I streamed this game for this review. The link will be below.
Pitch Black Secrets of Epiotica (which is a mouthful, so I'll just call it Pitch Black from here on out) is a game with a lot of style and a lot of flaws. It has a lot of potential, but as it's just an early beta, I recommend holding off playing unless you plan on providing valuable feedback to improve the direction of the game.
Pitch Black should immediately be eye catching to you. The developer clearly has an eye for design as each of the UI windows, map design, and character designs all look quite stunning. But this design may impress you at first, but the veneer will quickly slide away as you play more.
As an English player, the dialogue has clearly been machine translated, and it has not been particularly well executed. A lot of the dialogue gets lost in translation. There are glimmers of interesting moments in the dialogue, so I think if you were a native speaker (of whatever the dev's native language is), the writing would impress. However, as an English speaker, things are translated laughably, and sometimes results in a tonal whiplash. What exactly is the tone this game is going for? Is it a dark, Gothic mystery? Well the art style sure lends itself to that. Or is it a light-hearted hunt fit for the Mystery Machine crew? The execution in the dialogue certainly leans towards the latter.
When it comes to combat, it holds no punches. It throws you into the deep end (something that might be fitting of a grim-dark tone) and…really just feels like a pretty bog standard turn-based game with a lot of states to keep track of.
As Pitch Black is touted, it is meant to be a mystery solving game, but the dialogue drags on long, and the mystery solving lacks player agency, as the mystery will unravel itself so long as the player knows which NPC to talk to next. From what little time I had played the game (due to way too much dialogue), it never seemed like the game wanted to let the player use their brain to piece the puzzle together themselves.
I hope to see this game develop into something great, because it's got the visual aesthetic down, but it has a lot of other things that clearly need to be polished.
If you'd like to watch my experience with the game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing.
p.s. is this a kink game? It's even in the devs name. This is clearly a kink game.