Die by Anything Steam Charts & Stats

This is a case where I enjoyed what I was reading, like this would be a good ass book or webcomic, but I don't think it was a good game/visual novel. Each chapter would be how the MC dies until he gets one of the good endings. Devs, that's the only way you can save this game. Because in two hours, I've already got all the endings and achievements, and it was absolutely horrible to trog through. Having played through everything I'll state my biggest problems with the game: [h2] Problems with menu and interface [/h2] 1. Anyone who's played a VN before will see the issue. The menu is an absolute monstrosity. For a game that you're supposed to be replaying a lot, having a terrible menu to navigate seems like an absolute mind boggling concept. Every time you push a button in the menu or when a scene transitions, the game does this stupid dumb idiot looney tunes style spotlight transition, it's ugly, it takes too long, it makes no sense AND THEY ALWAYS USE IT, THEY DON'T EVEN HAVE A DIFFERENT TRANSITION, IT'S ALWAYS LOONEY TUNES. AND THE LOADING! My God, whenever you select an option in the menu, you have to wait for it to load... and then after it loads you have to press a key for it to finish loading. For a game that's only 500mb, WHY DOES IT TAKE SO LONG TO LOAD!? Clicking through pictures and starting from different scenes shouldn't take so long, it should be near instantaneous. This isn't a PC problem, this is just the developers putting an arbitrary timer on loading. Oh and another thing! Pushing the skip dialogue button doesn't pause during new dialogue, so if you're trying to skip past what you've already seen, you better have a quick trigger finger to stop it or else you'll skip paragraphs of info, which also screwed me over since you have to push the skip button ONLY to cancel it, I was frantically clicking my mouse trying to stop it and missing out on half of the story. Funnily enough, you can't go back to see what you missed, there's no rolling up your scroll wheel to see what you missed. You have to view the dialogue transcript and that resets upon entering a new scene. You also can't see names in the transcript if they're not the MC or the narrator, so dialogue can be confusing to read through if there's a bunch of people. [h2] It needed more QA testing [/h2] 2. There wasn't enough quality assurance. So many things are wrong with the game and there wasn't enough proofreading. if you do end up buying the game, MAKE SURE YOU MUTE IT OR SET YOUR PC VOLUME TO 1%! The stupid volume slider in game doesn't work properly, setting that to the lowest without muting is still very loud, and it seems like some sounds in game just ignore it, there was some ridiculously loud sounds even with lowest in game volume which blew open my ear drums, so I think the in game setting is a placebo slider. And if that wasn't enough, the game isn't translated very well to English. Achievements have spelling mistakes, the pronouns of characters are wrong (not in like a anti trans way, I literally mean that some characters who are referred to as female, suddenly get called he/him and vice versa), the names of characters are wrong like it'll say the narrator is speaking when it's clearly not, and one time the dialogue was in Spanish. [h2] The art is... something [/h2] 3. The art is inconsistent and not very nice to look at. Don't get me wrong, some ending artworks are good, like whoever does the artwork for the good endings, they did a good job, very well done and looks like a proper professionally done manga or comic. However, I think one of the artists has an eyeball fetish, because 80% of the deaths have an eyeball hanging off or bulging out or looking really disgusting-like, even when it doesn't make sense to have one. Also, even though MC is meant to be a vague dark silhouette as a stand in, there are some endings where his shape becomes really weird and the art style changes drastically, and even some endings where you just see his face and head in detail, even if it's disfigured from the death. I think they were too wishy washy on whether or not this is supposed to be you or an actual character. Also, the backgrounds can vary, some look pretty good, while others look god awful and were done on MS paint (looking at the sewer ladder in particular, but some are even worse). Some backgrounds are coloured, some are black and white. Characters that pop up in game look very bad and out of place, you'll see anime characters and then suddenly rats, a crocodile and a goblin that look like they belong in an eldritch horror game. Besides all that, this might be a pet peeve of mine, but I think it's too gory, some people might like that, but since I thought it was a dark comedic game I was hoping it'd be more toned down. Some endings are tame, but a few are just hard to look at. But some people might enjoy that. If I had to say a few things positively... I thought the game was very funny when I could understand it. There were some good jokes woven into the dialogue (Narrator is very hilarious). A lot of meta references and forth wall breaks. The game had a very good hook with it's first choice (you literally die because you started off on the wrong foot). I also think it's a story you can't really get mad at, you can't really care if it's bad because it's still a good time reading it, it naturally makes you curious about the other paths. The good endings are also nice, it'll be stuff like hugging your mother and the police helping you out after you help them survive. All in all, this WOULD be a good game for like five dollars if there weren't so many weird issues. It's soo close to being alright, but it just needed some QA testing and quality of life improvements or fixes.