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Ren'Py - The Night [v0.1] [1703_Productions]

  1. 1.00 star(s)

    kuraiken

    No. Just no.

    First time I'm giving a review this bad, but goodness.

    This game tries to fill in all the missing blanks of what the developer CAN'T do with AI. It goes exactly how you imagine it.

    Basically: You're flying on a plane, suddenly you read screams (you're not hearing them in the audio file, but the subtitles tell you people are screaming) and you wake up in the house.

    Generic audio on a black screen with subtitles telling you what you should imagine you hear but aren't actually hearing serves as device to establish all the things the developer came up with that make no sense, aren't needed and haven't had any effort put into. The entire "plane" element could've been replaced with something that's better suited as frame narrative for the story, but the dev went with the first idea he had.

    All the dialogues are voiced, which sounds great until you hear them. They're voiced by the AI and either written or translated by the AI. So toneless, emotionless voices are reading lines full of grammatical errors or syntax errors that are written like summaries of what you should think of they're saying. The dialogue consequently is bland, boring and bad.

    It gets worse. As so many enlightened developers, this dev has seen it fit to spend time to remove the skip dialogue option. So you have to click your way through the slog of pointless dialogues and monologues that don't set anything up, don't create any emotion, don't convey any atmosphere.

    I halfway suspect the entire game is AI written, because the dialogue and narration is so bad ("This is the dining room. It doesn't make me feel very hungry") that you physically cringe. It's a reminder of how different a game sounds when it's written by someone who has no idea how to write.

    To make matters even more worse, you have to click through countless on screen indicators to advance the story and, in the tradition of these point&click games, click your way through icons to make your way through the house and find the next thing that does anything.

    The only good thing that can be said is that the animated title screen makes you think the dev might be interested in spending effort on a polished experience. The game soon teaches you better.

    The game is also very short - a demo without any sex scene, no interaction, nothing. You go into a room, talk briefly to the AI impersonating a woman, then you click your way through the first and second floor doors without finding anything and the game ends.