Crosley Bendix 最近的评测

Endless Mondays: Dreams and Deadlines is a funny, somewhat thought-provoking, short VN that suffers from playability issues.

Let's start with the positives: this game has a subtle but effective sense of humor that really worked on me. It's not trying too hard to make you laugh, it simply lets the ridiculous situations speak for themselves. It also effortlessly slides in and out of a more serious tone for certain scenes, which, although some of them were a little overly expository and could've been omitted or trimmed down, were for the most part very poignant and would justify playing this game by themselves if it weren't for one glaring issue: the playability.

The biggest problem is that the actual act of playing is so painful that it undermines the whole experience and left me feeling sour at the end, after trying unsuccessfully for two hours to figure out how to get the true ending. Here are some ways that this game fails to learn from earlier VNs and compromises playability:

• Animations are too long and cannot be skipped. Every time you click on "Move" or "Talk" in this game, which will be dozens of times over each playthrough, you have to sit through a few seconds of animation consisting of the button you just pressed blinking in and out and sometimes also the screen fading to white. If every animation takes 5 seconds to finish, and you press buttons 100 times during your playthrough (a conservative estimate), that's over 8 minutes spent doing nothing but waiting for animations to finish. The game is barely an hour long from beginning to end for the normal ending, and you'll spend an eight of that time watching the same animation over and over again. No one else does this; nearly every other VN out there lets you skip animations by clicking or holding Ctrl.
  
• The so-called "skipping" mode is, ironically, very slow. It takes a couple of seconds for it to even start skipping after you start holding the key down, it doesn't skip through text particularly fast, and then it doesn't skip through animations, plus whenever the game stops you to make a choice you have to start skipping all over again, instead of being given the option to continue skipping after choices (let alone only skipping unread text or not) like most modern VNs. It gets real old by the time you start your third save.
  
• The mechanics by which you progress the story are not properly explained (if at all), and a lot of content is hidden behind unintuitive requirements. The objective of the game, evidently, is to create 6 files before the deadline; to create a file, first you need to find inspiration; whenever Penny (the main character) finds inspiration, she will immediately say she's "feeling inspired (highlighted in orange)" and you'll immediately get the choice to go back to your desk, at which point Penny will create the file. What you're somehow supposed to figure out here is that this period between getting the inspiration and creating a file from it is the only time that you can call people to discuss this inspiration with them, and after that those dialogue options will disappear. Huuuh!?!? This is really really bad, because it creates an expectation that important content will only be reachable by exhausting every possible combination of actions, which, VERY MUCH IRONICALLY FOR A GAME THAT OPPOSES THE AUTOMATION OF ART, turns the player into more of an algorithm or a machine that tries different 4-number combinations and checks off all of the incorrect ones until it arrives at the correct code. All of the joy of experiencing a fun adventure where your intuition and rational thinking can lead you to an interesting or desirable outcome immediately gets thrown out the window, because there's no way anyone would rationally arrive at these arbitrary combinations of choices. Goodbye, reader! Welcome, achievement hunter!

All in all, Endless Monday really had a lot of potential. The characters are charming, it's funny, and it touches on some interesting issues regarding generative AI, but the actual game is lacking a strong mechanical foundation and is held back by the clunky UX. I hope the developer can learn from these mistakes and create something that's not so tedious to play next time.

It could've been great.

The main problem with this game is the jank. Sometimes you have to click buttons several times before they do anything; the draggable area is inconsistent across windows; you can't drag icons on the desktop or rename saved documents; the terminal emulator has no tab autocompletion and no cd or dir commands, so navigating the filesystem for puzzles is a painful experience; the reminders application can't be closed after it is opened; characters will sometimes send the same chat message twice in a row. The list goes on. To stay on the subject of the chat, it's also indicative of a lack of polish how, when the player picks one of two options, the characters will often give a reply that only really makes sense for the option they did not pick.

So, mechanically, it's a hot mess. The last update was released in 2019 so I very much doubt these issues will ever be fixed. Also, apparently this update made 6 out of the 7 achievements impossible to obtain.

