This game shows promise for a first-time developer, and I'll be interested to see if they can build on that and improve in their next game. Good writing mostly, some interesting puzzles, original basis for a story, good characters. But Not Another Weekend just isn't a well designed game, making playing it a PIAT. The key problem is that you repeatedly, over and over again, have a vague list of tasks and only a general idea (if that) of what you need to do to advance them. Or, at times, no immediate tasks no idea what you need to do to advance the story.
So what do you do when you run into these repeated roadblocks? Go floor by floor, room by room, character by character, hitting the hotspot locator in every room to see if any new items have randomly appeared in some random location, or some random character has randomly appeared in some random location, or some previously unusable item in some random location has suddenly become usable, and talk yet again with every character looking for some new dialogue option to pop up out of the blue. It gets really tedious repeatedly having to do this because of how poorly guided and sign-posted the objectives are and how random it seems to be when and where new items or people will suddenly pop up or old characters or items will suddenly become pick-uppable or have new dialogue options.
A couple concrete examples of this repeated problem At one point you're told you need to eavesdrop at a door. Nothing that you've been able to pick up to that point does anything. Nothing you've seen sitting around up to that point seems relevant. No character has a dialogue option about it. What do you need to do? Go to the far right hand side of a completely unrelated room on a different floor, hit the hotspot indicator, look carefully and notice that the required item has randomly appeared on a shelf that wasn't there before. Another time someone's vandalized the hotel and you're tasked with making them clean it up. Okay, but where's the culprit? He's not where he was before. He's not in his room. He's just randomly standing around at the far end of a completely unrelated hallway. So you find him eventually by just walking up and down the hall on every floor until you happen upon him.
I suppose the best way to play this, knowing ahead of time about that central design flaw, would be just to have a walkthough always at hand and immediately check it when you run into one of these frequent dead ends and need a clue on where to go next in order to avoid the tedium of going floor by floor, room by room, character by character rechecking everything yet again to find the one thing that's changed that you need to advance the game.
Another annoyance is how clunky the interface is. Dialogue comes in tons of very short lines. It doesn't auto advance, and you need to click through all of them (thank God there's at least no typewriter effect!). Fine, no problem in general. The problem is that for some reason there is a delay after a line appears before you can click through it. So even something as pointless as "..." as a dialogue (which is actually the only way one particular character talks) won't let you quickly click through it, and every line lingers longer than it takes to read. Considering that the majority of the game is spent in conversation, this is annoying. Another seemingly small thing that is annoying by how frequent it is is the broken TAB key to open the map/task log. You will need to open this thing literally hundreds of times during a playthrough. TAB is supposed to open and close it. Somehow the developer broke this in a patch and never bothered to fix it. So you need over and over again to click at the very bottom left of the screen on the map icon to open it, then at the very top left to close it. Sounds like a minor issue but it's such a frequent core part of the game that the broken TAB hot key turns into a serious annoyance after a while.
