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Dropsy Review Corrections & Feedback

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Total Posts: 16

Joined 2013-06-29

PM

Howdy! You were our lowest review at 50/100 so I decided to read it again (as painful as that was) and found a bevy of inaccuracies. Here are a few helpful corrections:

1. You can use the fast travel car at any time and do not have to travel back to it to use it. This is shown in-game, so it’s odd that the reviewer missed it.

2. Regarding this:

In conjunction with the lack of any substantial story motivations, you’re left wandering aimlessly through the sprawling, maze-like web of streets and forests, deserts and caves looking for something you can actually do.

I won’t respond to the ‘lack of story motivations’ because they are there plenty; but the reviewer seems to have missed the blinking map markers that the game actually forces you to look at, denoting the critical path of the game at every juncture.

3. Regarding this:

One time I needed to hug a character a second time to overcome their reluctance, even though every other instance of hug failure means that other actions are required first.

This is untrue, there are at least 3 other successful hugs near the start of the game that you perform without other actions. That said, it’s possible to just miss them if you never actually attempt to hug anyone, so we have adjusted this puzzle since release.

4. Regarding this:

because the game map is so huge and you can’t control time directly, you have to do even more aimless wandering in order to see every possibility at different times of day.

You can choose when to wake up. This feature was available a month before your review went up. Also, two beds are available at start, not one.

—-

As for the subjective content, the reviewer’s complaints revolve around a fundamental misunderstanding of our design decisions. Players having a difficult time interpreting the game’s dialogue is intentional. You don’t NEED most dialogue to progress as sufficient environmental detail/animation fills in the blanks. It emulates Dropsy’s lack of communication skill, and people who’ve never touched adventures in the past were completely fine with it.

Their criticism of the ‘optional puzzles’ taking up most of the game’s playtime is fair, but that was also intentional.

There’s no sense of character development or actual relationship established. Sometimes you’ll get an item in exchange, making those friendships just another form of currency.

Was a bit off in that quite a few of the game’s ‘optional’ puzzles stack. The homeless folks & church lady, as well as the ‘alien rings.’ Many of the ‘optional’ characters are directly tied to the fire that opens the game, and you can easily discover that in the game itself.

I still dig this website because it’s important to preserve and catalogue such a niche genre, but that review was poor. I’d encourage anyone who read it to give it a try yourself. It sucks to have such a sloppy analysis from THE website for an already super niche genre.

 

     
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Total Posts: 1341

Joined 2012-02-17

PM

I’ll look into the “inaccuracies” and update the review accordingly, if necessary, but frankly, if certain features are so easily missed, then I don’t feel at all bad for missing them. I’ll take your word for #1 (though I don’t recall seeing anything of the sort), but if I overlooked #2, then I overlooked it. Referring to the map for help is just another form of hint system anyway, not intuitive game design.

I don’t even understand your answer #3, which doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the criticism. Of course I tried hugging everybody. The complaint is that one person refuses the first time (the review says “hug failure” not “hug success”), and then welcomes it the next, without any further actions taken to convince him, which isn’t true of any other character in the game. (At least, that’s how I remember it, as long ago as it was now.)

#4 may or may not have been in the version I played. The review was long delayed already by the time it fell to me to cover the game personally, so I easily could have had an outdated version of the game by that point. That versions of the game exist without it certainly isn’t my fault. But again, if that option did exist and I simply missed it, then it wasn’t readily apparent. That’s a natural byproduct of deliberately refusing to explain fundamental interface features to players.

As for your other feedback, I’m well aware that these were intentional design decisions. I’m not sure why you think that matters at all. Just because you intended something doesn’t mean everyone will feel your decisions were successful. And when I refer to a “lack” of something, I don’t mean a total absence of them—I’m aware that they exist very superficially—but that they serve as a largely insufficient and ineffective motivation.

I’m afraid nothing you’ve said here changes my opinion of the game at all, and I still wouldn’t recommend it to anyone other than those already specified in the review. This game surely does have its audience, and I think I represented it very fairly to exactly those people. But I can guarantee you that I’m far from alone in being turned off by the game, and they too need to be represented.

