I'd like to start by saying this is a rough gem, but a gem nonetheless. If you have any interest in dystopias or alternate history settings, and you enjoy narrative heavy games, then give this a try, right now! You may not agree with the themes or message of each dystopia, and you may have problems with aspects of the game's general historiography (if certain other reviews are any indication), but what's interesting about someone who thinks exactly like you do?
Now for some complaining:
Firstly, this is not a Choose Your Own Adventure where you'll spend hours debating philosophy with the characters or that has thousands of choices with bespoke outcomes. This is a puzzle game. The narrative hints and feedback you receive are certainly much better than the point-and-click or puzzle games of decades (lol) past, but still too thin and vague for my own taste and I think the taste of general audiences. Worse is that many puzzles require you to get three separate elements correct and does not give you different feedback than if you had gotten them completely wrong, even if you were close. In one instance, I selected the correct trigger and the correct action, and was very frustrated to find out when reading the walkthrough later that I would've never experienced 2/3's of the story if I hadn't looked up a guide, simply because I didn't select the correct item.
Unfortunately, I believe this story may have worked better in a novel format, if the puzzle elements had been removed completely, or if the resource pressure of the children's ever-increasing ages was removed or at least halved. As it is, it simply does not feel very good to send your kids back in time and waste 10 years of their life having learned nothing new, despite your most educated guess. This is surely part of the intended experience, but you're ALSO expected to restart multiple times to get all the different endings. This is only made more tedious by that fact that your discovered timelines only stay on-screen until you change saves or restart, and there is no indication that you've explored all the valid branches of a timeline! You're expected to care about your kids, and I did at first, but you start to view them as tools after the fifth restart. This feels like a really bad design clash and makes for an unpleasant gameplay loop.
There is an argument that this could also be intentional (full spoilers ahead!), [spoiler] mimicking your character's personal development. I don't think that makes sense. Firstly, and most importantly, it's very clear when you restart that you are doing it as the player and not the character. However, multiple dialogues with the children about your behavior before reaching the bunker imply, and the contrast between the "Good Ending" and "Best Ending" basically confirm that your character was basically a Vetverist-lite all along. Or, at least, someone who wanted a life of death and violence for themselves, even if they maybe wanted a better future for humanity and recognized that particular dystopia as not being objectively better than most of the rest outside of personal preference. It is possible the protag really was a cold-blooded sociopath doing it all for himself, as some of Ula's dialogue and timeline imply. Even after you get the archival fluid you can't choose to follow Jag's suggestion to find a nice timeline and jump into it together, or start using yourself in the experiments. Still, I take the more optimistic interpretation I began with. [/spoiler] That being said, I think my argument stands.
Also, and this is a pretty minor complaint given this is a project from an indie solo dev (as opposed to the puzzle/gameplay issues which were a design choice that added MORE work for the dev), but I found the UI to be pretty visually unappealing and lacking in feedback. It definitely felt a little sluggish too, though that may just be my machine. However, the choice of multiple themes based on ideologies you've discovered was a nice touch. I also REALLY enjoyed the FMVs!
Despite complaints making up the vast majority of this review I'd like to say I still really loved this game's and only wrote all this out because I was distraught to see only about 5% of players have finished the game! My suggestion: play the game as intended until you start to get frustrated and then use the dev's guide and flowchart to experience the rest of the story. Really excited to see what Last Piscean comes up with next! And please, throw this developer some cash before a youtuber makes a two-hour video essay summarizing every single plot point and sucking up further sales.
