El gatito gangsterito2 days ago (34 edits) (+2)(-3)
Where to even start with this? A conceptually interesting and fun game ruined by a plethora of issues that make it seem as if the devs are deliberately trying to make the gameplay as annoying as humanely possible. The base layout was nice and condensed last update, now it's even more tedious to navigate than last time, especially because you have to quickly switch back and forth to interact with the various functions of (power is at the bottom, server room in another hall entirely, etc.) it on top of having to babysit the protagonists hunger and sleep needs. Good thing the dev also decided to add hunger damage. Both of these stats could've been left out the game entirely, but they just HAD to be in there. Oh, by the way, since the Base is bigger now, the usual gameplay loop of Finish up a Crate with Processed Signals-->Carry to Pickop Point- involves walking through two doors and a hallway, the doors of which you cannot keep open.
Next up the various "little" things. Dear dev, please go outside, pick up a fucking rock, and see how long it takes for you to smash a wooden board. Unless you have major motoric disabilities or late-stage osteoporosis, I guarantee you that its not going to take a few dozen times of smashing the board until it cracks. I do not see a single conceivable reason as to why it would be this way, neither story- nor gameplaywise. Did I mention that something as simple and ubiquituous as picking and placing objects also functions in the most burdensome way imaginable? It took me five minutes just to figure out how to fill and use a box of drives, lid and everything. Oh, and items stack in your inventory despite possessing different qualities (Batteries stack regardless of charge, Sheets of paper stack no matter if somethings written on them and what) forcing you to drop them on the ground and individually check them each time. If you're going to imitate a source Engine game, don't forego player convenience to make it maximally tedious, please.
Not to mention the dirt and trash everywhere - if the fact that the place looks worse than an illegal dumpsite in rural Bangladesh is supposed to convey that the research station is abandoned, it could've been demonstrated with environmental cues that DON'T obstruct what you're doing!!! If the base was abandoned, it would be dusty and overgrown, but it wouldn't look as if two rivaling football fan clubs inhabited it overnight. The buildings containing the transformators are so full of it that you cannot even enter without taking some of it out the doorway, with no rhyme or reason, just as if the dev felt like spamming trash in there.
If all the cumbersome features mentioned weren't enough (by NO means exhaustive) there's also the fact that the sleeping you HAVE to do (remember, stamina meter) is frequently interrupted by nonsensical, and yet aestethically identical nightmares that quite literally throw you out of bed, if you don't complete them. And guess what? If you dont, then it literally depletes part of your stamina, making it wasted time. Ridiculous.
Inserting a drive carrying a signal into the processor cannot be done from a comfortable angle, because the devs still haven't fixed it, so you need to literally throw it into the slot as if you're performing a bottleflip and hope it sticks.
Since not a single apparatus on base is allowed to function reliably, the devs also made the radio tower break down this update, since we didn't have enough micromanaging on our plate yet. And you do that via clicking a button on the panel. No visual indication of anything changing, no sign of you having actually done something in the world that affected the radio tower. Lazy.
Instead of adding new features that would build on the games strengths and make it more fun(f.ex. more ways to inspect or interact with the astronomical objects you're observing, especially when that very same process is also extremely tedious), the dev just adds more things to keep track of and more chores. At this point the game consists of 90% babysitting antennae, servers, and transformators (ordered on temu I suspect, with the frequency they break down at), your own physical needs, and 10% actual horror content or exploring the cosmos. The actual content you're working towards experiencing in this game is tiny; it's artifically bloated by the tediums and work routines the dev keeps piling on to make it seem like there's content.
Oh, by the way, some of the most glaring bugs still haven't been fixed yet. For example, the fact that the nonsensical automatic processing upgrade (essentially enabling you to flick a switch determining the level at which the processing ceases) is reset to 1 whenever you load the game. Since this game is all about time and resource management that creates a major annoyance, especially if you saved while being out in the woods. It's so full of them, in fact, that you often can't even tell if somethings supposed to be a horror element or if it's just collision glitching out and creating noise.
Speaking of the horror: The pacing of it is terrible. The game succeeds in making you feel on edge through the isolation and mildly creepy happenings around you, but never delivers, thereby overstaying it's welcome and wearing out quickly. The first weeks are more or less just your boring wagie-routine with tiny specks of spoopy here and there, spread on so thinly that its often impossible to tell them apart from the bugs. It needs more actually scary, not ANNOYING things happening. Less "Haha Burger"s, sexualized Aliens, Crates, and underpaid IT-Labour, and more atmospheric horror could do the trick, perhaps? Just a suggestion.
