I believe I am discovering the reasons behind these “indie” games not being so popular. Not all, mind you, but some of them are just too “modern” and I guess “woke” for my old brain. Again, I really tried with this one, even gritted my teeth when I realised the entire game would be in these retro “16-bit” graphics with accompanying midi music and sound effects. I’ve played other games like this (Cloudpunk, for one) that I really enjoyed despite these things, but this game just pushed it to a point where you could barely see the characters, and even their “close up” visuals were still not great to me. They definitely did not look like the “trailer” images you see. Those are all full graphics and look amazing… that’s the reason I got the game. Clearly I needed to look further to see actual gameplay. My bad. I’m just not a “retro game” kinda girl. I lived through low-grade graphics once, I don’t need to do that again, right?

But, pushing through this, I started getting into the story – the game is actually very intuitive and offers lots of dialog options for different “attitudes” and a nice simple interface. You can view, touch/interact with, talk to, or use an item from your backpack on almost everything you see in a space. I liked that a lot! You could even talk to your plant! It didn’t answer, of course, but you got responses from the game like “this action will have consequences later… probably” and I love that kind of snarky sarcastic humour! I really enjoyed that side of the game. Your interactions with Turing can be very amusing, as well. Turing is like a child, but with an adult’s brain and understanding… they did a good job conveying that aspect of the little ROM. He is not two-dimensional in character, even if he is 16-bit visually! 😀 *laughs nerdily*

I was really enjoying the story, especially the detective aspect of it, the locations and people popping up to talk to and interact with… until we got to the Starlight Club.

The barman was lovely, and we had a great conversation. The main lead, TOMCAT, was also fascinating and warm and kind and I enjoyed our conversations… but before we got to “her” we had to deal with Jess.

Jess is a “hybrid” and Jess is so fekkin rude and bigoted, and treats you like shyte because you don’t “Get” that she’s a hybrid and she apparently HATES “normal” people… or “genotypical” as she calls them because we’re not as AWESOME as hybrids. We don’t need her at first… but later on, when our plans fall through (through no fault of our own) we then have to go GROVELLING to Jess to get some help. I tried, people. I really tried. But Jess is insufferable and I tried all dialog options – even went back and loaded the save for when I first encountered her and tried all THOSE dialog options to see if there was ONE where we didn’t OFFEND her by breathing.. but nope. She hates us and she won’t help. TOMCAT suggests we “be nice” to get her to help us… and I tried some dialog options, but Jess is so vain, and so elitist and bigoted, she refuses to help. We apparently had to resort to all sorts of other options to “prove ourselves” to Jess just to get her to grudgingly give us a pathetic lead… and I just couldn’t. It’s a game, and a game shouldn’t make you feel like you had to dirty yourself to get somewhere in it. I wasn’t uncomfortable that she was a “hybrid” or that everyone around me was whatever other “life types” and all the other things they are – I do not care what people are, as I believe everyone can do their own thing, as long as their ideals don’t get shoved down my throat, because I don’t do that to other people – I was irritated that they made my character out to be less important or cool than anyone else because I wasn’t augmented or a hybrid. That’s not cool. Maybe that’s just me being “old” and grumpy, but I don’t think so.

I carried on playing for a bit, trying out the various options to continue, but I’d lost my interest in the game at that point, and I have closed it, and I will most likely uninstall it and move on to the next game in my list.

Good luck, Turing. I hope you dream of Electric Sheep.