izigame.me

Putting out this review to give a more nuanced point of view on the game
Did I enjoy it? Yeah definitely, but I bought it with zero expectations and no experience in horror games whatsoever
Do I recommend it? ..Hardly
It's undeniable that a lot of love and attention to detail was put into this game and this isn't to dismiss the devs' work but it is also not without flaws either
The way it plays out is through different segments, all of which are significantly different one from the other and unique, the inability to go back at X or Y segment means that getting collectibles/achievements implies replaying the game a second time though (which isn't the end of the world anyhow)
I'll be honest, the wide majority of the segments were amazing but some were slightly generic and forgettable
Another minor flaw is the lack of proof-reading in the English text, not to the point of being incomprehensible but bad nonetheless
Onto the real flaws, first of all at the time of writing, the game's in "version 0.9", once you complete the game you can redo the intro to unlock "Peaceful mode" which on the main menu is written to be tldr "incomplete and so big the devs haven't finished it yet"
The issue becomes whether or not one is satisfied with the ending, there are few, and all of them are in my opinion extremely underwhelming, being 80% of the reason why I don't recommend it as it is right now
I don't know whether peaceful mode is just gonna be some slice of life slop or whether it will expand on the game proper but from the looks of it, it will be the former, I'll revisit my review should it release ig
The other issue, is that it's both bad and great as an horror game
I streamed it to my friends and kept saying shit like "where is my waif" and had a good laugh, but the actual horror part of the game makes up for about less than half and isn't much to write home about, besides the great characters I suppose
The other half is spent either listening to characters talk (and there's about 5-6 times you talk to a character and they give you 6 boxes that end in them talking for a good 30s each), playing minigames made for ipad babies (which is fine.. but extremely out of place at times, not to the point of playing the clock so you don't get a refund, but definitely to the point of being odd) and searching for items (a few of "find the X" puzzles exist and wasted my time cause I'm BLIND)
In the end it was nice, but was it nice as an horror game? Not exactly, it was nice to me as a story, however as stated earlier I do not believe the ending to be good and it leaves a really bad aftertaste
The question of whether the "peaceful mode" will get rid of that aftertaste is why I'll revisit the game and review later
My genuine thoughts is that this game tried and succesfully caught lightning in a bottle with the style and match of genres that create something people would love, but putting the style aside I can confidently proclaim it would have a significantly lower review score, as it plays more than a lot on the "doing silly antics with oomf" and 1000% tries to appeal to the affective dimension of the player than any other aspect
It's absolutely unique and unlike any other, but it failed at making its end memorable and therefore made me switch at the last second to a negative review, one can overlook strange design choices if the finality is outstanding but here it had the opposite effect
Usually I'd still say "yeah it's worth a positive review, here it's just the ending wasn't my thing" but instead I believe it to be a level above, almost objectively bad
All in all? yeah I could fix her