I cannot fathom how this was in development for six entire years. For a game built around walking and talking, both mechanics feel underbaked. Thanks to no audio sliders, you cannot hear your friends beyond a range of about four meters. You cannot tell me this is intentional. Unless you travel glued together in a clump, you cannot speak to them whatsoever. This means you spend most of your time completely isolated, as you backtrack across the map, watching your inaudible friends 7.01 meters in front of you also struggle to tackle the strangely sticky terrain with their toolbox of an anaemic jump and an egregiously slow walk speed.
Not that you would have anything to talk about, anyway. The world is a homogenous expanse of forgettable terrain, with some random brightly coloured buildings pasted on the map here and there. There are no animals, or any form of stakes whatsoever. There are no interesting physics based items to troll your friends with, and even if there were you can't die or lose progress. I recognise this is intentional, and the game is designed to be very chill, but it made the game so boring. I don't think the scenery, graphics, or sound design is strong or varied enough to justify the game solely being a walking sim; especially when traversing is so uninteresting. There is no climbing, no real sense of exploration - as you end up sliding off terrain that looked entirely walkable whilst looking for shortcuts, and the map is gated off by key. I would much rather face more creative puzzles that actively engage with the terrain, water, platforming or even mazes, when unlocking sections of the map.
Some people say the fun is when your group meets back up after splitting up, and retell stories of your adventure, 'holding back laughter'. What laughter? If you're not too mesmerised to speak by the outrageously large crosshair sitting in the centre of your screen, your conversation will go as follows - 'Yeah I held a button down for about 4 and a half minutes whilst Jimbob, entirely out of earshot, walked to a lit up location and collected an item'. What a right barrel of laughs. Whilst the puzzles may very well get harder further into the game, the initial puzzles were blindingly obvious to a degree that was almost insulting. There was no sense of gratification to being the first to solve them. I spent 40 minutes clearing through the opening section and beyond, and about 10 seconds of that was spent actively figuring out how to solve the puzzles. You can ease your player base into the core gameplay loop whilst still respecting their time and without treating them as simpletons. It genuinely feels like a game designed for top of the bell curve redditors. 'Me and muh awesomerino wife and kiddo played this and WOW what a heckin' wholesome chungus experience wowowow GOTY!!!'. I think after a few patches (especially with regards to performance, I have a 2080ti and i9 and it ran quite poorly), it will be worth grabbing on sale. I don't really get the current glaze status for this game, if you want to talk with your friends whilst doing BS just play some miscellaneous roblox games for free.
