izigame.me

I feel very conflicted on this game.
I'm giving it a recommend purely because it very clearly has a lot of time, care, and heart put into it; it's a very genuine game. I also do think it's deserving of your time and money, and it has some really solid moments. The visuals and music are also pretty superb. All this good being said, there are some problems with the game that leave me very conflicted on the experience. Spoilers ahead.
For one, I feel like this game does not even scratch the surface of its ideas. The core concept of "you have an artificial intelligence which has been designed to be your friend" is extremely lucrative in terms of exploring ideas. What would an AI consider the best way to garner and maintain your friendship? What scary misunderstandings or shortcuts could happen in the process? What does it say about the protagonist that they were willing to bring intelligence into the world with the sole purpose of being their friend? None of these questions really get answered or explored, instead the AI feels like it just kind of does things "because it's scary". The AI comes to the conclusion, immediately and randomly, that the only way it can be a successful friend is if it makes a game you like so much you won't leave, and then that's pretty much the conflict for the entire game. Whenever the AI isn't obsessively checking that you're still having fun, it's saying pointlessly ominous things that feel like they don't serve much of a purpose outside of trying to get a cheap pop and creep you out. It just makes me a bit sad that a concept with such an insane amount of potential is essentially wasted on the 500th take on the old trope "what if a creepy ai made you play its sick twisted games!!!"
The pacing is also bumpy. The text section at the beginning is arguably the most well-structured part of the game and is over extremely quickly, followed by an RPG middle section that drags on and on for about 80% of the game's runtime, and then a brief first-person section that's only really used for a fairly cheap scare. The story is paced very oddly too -- the moment-to-moment writing is actually pretty good, but the story is not beated out properly at all. For instance, when the AI throws every enemy in the game at you and suddenly starts ranting about how it hated you from the start it feels bizarre and entirely unearned, and the ending in particular is way too sudden and needlessly convoluted.
The game is also, as much as I hate to admit it, a bit derivative. If you've played undertale and you've played portal, you've seen most of the ideas this game is going to present. Glitch horror is cool, but this game doesn't really pull out any unique tricks, it's just the same "let's make the screen glitch out and then give a fake error message and close the game" that I've seen a lot of games do prior. The gameplay isn't anything super special either, not that it needed to be for a concept like this, but it means there's very little to set this game apart besides minor gimmicks (that being said, I don't care if it's a gimmick, changing the color of the whole game to your favorite color is fucking rad).
Again, this is a game I would say I overall enjoyed, which is why these issues bother me so much. There's such a solid foundation here, built upon with an amount of talent and heart that is absolutely palpable when you're playing the game, but if I'm being brutally honest the end result feels a bit incompetent, like it's not sure what it wants to be, and is drawing more from ideas that inspired it rather than ideas of its own.
Still, worth your money and time, undoubtedly worth experiencing, and I am excited to see what these devs work on in the future