Tally Ho Reviews

A very nice CoG game. One I actually hesitated about purchasing for years (though what tipped the balance isn't relevant to this game). Regardless, while I can't say I regret not buying it before, I was still extremely pleasantly surprised. The reason why did not think "I should have purchased it long ago" was because I've came to appreciate these more chill / low stakes stories more recently, so buying it in the past would have made it less good to me and left an impression of frustration. In the end it worked out well. Anyway, let's cast my ramblings aside. This game has a lot of reviews already, so I won't be too long with mine! PROS: It has a nice and crisp style of writing, though the first few pages have a bit of repetition. Characters feel pretty alive and the romance I did was lovely. An all in all good story if you like that style or are open to it. I was worried the humor would be too annoying to me, but it was perfectly fine! Also, another notable fact is the implementation of a checkpoint system. So while it isn't by any means a perfect solution for the lack of conventional saving CoG suffers from, you can still go back to the start of any chapter you just finished instead of actually concluding it and going to the next. It means you can just finish a chapter by clicking whatever you want if you made a mistake and come back to the start of it to fix it. Way faster than restarting the game, especially in later chapters. NEUTRALS: As most interactive fiction nowadays, it's written in second person. A con for me and probably for a lot of VN players, but if you read as many text based IF as I do you should be used to it and it's just a choice, not something bad. Just wanted to note it. Also, this one is pretty stat heavy, which is becoming less and less of the norm nowadays. What you make of it will also depend on your preferences. But... CONS: The way stat building and skill checks are done as a whole, sadly. Now, this is where I have real gripes with the game. 90% of the time, I was confused as hell as to which choice option increased/decreased each stat or tested it. The phrasing tends to make it unclear to the point of being entirely obtuse at times, and there is no possibility to toggle on indicators that would solve the problem as some more modern games have sometimes. This coupled with the lack of saves or cheats could really make for a frustrating experience at times, though at least the checkpoint system helps. Unfortunately, the way the game phrases its choice options isn't the only issue with stats. Skill progression is very annoying in this game. Most choice options make more than one stat move, and not always (rarely) in the same direction. Without careful min-maxing, you could really find yourself having quite low stats for checks that get relatively demanding later on, as you may pick choice options that will make you stagnate with a skill that goes up only to go down by a similar amount on the next choice and so on. This means depending on your luck (not skill) in interpreting what changes each choice will make happen, how lucky you are in what your organic picks could mean for stats or on your ability or not to code-dive and just check it all and pick accordingly (in my case it was a mix of all three, to be fair), you could get a fantastic character who succeeds at most of what they do and be quite desserving of their status of high-end servant, or they could be a total clutz who fails miserably at everything. You don't have game overs or anything, so this is not as catastrophic as it could be in other games, but could be quite disheartening. Funnily enough, you'd think in a game more on the laid back and low stakes end of the spectrum like this one, you wouldn't need to rely so heavily on stats instead of pure narration, but it is what it is. So yeah, my final opinion is still very positive cause I had a great time, but I know it wouldn't have been the case without the safety net of code diving. I wish this had proper cheats that I could purchase like the sequel has. If you can't or don't want to play that way, don't get disheartened if you fail a lot though! You're not "bad at the game", the game is just demanding with your comprehension of skill progression and with the level of the skill checks! Just make full use of the checkpoint system and I'm sure it'll help you!