CAUTION: SPOILERS BELOW
Summary:
Escape room genre in the style of an RPGmaker game. Dialogue heavy, with incredibly well drawn images, mostly focused on advancing the plot with short scavenger quests.
My Experience:
Coming into this game, I could tell almost exactly what I should expect, and I wasn't disappointed. Typically, these style of RPG-esque menus and dialogues work best when there's a lot of attention to detail and secrets, which there simply isn't time for in a week-long game jam, but what has been made is very impressive (even if, along the way, I did find mismatched descriptions and dialogue!) I still haven't found the chair CG picture (hints appreciated if it's implemented) but otherwise found two "bad" ends as well as the "good" one. Gameplay is quite repetitive, you go from room to room and pick things up by interacting with them with little challenge or traps to fall into, but the writing and artwork compensate well enough to get away with it. It's particularly nice that doing intuitive actions leads to bad initial outcomes. Also, the robot will give hints as to what to do and where to find things if you pay attention, which serves as a good player aid if you want one, but also doesn't get in the way or signpost too heavily. A small gripe, in that I lost all my progress after the first bad end because there's no autosaves, but that's an RPGmaker issue generally rather than a game issue. Very much enjoyed this one and hope to see more like it in the future!
Theme Fit:
The artwork is constantly on screen and the plot revolves around being tied, having to do things because of it; generally, plenty of justification for mechanics and story progression. Beyond that, the verisimilitude of being restrained doesn't shine through in raw gameplay - movement and actions bound/unbound are effectively the same, so it's really mostly the art and plot.
What Could Be Improved:
- Gameplay hints: Fetch quests are fine, but clicking on every tile to find the items is a little dull. There are stars at the start to indicate where to click to progress; it might have been nice if there were similar on a dozen locations to "search" for the relevant items instead.
- More complex challenges: As with the first point, retrieving items is fun, but there were a few times where it felt like the theme could have been met even better if there was a small puzzle or similar associated with it. Obviously the project is already ambitious for the timescale, but it would be good to see in future efforts.
- Mechanical changes: The game has a lot of work put into the text and art, but something small like movement speed or controls changing by restriction level could have added something a little more to it, just to add that layer of depth to the bondage.