Holonoptic

Holonoptic is a futuristic sci-fi corporate simulation/rpg strategy that scratches the right itch to keep you coming back. The characters and the story are genuinely compelling, offering a surprising amount of freedom to play the game, and interact with the world and the characters in almost whatever way you choose. Want to be a heartless corporate overlord? Go for it. A union leader trying to build a worker's utopia? Also possible. Some weird mixture of all of the above, or just someone looking out for numero uno? Also good. The game doesn't hold your hand, and the often confusing UI doesn't make it any easier to wrap your head around the deep game mechanics that allow you to fully engage. I'm hopeful that continued development irons some of this out because, once you do get a feeling for the expansive options Holonoptic offers, it is genuinely impressive. Well done. This is one I'll keep coming back to for awhile.

Chief Non-linearity Officer EfficientParadox, reporting for duty! As one of the beta testers, I managed to rack-up roughly 90 hours in the beta-test, and reported quite a few bugs. I am saying this, because while I received the game for free, I am not paid for a review or anything! Onto the proper review! I love this game, as seen by the hours I put into a beta-test (within a 2-3 weeks of being in the test). The story is insanely enjoyable, I love the characters, the gameplay is simple, albeit complex. I have played on 4 of the 6 difficulties. Including the hardest difficulty (Singularity). I say this to show that the game is enjoyable even on higher difficulties. Singularity is a great challenge for someone who wants to see how far they can min-maxx the game. If you are able to complete the first deadline in Singularity, hats off to you, as I never was able to. (Although I did not min-maxx fully enough I believe.) Enough about that, a proper review needs a description of the game. Holonoptic is a cyberpunk near-future corporate intrigue business management game. It includes elements like that of Disco Elysium's emotion system, with each part of you contributing to the full you. You are CEO of the company following a previous CEO's disappearance, and appear to have been selected by Glazial's AI, Geist. Various factions will compete for the dying carcass that was/is Glazial. Will you lead the company into a profitable future with maxximizing shareholder value? Will you lead the office drones of the world to unite? Will you steal from the rich, to enrich yourself? It is up to you. This is a message from CNO EfficientParadox. You have been chosen as the new CEO of Glazial. I wish you the best of luck, should you choose to accept this new role. I recommend you try, as it is a euphoric and dadastic experience. - Signed, CNO EfficientParadox.

Excellent game. Knows what it wants to do, and gets it done. Story keeps you hooked and is an entertaining ride through corporate intrigue. The characters are memorable and unique (and quite funny, especially their voice lines). If you've worked in the corporate world some of the characters and situations will feel eerily familiar, though make no mistake, in this game you are one of the decision makers, not an office pawn (even though, like in real life, CEOs tend to be pushed around by the REAL decision makers). The game mechanics are easy to understand but have a good amount of depth. And it really makes you feel the progress you are making, both in terms of the skills of your characters, as well as your mastery of the game systems. I really liked the emotion/drug system, a unique twist on the Disco Elysium trait system. I played during the beta and received my copy for free, but I will be purchasing another copy to support the developer and play through again. Would highly recommend!

Holonoptic pulls off something rare, it actually earns the "sim meets story" label instead of just slapping the two together. The UI is a bit of a mess though. The systems are modular enough that you can already see a dozen directions this could expand. If the devs keep supporting it, this could go from "good with rough edges" to something genuinely special. I'm writing this review to support the game and give it a bit of a boost, it really deserves it.

Crusader Kings 3, but about CEO, corporate intrigue and AI.

如果你沒有在上市集團當過總經理、董事長的經驗，那麼你可以買這款《Holonoptic》來過一下乾癮。 如果你也一樣曾在上市集團擔任過 C-LEVEL 的工作，那麼真心建議你可以買《Holonoptic》來玩一下，因為實在太過寫實，看到集團人資長來嗆聲的時候，就忍不住噴笑了出來 😂

