Undying Review (Nana-chan)
This War of Mine but 3D and zombies.
I'm enjoying this one a lot so far! It reminds me a lot of the crafting and exploration from This War of Mine. The mood also feels similar, but still unique. I played the demo first, and maaaaan, the full version is so much smoother.
Some problems:
- It's unclear when Cody can start to do something on his own, and it takes extremely long for him to learn.
- You have to choose one of 3 debuffs daily, which is a cool system but it's not explained properly.
- It seems there's some activities you can do with Cody in the living room for fun that can also teach him stuff, but this isn't explained. I think you can also leave him home, but it's also not explained.
- It's annoying that you have to hold F to do something, especially since 1) you have to press space to teach Cody, and 2) if you craft something, you don't have to do that. It's inconsistent and it's preventing me from getting used to holding F when I sometimes don't have to.
EDIT - Cody gets scared super often, and it's tedious to comfort him every time especially with the animation taking so long.
EDIT - Devs should make the option to comfort Cody priority over telling him to do something. I find myself pressing E for him to pick something up only for him to be scared, then I can't press E to comfort because the game thinks I'm pressing E for him to do something. This means I have to lead him away where there is nothing to interact with just so I can comfort him then go back and try to tell him to do it - along with this happening often and the animation being so long, this is super annoying.
EDIT - sometimes when there's a cutscene/event and there's a lot of talking, the dialogue gets quite a lot and the text size gets small. This is super uncomfortable to read - it makes me skip dialogue more often because I don't want to read a wall of text. I recommend rather making more pages of dialogue rather than making it so a lot of text is forced into one box. It's the same amount of reading but it's a lot easier to digest (yay for psychology)
Good things:
EDIT - The symptoms make more sense when you progress a little more, and is making the game a lot more interesting (still not explained properly though!)
EDIT - It took me a long time to encounter because I'm playing on tranquil mode, but I love that Cody can get sick! It makes the game super interesting and forces you to change the way you think about how you spend the day.
EDIT - You can either let Cody learn things by watching and helping, or you can unlock them with skill points! Cool way to handle this - sometimes I don't get enough opportunity to let him learn through watching/helping, and the skill point cuts out the frustration for even finding the opportunity to let him learn.
Bugs:
- Small mistake when you meet the cat: in the demo it was called "Hiiro", and in the full version they changed it to "Pink", but they call him "Hiro" in one of the dialogue boxes.
- I didn't try to replicate it but at one point when I rushed to Cody, I couldn't attack anymore except in a rush attack unless I changed my weapon.
Overall I like this game despite its flaws. I haven't played very much yet but I fully intend to.
EDIT: As I play more, the game does become more tedious - BUT I still enjoy it a lot and I still recommend it.