No one has rated this review as helpful yet
Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 6.9 hrs on record
Posted: 10 Oct, 2021 @ 5:04pm
Updated: 10 Oct, 2021 @ 5:10pm

A wacky, fun experience. While the gameplay is often frustrating, the excellent dialogue and interesting world more than make up for it.

The story takes place in a number of airports, each on a separate planet. These airports are populated by various (canine) characters who will typically have some dialogue and occasionally a quest. While there's really only one 'quest chain' required to finish the game, each of these side quests tells a small story and reveals more about the characters and the world.

Unfortunately, the majority of these quests just ask you to fetch one or more items, typically earned via another quest, given by a specific character, and/or found in a specific shop. Compounding this is a mechanic where, in order to fly between the planets, you need to locate the right boarding gate and then complete one of a small number of mini-quests to open it. These mini-quests are almost all fetch quests as well, and one of them requires you to complete yet another fetch quest for a different item in order to earn the item you need.

While the frustration of these quests can be mitigated somewhat by carrying multiples of each item, the inventory management is incredibly simplistic: you scroll through items one-by-one and there's no way to view a list of them. On top of this, a number of the items are never used and exist purely for flavour or jokes. This means that you have to balance the annoyance of scrolling through a longer list of items with the annoyance of needing to go get items if you don't have them on you. The airports are quite large and so needing to trek from your gate to a specific shop and back can be very tedious.

Finally, the graphical style is certainly not going to be to everyone's tastes - as the screenshots show, most 'characters' are simply 2D stock photos. I found this quite fun, and in a few cases it's used to comic effect, but I can understand why some people might consider it a poor or even lazy decision. On top of this, many of the models and effects in the game seem like they could have come from the unity asset store - the low-poly, bright-coloured look is clear and clean but feels a bit bland.

From the above criticisms, it would be easy to dismiss the game as not worth playing, but the dialogue is consistently funny and charming, and the 'lore' of the world that's drip-fed through conversations is fascinating (occasionally veering into cosmic horror territory!) The core story, without going into spoilers, concerns the relationship between the player character and their girlfriend and develops into a touching and very believable emotional tale despite the otherwise silly tone.

I got just shy of 7 hours playtime out of a single playthrough and, although I did complete all of the quests and met all of the characters, there's still a lot of dialogue I've not seen so I can see myself replaying it sometime in the future.
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