). Additionally I didn't feel like characters have any real distinction in their writing and dialogue - though it turns out that was a part of a much bigger issue I'll touch upon later. - The story itself felt not very well paced. You start off spending the first third of the game going about your day making a lot of fairly inconsequential choices: read or play the game, follow the path or go into the woods. As it turns out those determine which character's route you land on, but, yeah, more on that later. Then you get a very brief exposition and option to pursue romance, and then suddenly you are supposed to make some bigger-than-life choices. The end. It's like as if the entirety of the first book of Lord of the Rings were about Frodo doing his hobbit things in Shire, the second one was about the meeting in Rivendell, and then the third was about literally everything else that happened after that. I think a story describing something this grand could be successfully told in an hour-long game, but not like that. - The romance is, uh, weird. The main four characters start to touch you immediately (in the situation you seemingly cannot escape), then quite literally about an hour after you met they try to kiss you, and your options are either to push them away (no romance) or let them (yes romance). I mean, call me a buzzkill but I believe that in the year of our lord 2024 one shouldn't have to physically push away a mysterious fantasy man to stop unwanted advances. And finally, the reason for this negative review: - The four main LIs are - literally - the same character. Seriously. Apart from the names being different in each of their respective routes, there are maybe a couple of unique lines for each. I'm not trying to say that they are too similar, or generic, or follow the same archetype, or whatever. I'm pretty sure all four routes literally use the same lines with variable for the character's name from start to finish. So you basically have to only choose which one's sprite you like better, there is no reason to finish routes for other three. I often see people complain about lack of unique content in character routes, but, hey, this is a new low. There is a 'secret' fifth route that has a different final climactic part, but even there you get a bunch of reused narration and dialogue lines. - And as an extra little nitpick: despite text being exactly the same, you cannot skip it in a different route.