PRICE

I kind of hate having to give this game a negative review because there are a lot of good things about it. The artwork is beautiful, the animated scenes are a nice touch, and most of the music is really good and has this haunting, melancholic sound that sets the tone for the story perfectly. The story itself is decent, perhaps a bit cliché at its core with parts that seem confusing and fragmented at times, but I got the gist of it. My favorite thing about it all was the abstract horror, but such scenes were unfortunately few and far between. However, my main gripe is that the game is hopelessly clunky and broken for what is essentially a visual novel with some moving pictures. [i]*Yes, I know it's free. I don't think that excuses poor game design by any means, though.[/i] It crashed on me about five times before I even started a new save because I kept trying to alt-tab while on the main menu screen, which apparently the game does not like. What's worse, though, is that I made the mistake of alt-tabbing right before the final cutscene because I thought it wasn't working since it was taking so long to start. The game crashed, of course, but when I tried to reload my save file it would give me an error every single time, effectively erasing all of my saves AND my ability TO SAVE AT ALL. Whatever, it's not a huge deal for such a short game, but I actually managed to somehow break the entire save/load system without even trying. None of this would have happened if the windowed mode was any good, but it's just a tiny box that isn't adjustable, so I had to stick to fullscreen. The other settings aren't any better, and there's only three of them. Don't even bother trying to adjust the audio levels in game, it won't work and will just continue to play the music at full blast and blow out your eardrums. Volume mixer is your friend here. Anyway, that's really about it. The translation wasn't particularly great either, it definitely had its fair share of 'Engrish', but I've played enough of these types of games to not really care at this point. Partial voice acting was fine, I guess, but too quiet compared to the music and kind of flat. I'm not particularly good at puzzles at the best of times but a lot of these ones were pretty random and nonsensical, wherein you just need to click around at vague furnishings and acquire items in a specific order that probably only the developer can truly understand. Even my boyfriend who IS good at puzzles couldn't see the reasoning behind them. Final thoughts: pick up PRICE if you want the free, easy achievements, but don't expect some deeply profound experience... or a functional one.

ive literally never played this game in my lifetime and steam says i did