I cannot, for the life of me, understand why people asking the devs for an update are called out as impatient and "entitled", and that the devs were brazen enough to tell their community to stop asking for them. Guys - he earns 9.200+ Dollars a month on Patreon, this is no longer a simple passion project (it's his only active project in fact, that's where all this money is going towards). This game and it's community deserve monthly updates and a responsive developer actually adding real, tangible content, real QoL updates. You do not take that much money without being held accountable. It doesn't work that way. He doesn't even give proper status updates, let alone real updates, and yet the game is in a sorry state. How about he and his companion tackle all the issues mentioned above instead of adding funni sex aliens to the game? And like, soon? "It's out when it's out lol" doesn't work anymore when you're earning that much. The Game is not "BIG" - in fact, it's rather small in reality - and "taking a fat break" from it implies that a lot of hard, sudorific work has gone into it. 9.200+ Dollars, by the way, in case you forgot.
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TheRatGaming3 days ago
I may just be blind but I cant find the light switch for the main hall. please help
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Magenta Lizard4 days ago
How do you pronounce Argemia?
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maxwelltk12 days ago
My radar has not been showing the amount of entities since a power outage and its confusing me. Do I need to do something or is this a bug? Also, this game has sucked me in and there seems to be no hope of letting me go. I love this.
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FireyDeath415 days ago
I autosaved after being stranded somewhere with the food meter at like 8 while carrying an ATV with an empty tank and taking a nasty fall after running down a hill
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FireyDeath415 days ago (1 edit)
Starving, lost and running around carrying an exhaustedATV over my headwith the headlights on (they have free power all the time) after pretty much failing to do the second day because I was too busy trying to get around on the ATV and find the satellites and then feeling tired and sleeping the day away
I can't believe there are no signposts or trails leading to the satellites around the border
Autosave is gonna consign me to effectively softlocking in starvation before I manage to earn the monies to actually eat something and not die
Also I feel like I'm gonna end up not playing the game properly because you're not supposed to save-scum and all the rest of itin order to survive and win
Tips:
- Change the error responsefor writing "sv.hash" on the base terminal from "err" to "No hashcodes for base terminal; use satellite terminals to access their hashcodes" or something explanatory like that
- Add a feature that prevents autosave because there just isn't one
- Maybe add save slot duplication
- Maybe multiply thestamina consumption by some factorwhile carrying the ATV or something. Or not. It seems funny to cheese it's capabilities byrunning around with it giving free light over your head like a smurf
- Maybe make the ATV headlights connected to the fuel supply
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5666666621 days ago (1 edit)
How do i install it and how do i run it..
Should there be some thing to show run or cancel so please help. By the way just release it on steam.
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FireyDeath422 days ago (1 edit)
I got so hungry while I tried to figure out how to work the microwave (without breaking it on the trash) that I started hallucinating hamburgers. And now the shrimp pack is mysteriously gone
I have so much trash everywhere but I absolutely do not want to ask how to get rid of it because that would be cheating
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freggsterminator23 days ago
do NOT try hooking onto the delivery drone. you CAN and WILL fly with it and if you unhook with physics damage on, you will die when you hit the ground.
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Magenta Lizard24 days ago
How to befriend alien
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FireyDeath429 days ago
Got a fatal error two times while trying to use the signal processing station in the tutorial. Took me quite a few minutes, too, they did ¦/
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Moumi35 days ago
Can the drama end already?
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FireyDeath435 days ago (2 edits) (+1)
It's been a while, but yesterday I got around to playing the story mode of VOTV. I was tired then, and proceeded to sleep through something about an hour later, but it hit way too close to home for me. I freed some space on my computer, so it turned out the tutorial didn't actually just crash when I went on the slides, and there was more to it, but honestly I wasn't interested in taking the time to learn about things then, rather than doing so as I went when I wanted to do certain specific things.
Problem was, I didn't really know what to do.