Hey, I hope you do well with the game, and I was very disappointed that I didn’t like it nearly as much as others seem to. Nevertheless, I feel totally justified in my reasons, so it’s my obligation to say so. That’s the unpleasant part of the job, but it is the job.

     
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Total Posts: 1341

Joined 2012-02-17

PM

Okay, I’ve dutifully returned to the game I reviewed (version 2.2.0.4. from GOG), and if there’s a way to fast travel back to the car (or to another location without it), it qualifies as the world’s least accessible feature ever. If I blinked and missed whatever it was the game supposedly showed me, it’s essentially invisible after the fact. Either that or my game has a flukish bug.

I did see the blinking map markers, and that vaguely rang a bell from earlier. I believe I decided back then that those highlighted the major objectives, not necessarily the locations where you could currently accomplish something, which are two entirely different things (the latter being what the review was referring to). That could be time playing tricks with my memory so many months later, but seems likely.

So no, even now I see nothing at all “sloppy” about what is almost certainly the most thorough and extensive review of your game that exists.

EDIT: I see in another thread you’re claiming that all you do is need to click the map. I can say with absolute certainty that that does NOT work for me, nor does the map give any indication it’s possible. (See image, taken after car acquired.) Whatever the problem is, I’m not wrong.

 

     
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Total Posts: 1341

Joined 2012-02-17

PM

Where’d you go, Jay? I assumed this was an attempt at meaningful dialogue, but it seems it was merely an ill-conceived hit-and-run.

In any case, since this is a matter of public record, it deserves a follow-up. I have now confirmed that there is indeed a new version of the game (2.5.0.8. on GOG) since the one I played, and it impacts my earlier responses in the following ways:

1) Your claim that “You can use the fast travel car at any time” (bolded by you for unnecessary emphasis) is categorically untrue in both versions. I was not entirely accurate either, but even now there are quite a few locations that DO NOT allow fast travel after acquiring the car. Attempting to do so in the version I played resulted in no map markers whatsoever, as documented in the screenshot above. The new version still does not allow quick travel from any of those same locations, but now you’ve added inactive travel markers (as below).

This is just as useless to the player, but at least it alerted me to the possibility of quick travel that didn’t exist before, so I continued looking in more areas and found others that actually do allow it. It would appear that you allow quick travel in any location directly attached to a road, and refuse it in any location that is not. While that makes conceptual sense, it results in a completely inconsistent travel feature. Having accessed the map for precisely that purpose after acquiring the car and found no ability to quick travel from my location at the time, I was entirely accurate in my claim that additional backtracking was (and still is) necessary. The only thing I overstated is that you don’t need to go back specifically to your car (which the game’s inconsistency misled me into believing). The fact that you felt the need to patch in the inactive markers suggests you actually agreed this point needed addressing, though why you stopped halfway is beyond me.

4) You can indeed choose when to wake up in the newer version. You could NOT do so in the version I reviewed. Here too, my review was entirely accurate in describing my experience with the game. Again, the fact that this feature was implemented after the fact actually validates the nature of my complaint.

You’ve got me on the one bed instead of two thing. Either I forgot or purposely disregarded Dropsy’s own bed, which is so out of the way that it’s a nuisance to revisit, rendering it effectively irrelevant within the course of the game (beyond the couple times you’re forced back for story reasons).

Had you simply informed me of the latest game update much earlier (and I know you have my email, since I reached out to you several times pre-release in helping to promote your game), I would have happily appended the review with any relevant patch details long ago. Better yet, had you actually informed us of the update before the review was posted, we could have incorporated any changes into the text beforehand. But since neither occurred, we were entirely justified in reviewing the version first made available to us. It’s not a reviewer’s job to monitor ongoing post-launch updates. It’s a developer’s job to release their game in a finished state without them.

For the sake of all concerned, I will still update the review accordingly, of course, as soon as I get the chance. But this will not be a mass correction of so-called inaccuracies that never existed at time of writing.

     

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