Review

Shit's stressful man. This was very Papers Please coded. Where I would mightily struggle to say that I ever enjoyed playing but it was definitely interesting. I would bet that subsequent playthrough are rather a lot easier. But I couldn't be arsed. Ended up getting couped. That fucking sucked. Definitely made the ending feelings of the game rather dour. Shoulda tried fleeing the country. I think in general I started souring on the game towards the end and I can narrow down the why of that to two particular things. It was not, firstly because I got a bad ending. I'm perfectly happy to occasionally see a story where things do not in fact work out.

My frustration comes down to two events that I ran into in my playthrough. The first would be the economy and its downturn. I played the game over the course of four sessions. The first two were fairly miserable. But I suspect that's largely consistent between playthroughs. Sordland is a shit country. My third session was notably upbeat. I successfully got the constitutional changes through. And the economy finally started looking up. We got out of danger and up into unstable. But at the beginning of the last session, something changed. It very much felt like an invisible flag got set. Suddenly every bit of news I received about the economy was negative. It went back into danger and then plunged into the abyss. And...I don't really know why. I'm sure there was a cause, but it was not obvious to me. So that felt sucky. It felt so good clawing my way up. To have that taken away and then fall down into the abyss sucked. I would've appreciated some clarification there. If it was a matter of, "you didn't fix things quick enough, so when that happens, we have it coded to where the boulder will roll back down the hill and crush you". Just felt a bit shitty.

The second thing that peeved me was the actual ending I got. The coup. Again, I wanna be exceedingly clear, I am an adult. I am more than emotionally capable of handling nuanced stories where the heroes don't necessarily win. But the ending I got feels a little like the game didn't know what to do with me so it shunted me off into the coup story. I routinely did not prioritize the military in the game. I did that knowing full well that that may have consequences. My problem with the coup going down like it did is, I would have totally understood getting couped if I did not also work on setting up strategic alliances. But I did...I did that multiple times. I allied with several countries, joined NATO, and revealed to the world that Russia had nukes at the UN. There is no real world where Russia is going to be able to invade me without it exploding in their face. So while I would understand that the military was generally peeved at me, I don't understand why they would coup me. Iosef acts like you are this horrible traitor if you don't up the military's budget, much less lower it. But I don't understand why the game doesn't seem to be taking into account your strategic alliances here. I get that he is isolationist. But for him to be so unaware of how alliances and NATO works that he will topple democracy entirely? I just can't believe it.

It seemed like the game had a crisis system in place. Where, at the very beginning when you're allocating your government budget, for each sector you take money away from, there will be a crisis attached to that. I could see that playing out with the polio outbreak. We got news of it, but then were basically told "Oh but it's alright, since we upped the healthcare budget, we'll be alright". I can see in a parallel universe where if you had not done that, it might've exploded into a proper crisis. And so I'm assuming that's what's going on with the military. It just doesn't seem fully thought out. When I got couped, there was a moment where I was genuinely confused as to why it was happening. Not a great feeling to have going into the last couple scenes of the game.

So I'm conflicted. This game was made for people like me. And I admire the depth we get into. But I can't deny that I feel fairly negative about how things played out and that's largely based on feeling that events just didn't logically follow. It feels very much like we don't have quite enough endings so I got put onto whatever the closest track they could find was. I dunno. Just my best guess.

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