20something

Another in the line of pretentious art projects on Steam. What elements of realism the game exudes are hampered under a cover of fancy verbal diarrhea. Between randomly throwing in aspergers and stealing the core plot and outline of High Fidelity, the creator ultimately fails at his attempt to be deep and provocative. I feel like I'm being too harsh on it, but I spent 40 minutes in the game and have no desire to return. I will say, I kinda liked the ending though. The interface is also annoying. There is no save feature, for instance, so you have to finish it in one go. The game is short, but it feels so long and there is so much reading, that I needed to take breaks. I don't mind reading in my games, I got introduced in Infocom back in the 90s and fell in love, but the writing in this game is just too art school. The best I can say is that the game isn't broken. No crashes or bugs. Bottom line: I almost kind of enjoyed my time with the game, but despite almost liking the ending, the rest of the game just doesn't make it worth it. Go read Nick Hornby instead.

https://youtu.be/tZphAZExH_U The major hurdle in this visual novel is the lack of knowledge about the protagonist. Important personal info is revealed multiple times without warning adding dissonance to the narrative.

Usually, I appreciate the open narration that allows you to choose the evolution of the story, but in this case, the story is extremely boring, I tried to resist to get to the end, the playing time must have been very short, but I didn't reach the end, because I had the feeling that I was wasting time. Sorry to write a negative review, but depression constantly appears as a poorly represented shadow in the game, relationships appear immature, there is an unnecessary abundance of alcoholic details, and there are too many descriptions of uninteresting or funny TV shows and movies ( you can save a joke about Steven Seagal movies being one worse than the other).

I played this not long after a breakup, so it happened to be a bit more impactful than it might have been otherwise. 20something is a short choose your own adventure game about dating and depression. And it hits close to home. A bit too close, really. At least parts of it. Something is wrong. Something is always wrong. Can't ever pinpoint it. You know how you think you should feel. But there's nothing there. Broken, and there's no explanation to it.

A very well written text-based dating sim, in which the protagonist tries to find love and happiness while suffering from his mental state. Highly recommend.

Not a bad idea for a game, and somewhat niche in its audience. However, all it did was confirm our depressed feelings