izigame.me

Summary

MiSide is (mostly) a thriller game, with real gameplay, not just a walking sim, and it is a very easy recommend from me, for anyone who enjoys thrillers and isn't averse to anime style, or even if you're just curious about it, since it's a very well done and beautiful commixture of different genres and ideas.

Review

Narrative
The premise of the game is that the player character gets teleported into a sort of anime tamagotchi-style mobile game by the "tamagotchi", Mita in this case, and presumably would like to find a way out. Without spoiling much, the direction that the story and characters take, after this initial premise, is not what you would usually expect: the conflict does not revolve mostly around the existential aspects of this game, as the characters have generally accepted or resigned themselves to the world itself that they live in.
Instead, the focus is on the interactions and personalities of these characters and how they interface with the player character, and this I found to be very well done and vastly more interesting than a repetition of the typical "insane character wants to break out of game" story. Characters are memorable and believable and strongly pass on their personality with very smart design and animation details.
However, it is also in the narrative that I found the game's biggest flaw, apparently dropped or undeveloped plot points, most of which from the original demo sequence. These aren't dealbreakers but the game could have benefitted from further editing passes to the storyboard.
Gameplay
There are two main divisions in the gameplay: exploration + relationship, and minigames. For the first, it consists of walking around with another character and talking about different topics or objects in the rooms. There are also hidden collectibles and nice secrets to find.
The minigames are much more numerous and elaborate than you would expect, each feeling like its own little project, and have clearly had a lot of effort and thought put into them. They range from puzzles to racing to fighting to shooters, and are intercalated with the exploration segments. MiSide feels like the Bohemian Rhapsody of video games, it's every genre in sequence, with tenser sections broken up by more relaxing ones, lending it the best "irregular" pacing I've seen in a video game yet.
My only critique for the minigames is that some of them are a little bit underdeveloped or too effortlessly easy, to the point that it was clearly a matter of finishing the game on time for release (it's actually only version 0.9 yet as of this review) and not flaws of game design.
Visuals and Sound
Alright, so this game has, without any exaggeration, the best animations I've ever seen, counting AAA games too. It cannot be overstated how good they are, and then you consider that the game was made rushed by 2 developers. If this was a bad game, just the animations alone could carry it.
And not just that, the stylised graphics are also excellent and have perfectly translated, in the Unity engine of all things, the aesthetic of a modern sitcom anime into 3D. It's not simply well achieved, it's beautiful too, could even act as a case study for other developers to learn stylisation. Character models are impeccable as well, and act in concert with the animations, the environment, the written interactions, and even the style of the subtitles, to draw you in and easily immerse into what's happening in the game.
Sound design is good, and what I thought was very interesting, is that if you choose not to have voice acting (I don't speak Russian or Japanese), each character has a unique beep sound that plays in conjunction with the subtitles, and even conveys personality. I'm sure the voice acting is good too.

Conclusion

Whatever lacked in time, manpower, or budget, certainly didn't lack in talent. I consider this game a grand achievement for the 2 developer team and it's one of the few I've cared to review here.