First I had to fiddle with the controls to grab a suitcase containing a certificate that I felt had fraudulently been presented to me, and I couldn't go past the threshold so I spent a while running across the long wall of fence trying to get past it, but, failed. Then I returned to the checkpoint and decided to see if I could head to the base. I could use the flashlight in the tutorial, but not here because apparently you had to drop the suitcase (which I already wasn't very comfortable doing, since that would make it a loose object that could fly or get whisked away by something - at least that's how I felt) and fetch the batteries to use it. Also, I felt like having fiddly and slightly-convoluted controls was gonna be a problem if I ever needed to protect myself or do something quick, because I wouldn't be able to do much more than either just run around or stop and make myself exposed so I could handle a bunch of items. So for a while I couldn't read the signs because it was night-time and the render quality was...a bit low and indistinct, probably, but still a bit laggy. That meant I got lost and just ended up at a satellite running around on a dark balcony. Then I felt really, really lost. So I left and decided to run somewhere to try and find where I was supposed to go, ended up in the water, scrambled my way out and found myself back at the checkpoint. Great. So I opened the suitcase and used the batteries. Took me a while to get there, but I did.
Yeah, the place was a mess. I felt like the place didn't belong to me and I was simply intruding. Normally this would be fun, since I like to run around and explore stray construction sites around town, but I was feeling really tired and I felt bad because I couldn't just have a moment of collapsing on the laptop out of exasperation because the plug was broken and I would have to mess with it trying to make the exposed internal wires connect and stay put again if I did that. The lights were all out so it was really dark in there, and there were no light switches to be found. When I got to the signal processing room I saw there were actually some bar-lights on the ceiling, so I moved over a desk to see if I could do anything with them and I couldn't. The combination of the place being dark, laggy and trashed gave everything a sense of discomforting claustrophobia that I simply wouldn't have if I was running around at the shops instead, and I also felt like I was under pressure because of my food and sleep gauges going down. If you've been on my Discord server and read my speeches, you know what having a messy place that's overwhelming yet apparently having limited clear options while you struggle with ADHD and slow stagnation and self-neglect does to you. Eventually I drove out the buggy thing. But it didn't make me feel better because I was tired and disturbing the place would make it more chaotic and trashed than it already is. Plus, the controls were simple but also fiddly, it seemed. Left the headlights on when I got off it at some point and I immediately started worrying about whether it would run out of power when I couldn't even see how much it had, so I went back.
Tried going on the main computer station in a bit of desperation to try and do something, but just like the tutorial, I read a couple of emails, and everything was just long paragraphs and clusters of text and meta-exposition that I couldn't remember or skim through. Then I deleted both of those emails for some reason, so now I was really stuck. The game was auto-saving all the while as I did this, while I was slowly starving, so I just gave up and went to bed. The sun rose as I woke up, some event happened that dropped my sleep gauge, I went back to sleep again, I couldn't go back to sleep, I wandered around the place, and then I gave up and closed the game and slept through something as I mentioned earlier. Everything was just too overwhelming for me and aside from exactly two paragraphs of two deleted emails from two people, I had nothing guiding me on specifically what to do. I didn't need to live a double-life where one life was just as disorderly as the other one. I might get back to the game later, at some point when I get to the laptop again - which I'm sure you can wait for since it's been many months since I wrote that comment about the tutorial - but for now I suppose I'm just going to get over that. I didn't want to stay stuck in the tutorial for much longer since I already outran the spook and did a bunch of experiments that seemed fun and didn't progress to the main game for a really long time, but I suppose I'll have to stay there anyway until I get an intuitive grasp on how the game goes. Then I'll be able to deal with the base I stepped and ran around in, and find a way to accept and claim it as my own. No idea where to start but I suppose I'll restart and not delete those emails next time, as well as be patient and know when to stop and take a break or think things over.
Yeah it's one of these speeches again :P
Hopefully that was at least nostalgic to see, the stereotypical long walls of text on MrDrNose game pages by FireyDeath4, even if previous ones (and even this one)sounded very silly
I should probably give you a free cookie as an act of courtesy or something. Sigh... 🍪Here you go
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lefunnypaste35 days ago(+1)
can't microwave the plush
10/10 would play again
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Frenshed37 days ago(+1)
i love your work mrdrnose, hope you have a nice break!
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Amongasik22941 days ago(+1)
Почему я не могу найти 0.7.1 хотя она уже вышла?
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a real bee42 days ago
I'm having issues installing the game, it would stop installing the download would say, "cannot install, no permissions," how would I fix this? (I'm new to itch.io and using it, too)
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tutelgamerm46 days ago(+1)
im having problems with my daily task my hashcodes are fine but i always need to deliver 2 level 3 drives any way to solve this or is this normal?
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weddigo48 days ago(+2)
Add the ability to hold plasma TV, as well as give the omega kerfus plasma TV to him. He also sits on Kerfuss's back and tells him where to go.
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