Recent reviews by otanim

A Solid Foundation That Needs More Depth

The game is surprisingly good and has a lot of potential. However, once your teammates are skilled enough, the experience starts to feel stale. It lacks that sense of variety and unpredictability that keeps sessions fresh and engaging.

Mods, while intended to expand the game, often detract from the core experience. Similarly, overly loud or disruptive players can ruin the atmosphere. The level design is also limited and quickly becomes repetitive.

To truly thrive, the game would benefit from some roguelike elements - something to keep each playthrough distinct and rewarding.

All in all, it's a good game, but it still feels a bit undercooked. I’d love to revisit it in about 6 months to see how it has evolved.

Good job so far, developers. Keep it up!

This is not a game; it's a time-waster widget on your desktop. This "game", or whatever you call it, actually has great potential. But well, I guess all you do is slow-paced gambling with assets. I cheated my way through, hacked the grass count, and got to the end, and as expected, there was nothing to really expect - the same frog endlessly cutting grass forever.

I wouldn't recommend this product, unless you're a vegetable.

Unfortunately, the game is in a rough state at the moment, with numerous bugs and issues disrupting progress. It needs more time for proper QA, polishing, and bug fixes. I may consider revisiting it or updating my review if the major issues are resolved.

For the record, I played both Dreaming Sarah and its mini web game, and I enjoyed both, though the web game had a few minor caveats.

best game

2nd if not the 1st best game (after the game Inside).

So, I initially played this game on its release date on PS4 Pro. Back then, it was an absolute mess. You’d think they’ve fixed *all* the issues by now, right? Well… not really. Here’s my conclusion after replaying the entire game on PC with the latest tech.

Pros:

Improvements I’ve noticed: the police are way smarter than before. And… that concludes the improvements. Yes, they added a handful of side missions and soundtracks tied to Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. But these missions? They’re painfully lazy: "Go here, go there, wait for someone to call you, call someone back, message someone, aaand... you get a jacket for an anime character!" This kind of integration feels more like a checkbox ticked off than a meaningful addition. Sure, it might impress some people, but there are far too many filler missions like this.

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Cons:

Game-breaking issues:

• Certain actions don’t trigger when they’re supposed to, forcing you to restart the game.
  
• Frequent game crashes that sometimes require restarting your entire PC to get things running again.
  
• In Phantom Liberty DLC you can fall off from the map while swimming.
  
• In Phantom Liberty DLC's "Run this town" mission near to the chair you can't deactivate Augilar's imprint, I guess devs didn't bother testing this mission after the implementation either. Must've been too busy counting money I'm assuming.

Scripting issues:

• Some dialogues trigger out of context, repeating lines that no longer make sense after certain actions.
  
• Critical dialogue options with Johnny that influence your relationship with him can be misleading, sometimes causing conversations to end prematurely and locking you out of key choices.
  
• Enemy AI while driving can randomly insta-kill you if the game *feels* like it’s supposed to happen, regardless of your health bar.
  
• In the "Automatic Love" mission, you can bribe joytoys for information - up to 45% of your total money. Got $100,000? Say goodbye to $45,000 for... nothing useful. Who designed this?
  
• Tiny Mike keeps asking V to sit next to him in Afterlife, every single time you pass next to him, and gives no any useful information. Just keeps harrassing the player.

Game design issues:

• Picking up certain items is unnecessarily finicky; you need to stand at just the right angle and aim your cursor *perfectly*.
  
• Bodies and pick-ups sometimes vanish instantly after specific actions, preventing you from looting them.
  
• Difficulty imbalance: "Very Hard" mode doesn’t affect general gameplay - it just slightly tweaks boss fights.
  
• Navigation directions are often nonsensical, and you’ll rely on common sense more than the game’s map guidance.
  
• The final box fight isn’t replayable unless you manually reload the game.
  
• Weapons received as rewards from fixers somehow appear in your apartment stash. How did they get there? Plus, they initially display as "Tier 1" items but magically adjust to your current tier upon pickup.
  
• Shooting side missions clearly weren’t designed with console players in mind. If you’re using a joystick, good luck - you’ll need mouse-level precision to pass them.
  
• Dialogue skipping feels inconsistent: sometimes you can skip important bits, and other times you’re forced to sit through pointless lines.
  
• Often you get in a combat state, you kill all enemies yet you can't get out of this situation unless you save and reload the game,
  
• Few times it happened that you get into a combat but you're locked out of using weapons, so the only movie you can pull is to just run away.

Immersion-breaking issues:

• People float above their bikes while the bikes continue moving like everything’s fine.
  
• Time-skipping while driving occasionally reveals PNG cars gliding across the road.
  
• Some mirrors in Afterlife don’t reflect your character.
  
• You can have dialogue options with people… after you’ve killed them.
  
• Collision of objects.
  
• What's the point of having either 20-30 years olds and only 5-6 year old (wobbly, and having adult face) kids in the game? No old people, nor teenagers,
  
• Floating corpse you can't loot.

UI/UX issues:

• Multi-level dialogue options dim after being clicked, even if you haven’t explored all the sub-options.
  
• Less-important dialogue options (highlighted in blue) aren’t consistently marked. Sometimes, choosing these actually impacts outcomes, which can be misleading.

Other:

• In the sequences where you can't fully interact (i.e. run, shoot. etc), the character's movement might slow down very badly.
  
• I got Autojock achievement even though I didn't buy all the vehicles, only ~60% of them.

Miscellaneous:

• You can’t romance Mama Welles or Micaela Ruiz. Unacceptable.

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Don’t get me wrong - the game is in a playable state now, and I’d even cautiously recommend it. But let’s be real: do you think “recommendations” will make developers genuinely consider criticism? Of course not. It’s baffling to me that a random player like myself can spot this many bugs and issues, yet after four years, countless test cycles, and mountains of feedback, these problems still linger.

Instead of prioritizing polish and quality, devs churn out new content for another quick profit boost. Passion is missing. There’s no drive to deliver a product that feels complete and refined.

Anyway, that’s just my take.

The DLC is only good if you want to support the charity, otherwise if you're a normal human being who just wants to spend some time enjoying playing it, you won't experience any enjoyment.

- The DLC is basically an extra 11 materials/stories that you need to collect, I ended up collecting only 9 of them even though the other 2 never to be seen nor the game allowed me to continue playing and collecting them, I guess it's for the better, considering how much of a mess this was.
- The game crashed at least 80+ times every 5m. Does seem like the game wasn't even been tested nor been polished.
- The DLC definitely wasn't been optimized for a controller, some parts of the game where you're being given options to choose, you'll be forced to switch to mouse/keyboard instead.
- Showing combat tutorial in the most extremely worst situation where you actually need to attack or defend yourself,
- Enemies falling through floors,
- And most funny part - in my playthrough at some point Katia's clone joined our gang, but without an eye patch, lol.

This DLC has been advertised for the release more than a month ago, but I bet devs actually spent on it no more than a week on the development. Very disappointing. I hope the new upcoming game Alters isn't another flop just like this one.

the game is good, but do not buy any of DLCs.

The DLC is not worth the price it’s being sold for.

It feels as though the development team spent 2–3 weeks on graphics but only 2–3 days on programming and asset replacement, neglecting proper testing and quality assurance. The DLC is in a very rough state, riddled with bugs and lacking polish.

The pixel art is well done, but 90% of the assets appear to be reused.

This is basically the same main game, with slight adjustments and replacements. I mean you can milk this game forever. I guess this is what's the developers' main aim.

[update]
Avoid purchasing this; it's not worth your time. It's a poorly made product that the developers clearly didn’t bother to test or even QA properly.

cool short game