Paradise's Secrets

I usually don't like posting negative reviews for indie games, but something about all of the glowingly positive reviews that read as very...uh..."generated" makes me feel like I should put my two cents in. I had to stop about 15 minutes into playing this game because of a whole bunch of issues that would have made it a slog to force my way through instead of just a "meh, it was fine" experience. I should say that, fishy positive reviews or not, the developer clearly has big ambitions, and I hope they are able to match them down the road. I could understand what they were going for, and had they been successful, it would have been right up my alley. My problems come almost entirely from the actual gameplay/design which is clunky, to say the very least. First of all, it's just filled with community assets. I've seen the locations a dozen times before. Then when you pair that with movement that made me feel like my character was drunk with every step, unnatural jerky movements, the fact that you "plop" down the stairs one stair at a time instead of moving like a normal human, and that was enough to make me nope out. The game looks gorgeous (which is somewhat easy considering the assets) but I would have taken a 16-bit game with movement that didn't make me seasick. And this part sucks - because this developer actually seemed to use real humans for the voice acting instead of AI - which I SO appreciate. But, the audio quality is jarringly bad. I'm not even talking about the acting, I'm talking about the "face squished against the microphone" harsh sound capture combined with lossy sounding files. It made the whole thing feel cheap, and started to give me a headache. So, feeling both a little dizzy (yes, I shut off head bobbing - it didn't help) and with my ears being pounded, and with the awkward feel of the controls, I was done. It's a game that looks like a million bucks, but played so poorly that I couldn't even allow myself the time to get into the story, which is a shame. I hope they take some time to hone their craft for any future projects.