Pains me to leave a negative review on an indie game, I’m usually pretty tolerant with them but this isn’t really a “it’s bad, don’t buy it” type of review, it’s just a fair warning to proceed with caution and that I would specifically not recommend it if you play games with a controller (and on the Steam Deck in my case) in its current state. Torutaru has an interesting style and setup that immediately captivated me, but unfortunately the early access-ness of it all does very quickly start to show. I encountered a ton of bugs, some of which I will delve into in a bit for the developer, and the biggest issue here for me was simply the controls. It feels like a very poor design choice to assign so many different buttons to so many differeny things and it’s very hard to keep track of them all when playing on a controller - the game only shows keyboard controls, and it’s usually not too hard for me to get used to what keyboard buttons equate to what controller buttons in more than a few minutes, but Torutaru makes you use buttons like Y, N, Q, E, F, N and backspace pretty much all within the first 15 minutes. Again, this is probably fine if you’re playing on a keyboard in which case you can disregard me, but I must stress that this is a specific warning for people who play with controllers or on the Steam Deck.
Aside from that, I ended up having to play through the unskippable intro sequence three times in my 1.5 hour playtime - the first two times because right after the intro sequence I went to the menu screen to change the mouse sensitivity, and when I moved the joystick left to slow it down a little, it just kept going even when I let go of the joystick until it got to 0 and then softlocked me. I wasn’t able to click on anything and none of the buttons worked so I essentially became trapped in the menu screen. Exited the game, played through the intro for a second time, this time running past the thing that comes at you during the street scene, which also led to a bug where I got stuck on that street for a while because the event that’s supposed to trigger when it catches you wouldn’t do so, but managed to trigger it after running around for a while. Got back to where I was, tried the mouse sensitivity thing again hoping it may have just been a weird one-off bug, but sure enough, exact same thing happened twice. Restarted again, got back to where I was, this time being very careful not to touch the menu at all. Played a couple runs, got up to floor 3, and then my steam deck ran out of battery (seconds after it got to 10%, I was about to grab my charger and plug it in). There was no option to save in the menu so it just threw me right back to the unskippable intro when I launched it again, and I wasn’t really in the mood to sit through it for a fourth time for a game that I spent half of my playtime trying to get it to run properly.
I’m sure this will be a great experience once it’s been refined and optimized, and I’ll probably repurchase it when that day comes and give it another chance, at which point I’ll delete this review. But for now, I’m unfortunately refunding it until it’s ready to be played on a Steam Deck.
