Nell Watson's Founder Life

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6/10 A VN-like simulator of founding a startup that focuses on the psychological side. Good: - as a person who participated in startups and ran a business, I must say that overall the choices in this game and their outcomes make sense, and it gives a good generic impression of what it means to be in a startup in the US - free So-so: - I'd wish to be able to select the friend character and the sexual partner character. The idiot friend guy is very annoying, I'd never want a friend like this, so I was glad when he said goodbye. I guess this wasn't the devs' intent, so if there were other friend types and I could select one that I'd actually care about, then I'd probably make different choices in the game. Also, the sexual partner is some unattractive person with a shaved head of an unclear gender. Cmon, obviously need a choice here. Bad: - starting from stage 4 you're essentially left without any options to get cash. You watch your cash go down, and once it's negative, it's game over. I expected the investor to give cash, or be able to take a loan, or sell some crap from the apartment. But the game just ends Overall, it's a generic game about being in a startup. It doesn't specif…

"Nell Watson's Founder Life" is not really a game, it's more like a CYOA e-book (slapped together badly with the Ren'Py visual novel construction kit) that relates the story of a failed startup. And I suppose if their understanding of business is anything like the way they understand Steam is for video games and not crap e-books about failed startups, it's easy to see why they failed as a startup. What do you do in the game? Very little... while there's trite attempts to gamify CYOA e-book decisions in this e-book, they're inconsequential. The majority of this experience is just clicking through godawful cringey Ren'Py fan-fiction writing about startups. It's painful. So, it's hard to describe this as a game, the focus of the product is more like that of an e-book/visual novel, there's only minor, shallow and uninteresting gameplay elements. The crux of this is to push some very low quality, badly done fan-fiction tier writing, where we see once more a developer fail to understand the importance of "Show, don't tell", and for whatever reason, weren't able to convey their narrative through gameplay, giving us endless lines of badly written e-book text instead. My gaming ri…

Appropriately stressful. This is more of a "I don't want to replay it (even though I'm somewhat curious about the success ending)" than a "it's a bad game" review- it works fine, it's just repetitive and there's barely any story.

This is a free-story-driven text based game in which you will rola play as a new enterpreneur, where you need to choose between two option every day, which will affect your personal energy level, business and friendship. With every decision you will positively or negatively affect your stats. Try to get out the most of this new situations. It is literally a mini simulation game in which you can feel the enterpreneours life to balance between friend relationships, your well beeing and business development. I suggest this game to give it a try if you ever thinking to start a business.

Interesting business-themed choose your own adventure. I basically made all the choices I do in my actual career and burnt out several times and went bankrupt halfway through, so perhaps there's a warning to be taken from this game. I do think it's pretty corny that whenever your energy runs out, you yeet off to a $1000 "Entrepreneurial retreat", especially since the game hammers home how tight you have to be about your cashflow. If I blew a thousand bucks every time I burnt out, I'd be bankrupt several times over. I get that they need some kind of punishment for when you run out of energy, but the other metrics just give a game over when you bottom out on them, and it does stick out like a sore thumb since the game is generally trying to present a realistic depiction of the startup process. I think there could have been a more believable punishment like having your productivity tank or forcing you to stop work until you're better that would have a detrimental effect while still being more realistic. The writing is a bit Linkedin-core in a "Top 10 habits of Top CEO's" kind of way— this is definitely targeted at people who still believe in TED Talks, but they do a good job acknowle…