Road to Karatl

WTF is this garbage? High level of rubbish; utter trash. Human generated slop. Anti-creativity. Idiotic reddit writing authored by the impressionable mind of your typical fear & hunger dark soulser fan of FromShitware games, accompanied by weird collages of misplaced "historic" stuff from random "real world cultures" Developer, where are your parents?

As an experimental title to practice development this is a fine experience. However this is being sold and treated like an actual game so I am going to treat it like one. *Spoilers Below" Before we start I need to know... why I am being charged for this? This is nowhere near long enough to get past the 2 hour refund cutoff. One of my fellow reviewers Squido claims it took him 24 minutes to get through this game for the first time and it took me even less. If you want more people to review and share their thoughts, it should be free and if you want to make money off this it needs to be much longer. But whatever lets actually talk about the game. You are thrown right into the game and this is probably the biggest issue. The person you play as obviously has more context but from your perspective, you are simply on a journey to a city you don't know anything about anything. Despite this all these characters keep speaking as if we are having a grand discussion on philosophy and they pretend to have a grasp on your character as they tell you what to think. For example I told a man asking about my journey, that I am just passing through and he essentially says "Nuh Uh you stup…

I've conquered the Holy Mountain horizontally.

Very short with empty branching. A first playthrough will take you 15 minutes, repeat playthroughs less than half of that. The story itself does not have much of a 'physical' layer (you are a pilgrim on a journey, others are expected to give you alms but mostly they just vent to you) so it's likely expected that we analyze it on a 'symbolic' layer. The most common theme in the story is [spoiler]about whether life is truly in your own hands or if it's all in the hands of the gods, a decent theme for a pilgrimage and likely tied into the empty branching.[/spoiler] If the 'physical' layer had been meatier, then maybe it would be more satisfying. As is, it's hollow and feels like you're just nodding along. Without meaningful encounters or branching, Road to Karatl fails to distinguish why it [i]needed[/i] to be a game rather than a short animation or a short story in a collection. It's interactive fiction, sure, but the interaction is all just for show

Incredible thematic and storytelling beats, pared down through minimal visual design and ambience that begs to be expounded upon. An excellent micro-journey.

road to karatal promises to knock your socks off, change your world view, quite frankly it's not sure that you're ready for it. At that point you play it, it is charming, but it lacks so much. It is a completetly linear game, the only choice you have is dialouge, while that is fun for the first few playthoughs, it quickly wares thin. The artstyle is also somewhat charming, however i feel like alot of it is just "exotic" artefacts and whatnot, it doesn't feel like the developer has taken time to understand what they art they are choosing to use. i'd give it a 4/10, the sound desgien is great, and I enjoyed the animation while walking, however it, like the game itself, wears thin after a while.