I wish steam had an actual Mixed review option, because thats how I feel about this game.
It's very fun and after pirating it and playing it a hand full of times I decided to buy it and actually try to beat a full sentence in the game.
The game is great, don't get me wrong, but a lot of these frustrating elements are only funny to watch someone like Jerma or Vinny Vinesauce deal with. Actually paying for the game and playing it solo, these make it a mixed bag of an experience.
The frustrating parts are things like the controls, dialog and communication system.
The camera is very hard to control and will often clip into walls when you need to get somewhere important, and there isnt an option for third person or over the shoulder view.
The rest of the controls are fine i guess, the emote/communicate controls are probably the worst because they'll often have you give the middle finger to someone you like or have you set a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pizza on fire when you run up to it to grab and eat it.
The dialog is one of the most frustrating things in the game. Text takes up a quarter of the screen, NPCs will often tell you information you already know or could learn from books, computers and Ipads, and they always do it when your trying to stay alive or need to do something important to retain reputation points.
Selecting dialog options takes too long, theres a very large delay between pressing buttons to skip and to accept, and often you'll accidently make enemies with someone because you skipped text and it immediately registered an option selection.
Things that should be explained to you are never explained, like what exactly decreases reputation points. You can make friends with someone and lose reputation points from the entire prison and have no idea why. You lose them if you fail to make a friend, fail to do a task you were forced to do with no clear instructions on how to finish it or by ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ yourself because people kept talking to you and the camera got stuck on a wall.
Some other oddities include not being able to sit on toilets because they're too close to the cell wall when they spawn and you cant move them, being randomly attacked by a friend or fellow gang member for no reason or for failing a small task, and stat increases like weight from food taking so long that you fail tasks.
The life and death system is also confusing. I don't know if you can recover "lives" or if its all permanent, what counts as a death and what counts as a fakeout and if you can do anything to recover lives.
The game is also basically impossible to finish a full sentence.
I've gotten to 5 days and no further. Something will always happen, you will die to the most nonsense ♥♥♥♥ imaginable and the "revive" system is basically RNG so you need to cheese the game by using ALT F4 before it saves.
If I could suggest some ways to fix this, this is what I'd do:
Make the walls go invisible and have the camera clip when behind them like in The Sims
Change the controls for setting fires, or require something like matches to do it
Increase stat gain values for eating food
Maybe add a tutorial level to explain your stats hud and how things can change they're value
Fix the dialog system, make text go faster, disable input for a brief moment before the dialog option select comes up
Add a settings option to disable tips and advice from NPCs if you dont ask them for it.
In conclusion, the game is fun for the first few hours, but it becomes frustrating when you actually try to beat the game and make any progress. The game constantly sets your progress back faster than you can increase it, and eventually some NPC makes it their mission to murder you for basically nothing.
Its fun to watch streamers play it, but it doesn't stay very fun for long when you actually play it by yourself casually.
