The Brittle Epoch

"The Brittle Epoch" is a poor quality "Dear Elise" ripoff, more pretentious "art" than an attempt to make a game. This is a self described "walking sim", the plot follows a group of children brought by a singularity AI to their new home in an abandoned subdivision, where two girls named Flutter and Juniper explore houses during a winter storm, which leads to a bunch of crappy writing and plodding along, listening to crappy voice acting and wondering why you're wasting your time on Steam shovelware. Sometimes you get what you pay for, usually you get a lot less, even when it's "free". And despite being sponsored by the Ontario Arts Council, the developers tried to scam gamers out of money for this, too. What do you do in the game? Walk, roll your eyes, uninstall before you get to the end. Because this is more "art" than game, it prioritizes artistic and experiential elements so heavily that gameplay is an afterthought. It's an interactive mood piece... playing this makes you feel like you've been dragged along to a student film festival or something. There's no challenging, gripping, immersive gameplay. That's a problem. It's true that games can be art, of course... a…

Not a fan of this type of game, the visuals are really good. Got board after while of playing this game, also this game runs really poorly.

Absolutely abysmal optimization. The world is quite pretty though.

My biggest beef with this game is the pacing. There are huge problems with pacing. You go through an abstract environment and come across key-points which trigger story lines. Voice acting here is pretty OK, but you have to stand around dormant until it plays out or just skip through it. There are elements of near-future sci-fi, ancient Greece and religion in general, but it seems like there is no real goal. Charachters pictures are crappy and environments are beautiful. I didn't get stuck but got annoyed with the pacing. Look at how 'Dear Esther' does it. Plan bigger environments and let stories play out while you move along and you'll keep the attention and enthusiasm om the player. If you focus on one story you really want to tell, this might have been really good! Good things and bad execution. Try it and see if you agree. And subtitles would be great.

While the world was beautiful to travel through and explore and the narrator had a very pleasant reading voice, this 'game' just felt jumbled and messy. Instead of using static images in a 3D world to tell a story, I believe it would have been much more immersive for the player to be dropped into this dystopian world and uncover the story by discovering objects and notes along the way. Having sections that are recommended listening before you even start the game in order to better understand the story, is just ridiculous. Incorporate all that into your game to make it a cohesive experience. Overall, I think this could have been something very cool and certainly the developer has a lot of imagination and skill, but I just think this was excuted in a non-optimal way.

Just as good as it was when i explored the sim on second life.