Yeah, I'm pretty sure you broke the game completely now with the new update. Because no matter how many times you press travel, you always get the "wohoo, rest!" message. And you never make any progress or anything.
Reviews for "The Evening of the Son"
Hyptosis responds:
That is a really weird bug, did you try refreshing the game? as this after you loaded a save? You've got to provide some info to help a dev out instead of just leaving a mean message and a bad score.
this like a a different version of the other game this game is good and more random.
and finding water is kinda easy you just need to travel but what's with the complaints all about
Playing on version 1.07. I never accessed the previous versions, so I shouldn't be experiencing any of the problems that others talked about in the initial versions. Here's my review.
Having to decide what to search for seems to make little sense from a gameplay standard. It serves to just increase the amount of crap that I have to try to stock, and lengthen the game by way of bad game design. In a real survival situation you need to locate or repurpose anything you find. If this game is asking how long would you survive, you'd die very quickly if your mindset were "Well I need ammo, armor, and food... so I'll only look for each individually, at only one location at a time, before moving one." That's ridiculous.
Expending energy seemed to be a way to prevent food and water from being taken down too quickly. I wouldn't have minded about the food being used more, but I agree with others saying that water was nigh-impossible to come across, and considering that the average person wouldn't last 4 days without water, it should not be so statistically rare in a game that expects you to somehow fight for weeks or even months to traverse 140 miles. Again, game design is broken simply by not synching up with the attempted atmosphere and story of the game.
The penalties to armor upgrades and weapon upgrades happened almost as quickly as I managed to find them in the first place. I had no real sense of progress. Random events may have seemed like a good idea on paper, and yes, I don't expect to control every situation, but randomness can lead to a game, or multiple games, of just having very bad luck. To the extent that the game becomes unplayable and it's not so much a game as it is a "Sucks to be you" simulator. The randomness especially begins to break the suspension of disbelief when it turns out that my character seems to gain absolutely no proficiency in anything over time. You might find armor, find weapons, find ammo, find food or water, but there's nothing in the way of actual skill progression and retention. This survivor doesn't learn how to scout or scavenge more effectively, does not become better at fighting over time, doesn't become a better shot, they simply serendipitously trip over helpful items. What kind of survival strategy is that? In light of the fact that *I should be getting better at surviving as time goes on* this is yet another thing that kills the preservation of an atmosphere and reminds me that I'm just playing somebody's random numbers generator with pictures.
I didn't see a benefit to fighting across multiple games of fighting every zombie that I came along, however the penalty to fleeing zombies is so severe that you're forced to fight them. It wasn't an interesting mechanic, it was just a chore. I felt like the battles were added to pad game length and simply there to force me to lose something because it was either health or it was food and water and bullets. Giving me the choice of what I want to lose isn't hard-hitting gameplay when I have no emotional investment in anything and when it's ultimately just a matter of deciding how much shorter I want my gaming session to be. All of that comes together to create an experience in which any time I search for anything, I stand a far greater statistical chance of losing resources than gaining them. And what I gain ends up not being worth what I lost. Food is the only thing I seemed to be able to retain, since most of the time I don't lose much food, but you lose ammo by the pocketful and I lost upgrades as quickly and often as I got them...
Finally, maybe I just had a bad string of luck but across three games (I'm talking, cleared cookies, flushed the DNS, did everything I could to get the fact that I ever accessed this game out of my local files) but in the three games that I played, no matter how much I pressed the Travel button, I didn't get the sense of any forward progress. Literally, the screen always said "140 miles to go" after two hours of real life time spent allegedly traveling.
Nothing about this game was enjoyable to play. I tried to give it a chance, walk away, come back to it and reload and see if maybe it'd do a little better next time, but it's just too unpolished and too random to actually like. It's as though you made a game you don't want me to play. If that was your intent, mission accomplished. And this is coming from somebody who actually played through and enjoyed The Rose Is Blooming, so I was aware of the idea of the game and very willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.
For positives, the art style and text presentation is still easy to understand and keeps the pace moving. The mouse-over boxes giving explanations of all the buttons is a good touch and something that should be a standard in gaming. The audio was fitting and never annoying. And I like the implementation of medals.
broken record but waters to hard to come by or keep around.
that was really fun! i found it a little odd that sometimes you would lose ALL your stuff, but then by the time i reached the end, i was a walking armory :P although i really didnt run into many zombies to use all that stuff on, the survival aspect with food/water and other stuff still made it an interesting journey. i gotta ask though, whats this freeway stuff? i didnt even encounter one. was it a side-route option? i walked through the city, got shot at whenever i approached a jeep so i stayed away. great game :)
Hyptosis responds:
There is a freeway area that a few people have reported having a problem at, but I can't seem to replicate it. I've gone through the area a dozen times just fine. The game gets more random as you progress, it IS possible you just never saw that area.