As for the narrative, it's a similar situation. There are certain things that suggest that the game would've originally had more content, for example the "guestbook" section on the PGFans page which would supposedly open on the 18th (the game ends on the 15th, and the set date doesn't make much sense diegetically), or how the game doesn't utilize all of its elements thoroughly, or just the way everything resolves so quickly in the final third of the game. The story itself is not bad though, and the writing is deceptively good, but it just doesn't feel finished.

I am a 45 yo father, probably one of the oldest people playing this game. I am a single farther to my Son, who is 14 now. My son got this game for Christmas, so we installed it on his computer and he started playing. By the end of the week he had 24 hours on this game. This was horrible for me, as it was already hard for me to find ways to spend time with my son, as he is always out with his friends or just, watching YouTube. So i decided to make a Steam account and get this game to see if I could maybe play alongside him. loaded into the game, made my character and world and started playing but I was stuck on what you where supposed to do. I asked my Son for help and he hosted a game for me to join. loved it as it was the best time had spent with my Son since my wife had died. This game has ever since brought me and my son closer again and now we actually spend time together outside the house together as well. This game reminded me that there's fun to be had in everything, and it has brought both me and my Son many happy memories

SeaBed is, as it says on the store page, a yuri-themed mystery visual novel. It is not, however, about yuri, or in other words, how society views lesbian relationships, or how characters come to terms with being gay, or anything like that.
The yuri is basically taken for granted. The focus of the story is directed mostly at the mystery aspect, and the slice of life scenes, which make up the majority of the game. That is not to say the slice of life scenes are filler, or don't tie into the mystery in any way. Quite the opposite...

SeaBed is not a novel that will choreograph every important piece of information so you know when to pay attention and when not to. It doesn't insult the reader's intelligence like that; instead, you're expected to pay attention to every passage. Sometimes it will not be immediately obvious why what you're reading is supposed to be relevant to the story, and this may be due to the fact that there isn't just one thematic throughline in SeaBed.
Many different ideas are presented, but not necessarily explored in depth. It's a novel both for those who like to let their mind wander, and those who like to dive into a particular concept to try to understand it. Picking out a specific word or sentence and running with it to see where it takes you can become a sort of symbolic dialogue between the author and the reader. This, to me, is the appeal of the mystery genre: the ability for the spectator to shape the fictional world in their mind.

I've seen so many murder mysteries, whodunits and police procedurals, and the worst part for me is always the ending, the moment when the culprit is revealed. Every time I consume a mystery novel or show, my main worry is that the author will give too much away, limiting my sense of imagination and destroying any possibility for re-reading/re-watching. My favorite movies include Caché and Memories of Murder.
Because what good is a mystery if it ends as soon as you see the ending? Once it ends, it's no longer a mystery, and then there's nothing left to think about anymore.
SeaBed, being more of a missing person mystery, absolutely sticks the landing, and it's not because it doesn't give anything away - in fact it is quite simple to sum up the story in a couple of sentences once you've finished it - but rather because there isn't just one element of mystery to SeaBed, or even just mystery. The devil is in the details, and this novel contains so many thematic throughlines tying everything together, so many different ideas, feelings, and images, each one expressed so sincerely but so deliberately that you'll re-read sentences four times over, not wanting to miss a single word. It's not just a fictional puzzle to be pieced together, but a reflection of the real world with real things to teach, and an endearing manifestation of the author's worldview which captures the true essence of the mystery genre.
You won't get all the answers right away, because most answers are not definitive. The only right answers are the ones that feel right to you. Once you have finished this visual novel, you'll still have plenty more mysteries to solve. The fun never ends!

While writing this review I found out that the translator for this game, Conjueror, passed away in 2019 at the age of 29. This hit me like a brick, since I love the translation for this game so much that it inspired me to try to become a translator myself. I'm not a very good writer, though, so this ended up being mostly a stream of consciousness piece.
I know a lot of this review won't make much sense until you've actually read the VN, but I'm hoping just by seeing how passionate I am about it will get you to consider buying it.
I hope I was able to replicate here, the feelings that SeaBed gave me, if even just a little bit. It definitely deserves more attention for all the effort that went into it.

Estimated reading time is 19 hours. Contains no voice acting and no branching paths/choices.

LIFE IS PAIN
I HATE-

oh god

this is Under tale 2

（评测文本已隐藏）

This game is basically terrorist propaganda and a way for ISIS to train members

scar fase