With Good Intentions

[h1]Sum-Up[/h1] [h3]In-depth analysis further down.[/h3] [table] [tr] [th]🟩 [b]Pros[/b][/th] [th]🟥 [b]Cons[/b][/th] [/tr] [tr] [td] - Solid art style that contributes in creating an immersive atmosphere, particularly during battle and action scenes. - Interesting setting that spans across two different timelines, and has decent world-building depth. [/td] [td] - Lack of instant dialog skip, manual saving and bugged dialog log make the experience tedious and frustrating, especially in the ‘past’ timeline where repetition is common. - Unique branching choices don’t really feel impactful on subsequent events, as their consequences are rather obscure most of the time. - Frequent issues with translation quality, proofreading, typos and sentence construction. The localization to ENG from RUS is of subpar quality, at best. - Dubious logic and narrative fallacies in multiple chapters, especially in the ‘past’ timeline, in which you’ll frequently fail and die for hilariously forced, implausible reasons. - Most characters feel generic or are indeed interesting at first, but then fail to evolve and keep interest up with their persona as the adventure continues. [/td] [/tr] [/table] […

[h1][b]The road to hell is paved [i]with good intentions[/i]…[/b][/h1] The abovementioned proverb describes this visual novel perfectly, as perhaps its initial ideas were solid; however, their implementation is half-baked at best—even that might be an overexaggeration. That would be because [i]With Good Intentions[/i] tries to be overly complex for its own good, switching between many literary genres without fully committing to them, leading to their superficial presentation. As if that would not be enough, its death mechanic forces you to venture through many paths repeatedly, bringing tediousness and killing my interest swiftly. Anyway, taking place in the possibly 18th century, it all starts in the city of Shemergard, where a group of rangers hides before the vicious attack of the rebels. While you manage to fend them off, you start noticing strange curiosities in this ruined town; time seems to flow differently at certain places, and even some weird visions appear to haunt our protagonist’s mind. It does not take long, and you start witnessing the events happening in the distant past from someone’s else eyes. There is definitely something wrong with this place, as an unnatural…

Really wish the devs luck on this and in the future, this game clearly has ambition and some talent behind it, but its missing key features for a visual novel and overall the presentation is very clunky. This feels like it needs a lot more polish to really shine.

I really wanted to like this game. Unfortunetly I just cant really get behind it. The story is interesting and for as long as I played it seemed like some of your decisions make a difference, but the writing itself is lacking almost like they need someone to proof read it again and fix small mistakes. It just feels uncomfortable to read.

Like game but hard to know which choice is the best one without killing the main character many times over. Would love to see a walkthrough of all of the choices and their results to help me navigate the game more smoothly. Otherwise, it's really frustrating to literally run into "dead ends". Anyone know of one already available?

Name captures this game well as it has a lot of good ideas. However the devs intentions don't quite work out. The rewind system become a bit of a slog while the writing and art is good enough I suffered from several game breaking bugs stopping me from even completing the game.