izigame.me

I get tired of rogue style games quickly, I have a like-hate relationship with Visual Novels, and I'm not fond of social deduction games like Secret Werewolf and Among Us. Despite those, I still wanted to give Gnosia a try because it sounded so unique and hoped it would hold my attention. And for a bit, it did. Unfortunately, I began to get tired of it and started getting annoyed at it's random design.
Since its a single player social deduction game without voice acting, you're more reliant on your stats than any deductive capabilities to survive each loop. Which means you will at some point have to start grinding up EXP so you can appropriately level up stats. You only get EXP at the end of a loop, and you get significantly more if you "win" in the end. So grinding in this game is very tedious.
As far as the story is concerned, the overarching plot is not the real focus. Instead, its about the learning about all 15 of the characters. Literally, you have to learn more about each character in order to progress in the plot. In order to do so, you have to meet certain criteria in a loop in order to trigger an event (like certain characters get voted off, you have to play as Gnosia and keep someone who isn't Gnosia alive until the end, etc.). However, because this is a roguelike, there's several things that are just random and you have no control over. You are able to customize SOME aspects about a loop, but unfortunately, you can't customize everything, which means you could start a loop where you don't have all the criteria you need to trigger the specific event you're after. There's other random elements as well that could completely screw you over. Like if you need to keep a specific character alive until the end, that character could just get randomly killed while progressing the loop. There's also the fact that several of these characters I just didn't find interesting enough to actually want to know more about. Yet in order to progress in the game, I had to put up with random BS in order to try to learn more about this character I don't like.
Another thing, and admittedly this may just be me, but I never liked being the Gnosia in this game. That could stem from me just not liking being the antagonist in social deduction games, but I also just in general don't want to be the evil character killing off these characters because I don't have any grudge or reason to want to kill them off. Again, that's probably just me, but since you have to play as the Gnosia (or play as non-Gnosia and help the Gnosia win a loop) to learn more about certain characters, I was at an impasse.
The game is also in general bad at explaining things. There's a lot of tips and things to know about how to play this game in which it just doesn't properly explain in the game and you're forced to either look it up online or read through the many pages of explanations in the game's pause menu. You should always properly explain the mechanics of your game in the actual game itself and not relegate it to a menu or an outside resource that someone else made. And if your game is too complex/complicated to do that, then just make your game simpler for cripes sake. Plus, there's some criteria for advancing the plot that I don't believe ANYONE could ever figure out.
I think the game has some lovely artwork, I appreciate the ambitious attempt, and there are some character I did genuinely like and wanted to know more about. Unfortunately, I was only on like Loop 16, and many people were saying you'll need to do like 150+ loops to beat the game, and I just couldn't bring myself to keep playing with all of my grievances I was having.