[h1]Not Recommended, even after 8 years of "early access" (10+ years of actual development)[/h1]
Fast forward more than a decade since Jason began working on this game, and you get 3 puzzles, 2 minigames, and one whole boss fight. That's it. That's the game.
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[h2]The Game[/h2]
The first build of this game dates back to October 7th, 2015. That's when Jason started working on it. Early access launch didn't even happen until 2018, meaning the game had already been cooking for [i]three years[/i] before the public even got a version to be disappointed by. So really we're not looking at 8 years of early access, we're looking at over a decade of total development on a game you can finish before your lunch break ends. The pixel art is genuinely nice, credit where it's due, at least the artist clearly did their job. That's about where the compliments end.
The dev talks a huge game about scope, story, "multiple endings," monthly patches, the whole vision-guy schtick, but the output doesn't match the mouth. At some point [i]"early access"[/i] stops being a defense and starts being an excuse, and we blew past that point five years ago.
Remember the demo? Great puzzles, real combat, actual promise. Turns out that demo wasn't a taste of things to come, it was the peak. Everything after it stagnates into walking simulator territory. Combat consists of one real encounter design (copy-pasted a second time for good measure). From a director who introduces himself every stream with a resume longer than the game patch notes: Blizzard, Amazon, the Department of Energy, "hacker," "nerd." All that pedigree and somehow still just the one boss fight, wearing a different hat the second time around. Puzzles require the mental horsepower of a Roomba bumping into furniture. It's a "move this from here to there" tier, the kind you solve by accident while checking your phone.
Apparently, three puzzles in ten years wasn't puzzling enough though, because at some point he also bolted on an entire ARG, a separate, ongoing, community-solved cryptography puzzle running parallel to the main game. So the actual RPG has fewer puzzles than a cereal box, but the metagame surrounding it has a whole task force decoding hidden runes in the client files. Genuinely unclear which project is the side quest at this point.
The writing wants you emotionally invested in characters you've known for ninety seconds, drops plot threads with total confidence, and then never picks them back up. "It'll all make sense eventually" has been the pitch for a decade now..
[h2]The "Monthly Patches"[/h2]
Go look at the actual patch notes yourself. It's the same handful of categories on rotation - an animation tweak, a textbox shuffled two pixels, a line of dialogue, a bugfix, and of course, an ARG update, because god forbid a month go by without feeding the puzzle game that exists to make up for the puzzles missing from the actual game people paid for, and isn't anywhere close to being finished.
Nothing of substance is actually being added to the game. What you get instead is an endless polish loop on the same tiny sliver of content that's existed for years, dressed up as forward progress.
And here's the best part: this whole diligent monthly cadence only started [i]after[/i] Steam tagged the game as abandoned following over a year of silence. Nothing says "I was already hard at work" quite like needing a storefront algorithm to publicly shame you back into opening the project file. And the update? Total nothingburger, just merging game build for the sole purpose of keeping up the illusion of work being done.
More effort is spent on maintaining the appearance of an active project rather than on the project itself.
[h2]The Drama[/h2]
Then there's the guy himself, which honestly might be the bigger issue than the game at this point. Built his whole persona on being the calm, credentialed voice of reason in gaming, then went and demonstrated that live during a WoW Hardcore run: panicked, got two teammates permanently killed, and when a guildmate asked him to own up to it, delivered the immortal "Nah, I'm good. See ya," and left the call. Reassuring stuff from a guy who spends his downtime explaining to chat how everyone else is ruining the industry. He's also filed a bogus DMCA against another indie dev, which, coming from a self-described cybersecurity expert, is quite the twist, like finding out the building inspector's been sneaking in through the fire escape.
[h2]The Ego[/h2]
And that's the real kicker - the ego on this guy is the size of a raid boss, but his skin is somehow paper thin, like the plot of this game. He's got no shortage of opinions when it's him doing the criticizing, he'll happily go off on other devs, other games, entire community movements, all with absolute confidence. Constantly playing the "I've seen it all, I know better" character. But aim so much as a mildly worded critique back at him and suddenly it's harassment, it's a smear campaign, it's the internet hate machine coming for an innocent indie dev just trying to make his little RPG about a boy and his dog.
Here's a quote from his own stream: "The mods didn't ban him, so I did." He's personally hunting down a critic like it's a side quest, possibly the only thing he's ever finished ahead of schedule. Bans critics, curates an echo chamber of yes-men who'll never tell him the emperor has no clothes, and then acts shocked when the internet stops giving him the benefit of the doubt.
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If the game had shipped, none of this would have probably mattered. So all that's left is a mostly empty early access title, a decade-old build history nobody asked to be reminded of, and a dev whose entire personality is confidence he hasn't earned.
[b]0/10, check back in another 8 years, I'm sure it'll be done by then[/b]
