A-Z #61 The Occupation - Its like playing DoTa, but the same.
0I left the entire mission unedited on purpose. It will get you mentally ready for having to repeat it.
This game does not have a manual save mode, or even an autosave checkpoint every 5 minutes or so. This is a big problem.
I noticed in the steam discussion forums that the developers claims it was an intentional design choice to not include a manual save due to "in game time mechanics" and quite frankly, that all sounds like a bunch of BS with all due respect Mr Developer.
I started playing this game, and I have sank the better part of an hour into the second mission. This game literally makes you play for hours in real time to progress further into the missions. This is an interesting mechanic I will admit, but not letting people save is an absurd design choice, one that begs the question as to whether or not you have the capability of implementing such BASIC ability in a vide game.
After real life called, I had to exit the game after I noticed do some automatic checkpoint thing which I thought it was saving my game. The game time was 50 minutes of gameplay, only 10 minutes away from my meeting with the NPC. I exited the game, foolishly thinking that I could just jump right back on.
At what point does your "Artistic and design choice" stop benefitting the end user of your product, and instead starts making their lives miserable? I have little to no desire to return to the game at this point. If this had not been part of the humble choice bundle a couple of months ago, I would had requested a refund since I am less than 2 hours in.
Why would it had been such a disaster for me to be able to save my progress and not have to repeat 50 minutes of the same stuff all over again?
I am simply flabbergasted by this decision. Reading your response and your justification of such decision in the forums does nothing to justify it in a remarkably reasonable manner. This comes with heavy burden as well because at its core, The Occupation does what it does very brilliantly, for the most part.
Now that my ranting is complete, I will try to explain what the game is for those who are still interested in taking a risk with this game.
The basic premise of the game is that within an allotted amount of time, which is counted in real time, you must explore a level in order to discover as many clues as you can and puzzle what is happening together. This is a big head scratcher of a game because you are solely dependant on your own ability to memorise attributes of each level, such as secret pathways and their locations, rooms, conversations that will lead you to items necessary to proceed etc. There are no waypoints, there are no hand holding mechanics (to the point that the game will not even save for you).
Some areas are restricted and some of those areas will sound off an alarm. There are ways of disabling alarms, such as discovering the passwords for them by exploring of course, or by deactivating breaker. If you get caught too many times by the guards, you will eventually lose. I never got to that point. I was really close to beating the first level when the game decided to present me with a big nice juicy middle finger and say SIKE, YOU THOUGHT, and bump me back to the beginning of the level.
At the end of the day, this is your product. Your idea presented to the world to see, your vision. Your creation. But it is also my duty to inform others that would suffer from the same fate. You said so yourself in a comment, that you know some people may have only 20 minutes to play the game, but you simply do not care (paraphrasing the not caring part). Your excuse is that there are only 2 long levels. This should not even be a discussion.
#theoccupation
#gameplay
#meme