There's a lot promising and a lot to work on. --I like the flavor and the worldbuilding. The writing is generally pretty solid. --the game is heavily inspired by Disco Elysium at every turn. --The UI is pretty terrible at every level. In particular, assigning executives from one location to another, and then assigning them to a job (which may or may not be possible if they are in transit) takes a lot of clicks and does not work reliably. Functions which need to be done close to each other frequently aren't even close in the game's navigation, e.g. assigning executives to a mission vs. equipping executives with equipment that will make them able to complete the mission. --in general, using the world map is notably terrible, and I'd recommend maybe thinking about getting rid of it altogether. Do we actually need to worry about where in our corporate empire each executive is? Why is it so tedious to move executives between offices (and opportunities). --A lot of the assignment detail is really anti-intuitive. For example, some of the CEO's office missions usually takes a different skill and it'll be an entirely different agent you want in that slot pretty much. Except... why? It's really weird to have to host my tech guy in the CEO's office rather than, I don't know, the CEO, to do the mission which is unlocked by the CEO's office. I think a better approach would be more flexible agent assignments WITHOUT needing to babysit this at the "who is in which office at this particular second, which will be constantly changing based on mission needs". --it is wildly bizarre how hard it is to find out what each of the upgrades does. For example, in the CEO's office, you can start something called "Cousin Economy." Except, it doesn't say how much it costs or what it does and good luck get ****ed guessing what that is if you've not heard of this Swiss concept. You COULD click on the Projects menu tab where the project is listed with its function, except this Projects menu tab is NOT where projects are started or managed. What are we even doing here? The project information flow in this game is unpleasantly terrible. --A special shoutout for how miserably hard it is to pick character traits/skills/feats at the start of the game. Every time you add a starting job (which may happen more than once if you are playing with a Mid-Life Crisis character), the game resets your skill points. Which is incredibly unwelcome at all times, but especially for MLC characters. This is maybe the least intuitive character creation interface I've ever seen and it needs a lot of work. --The game doesn't make this clear very much, or at least it didn't when I was playing, but there's a huge difference between KNOWN stat points and stat points given by inventory items. Your character starts with a total of 3 KNOWN stat points which can be used for unlocking feats which are also sometimes called Courses (e.g. there are some feats/courses which can only be unlocked if you have 3+ Creativity, and some feats/courses grow in power as your KNOWN stats improve). The ONLY way to gain more KNOWN stat points is to go on missions and assignments that require that stat (e.g. managing a server lab doing Geist upgrades, negotiating business deals, working on acquisitions, etc). Notably, working in the CEO's office without a mission does not give any stat points. Stat points which you gain from inventory items do not help at all towards unlocking feats/courses. The game hardly explains any of this at all, good luck get ****ed is generally the vibe here. --currently I have a can't proceed game error where it seems like completing a mission on the same day as its deadline causes a "your game crashes forever and the save file's no good either". So, yeah... this does not feel ready for release at the moment. --Character design in the game is generally on the ugly-ish side. --I dislike how little stats play into company acquisitions/management. For example. The difference between having having no known Science whatsoever and 5 known science (presumably one of the best in the world) is just about nothing. It doesn't unlock any products AFAIK or make your products more effective or increase revenue or profitability, anything. (There's a trivial one-time ask where you'll be given a tiny mission with a tiny amount of Science progress before buying a science company, but this can be trivially be done quickly by any executive who is temporarily holding a +1 science item). This is quite odd and lackluster. Weirdly, the only person that can increase the revenue of a science company comes from... a Creative Director who can increase revenues with branding strategies. I've got a branding strategy which might make character selection feel less pointless. It's called "have an incredible superscientist and develop drugs that no one else in the world has yet." I don't think the game allows this at the moment, but have fun finding a branding director I guess. --In general, the game leans heavily towards soullessly amassing an army of pawns which are ~interchangeable and have no flavor whatsoever. Get ready for news updates like "pharmaceutical purchase #4 just entered the field". --Weirdly the main executives at each of the pawn are NOT interchangeable which penalizes you heavily if you go for a hostile takeover that brings you a NPC instead that won't get any scripted missions down the line. Oops, good luck get ****ed if you didn't figure that out. --A lot of "repeat this 100x" grinding. For example, each of your purchases gets usually 5-10 missions for expanding it to its max size. I'd expect 10-30 purchases over the course of a game. Yeah, this is a crazy unfun setup with very little automation.