Imago Season

It's quite good! I appreciated the addition of a little pop-up telling you how you unlocked a particular dialogue option - it feels like a genuine innovation for the genre.

An excellent bite-sized Disco-like. Great writing, great worldbuilding, great bug people!

Imago Season is a bite-sized cRPG with inspirations ranging from Disco Elysium to Ursula Le Guin to Moebius - all very good and close to my heart. I love the world-building - a humanesque world seeded by other humans thousands of years ago but left to develop on their own, now stuck between allying with the space Union, accepting the "benevolent" yoke of a super-compute with robot minions, or attempting to liberate itself. The gist will be very familiar to readers of the Hainish Cycle. In particular, this planet has somehow developed genetic engineering - on humans - before any real industrial or technological revolution, and the problems revolve around bodily agency. I am not the biggest fan of the thin allegory here, but the setup is still cool. It's visually pleasing, and conveys information clearly. It has a simple cel-shaded style with a few touches of its own. It also uses very organic shapes, which fits the theme perfectly and gives it extra charm. No complaints here! The music was also pleasing, but nothing too interesting, and mostly in the background. The writing is not bad, but it feels a bit too naive, too blunt. The biggest problems, however, are how it feels like…

I do wish it was longer, I got a single ending in about an hour and a half, but I appreciate the work and the creativity that went into this game. Pick it up if you want a concise and interesting story

It's not necessarily bad, but after about 30 minutes I no longer felt that continuing to play would be a valuable use of my time. I think for a first release from a studio that was very clearly limited on the scope of the game they could afford to produce it's alright, and there are definitely worse indies to play, but I was not really compelled to finish the game. I'll be comparing the game to Disco Elysium a lot, which is not really a fair comparison since that game had a much larger budget and studio behind it, but if you play the game for around 30 seconds you can see it's sort of inevitable. I'll start with the gameplay, I like the idea conceptually of placing a discolike in first person, but the scope limitations of this game really show here. The overall play area is extremely small, and your movement is very frequently blocked off by invisible walls to the extent where it does not feel like there is really any reward for exploration. There are some random pickups with resources here and there but from what I saw they are all just placed in plain sight. This leads to walking around the environment feeling pointless, the game seems to recognize this as well as there is a dia…

A polished walk & talk. Successfully does what it sets out to do. Slightly grandiose lore (typical for a debut) vs. an almost intimate play area. The big plot sometimes overshadows what should have been a few more smaller moments. I liked that I could weasel my way in, out and around the main factions, fully supported by a robust role-playing choice system. Unique music for every area. Splendid cover art. It IS somewhat on the still and dry side, so don't expect a massive epic with hundreds of characters bustling around. I adored Sandra. It was fun being a constant disappointment to her.