Holonoptic

Игра вылетает при попытки открыть карту. Не знаю починят ли. The game crashes when trying to open the map. I don't know if they'll fix it.

--I like the flavor and the worldbuilding. The writing is generally pretty solid. --the game is heavily inspired by Disco Elysium. --*everything* else about this game is totally underbaked. --In general, the game leans heavily towards soullessly buying an army of businesses/pawns which are ~interchangeable and have no flavor whatsoever. Get ready for news updates like "pharmaceutical purchase #4 just entered the field". And… you can reasonably win with purchasing none of the pawns whatsoever. This is lame as hell. --it's extremely unsatisfying and strange how little traditional success metrics matter in this business strategy game. Whether you own 0% or 29% of your company makes no difference whatsoever. (If you can get to 30%+, that's an alternate condition for beating the final boss). Personal wealth: no difference whatsoever at any point? Company profitability: almost completely meaningless. I think it's possible to win the game without ever having a profitable month which is baffling. This is such a weirdly unsatisfying take on running a business. Expect 10x as much feedback from your board on whether you used up the budget each month than "are we even generating revenue" or "Jesus Christ WHAT are you doing to the stock price". What are we even doing here? --I dislike how little player stats play into company acquisitions/management. For example, when running a science company, the difference between having 0 science skill (rookie) and 5 science (a world-leading genius) is almost literally nothing. It doesn't unlock any products or make your products more effective or increase revenue or profitability, nothing. The only person that can increase the revenue of a science company comes from... a Creative Director who can increase revenues with branding strategies. I've got a branding strategy the game mostly forgot. It's called "have an incredible superscientist and develop drugs that no one else in the world has yet." Weirdly 100% of this is routed through an annoying scientist NPC who you'd miss on 2/3 of purchase options, not the player character. --A lot of "repeat this 100x" grinding. For example, each of your purchases gets 5-10 missions for expanding it to its max size. I'd expect 10-30 purchases over the course of a game. This is a crazy unfun setup with very little automation. --The UI is pretty terrible at every level. In particular, assigning executives from one location to another, and then assigning them to a job (which may or may not be possible if they are in transit) takes a lot of clicks and does not work reliably. The UI navigation is very bad, e.g. assigning executives to a mission is not close to equipping executives with equipment that they need to complete the mission, and assigning enclave courses is bizarrely far from everything (not on the Courses page?! What the hell?) --The world map is notably terrible, maybe worth getting rid of altogether. Do we actually need to worry about where in our corporate empire each executive is in transit? Why is it so tedious to move executives between offices/opportunities? --It's really weird to have to need to move my tech guy into and out of the CEO's office every time the CEO's office has a tech mission. --turning on/off fake expenditures to manage board's budgetary expectations is very unfun. --Finding out what each of the upgrades does is bizarrely hard. For example, in the CEO's office, you can start something called "Cousin Economy." Except, it doesn't say how much it costs or what it does and good luck get ****ed guessing what that is if you've not heard of this Swiss concept. You COULD click on the Projects menu tab where the project is listed with its function, except this Projects menu tab is NOT where projects are started or managed. --A special shoutout for how miserably hard it is to pick character traits/skills/feats at the start of the game. Every time you add a starting job (which may happen more than once if you are playing with a Mid-L…

Highly entertaining hybrid of corporation management and roleplaying mystery narrative. The management mechanics aren't all that deep, yet they have enough weight and player choice to feel satisfyingly meaningful.