And it's fascinating how they manage to screw up lots of things while simultaneously getting a lot right. The end result is a game that I think is so fundamentally flawed that they can't trivially fix it, but on the other hand getting a few things right early on would have probably cheaply salvaged it. I'm going to start with the smaller problems, but trust me, it gets bad.
Path to Nowhere is a tower defense game that came out a week or so ago. It can briefly be summarized as "you're the new warden of Arkham Asylum But For Hot Evil Supervillain Lesbians Who Want To Do A Variety Of Things To You", which is a somewhat unique pitch in the current market. I've seen a lot of fanart already, despite the fact that I only know one person who's actively playing it.
The game clearly has a sizable budget - large chunks of the main story are fully voiced in english and japanese, all the gameplay sequences are in relatively high-detail 3D, and it launched with a lot of content in it. It clearly spent a good amount of time in development before launch.
On the other hand, it's littered with mistakes and problems that make it hard to imagine how it could have shipped in this state without being rushed and untested. Riddled with translation errors and text that runs offscreen so you can't read it, controls and tiny text that would only feel at home on a desktop PC (despite it not working right in emulators), and very poor tutorials/game balance. I've repeatedly hit difficulty spikes that were seemingly random and turned out to be because the game didn't explain a mechanic or they simply had not playtested the stage enough to get the balance right, and then after spending 15+ minutes on that single stage the next one took around 90 seconds. Many games ship in this state, but it feels rare to see it happen when the game seemed like it had time and money to spare.
But I said the game is fundamentally flawed, right? Those are all fixable problems - you do an editing pass or two over the translation, have the programmers and UI designers adjust things so it's actually playable comfortably on small phones, and fix emulator support. Rebalance a few stages and you're good, right?
Well, not actually. I've elided a couple key problems! The lesser of the two is the art direction and visual design. See, this game is for phones, right? But for some reason, all the characters are tiny 3D models shown from a perspective that obscures their detail, rendered at a size that makes them less legible. They waste a ton of screen space for nothing, showing you boring environment detail at the margins. This is a game that wants to sell you cosmetics where the actual result of that purchase will be barely visible while you play it.
The models have no reason to be this small! And the perspective chosen is a clearly bad one. The squares you place units on have plenty of extra space, so character models could be bigger with no issue, much like they are in other tower defense games. And the choice of perspective causes all your characters to overlap each other, which makes it even harder to see them, and worse still makes it very difficult to select the character you want with your finger... in a real time game where being a second too late can ruin a stage.
Anyway, enough about gameplay. Lots of games have major gameplay problems, sometimes they get fixed. The part they probably can't fix at this point is the story/setting. See, I mentioned you're basically the warden of Lesbian Arkham Asylum, right? Being a prison warden is already sketchy enough as a position, but the developers decided to double down on this and make sure you're really uncomfortable because the player character is a deeply, fundamentally bad person.
The core plot mechanism that justifies the player being important is the "shackles", a magical power you have for no reason that allows you to enslave "sinners" (anyone with Evil Supervillain Powers) by touching them. Naturally, this makes you the perfect (?) prison warden because you can just tap all the naughty girls and boys on the arm and then walk them back to their prison cells. Okay.
Why did I put the word "sinners" in scare quotes, you ask? Well in the setting this term actually just means "anyone with superpowers", and you get superpowers from exposure to Evil Goo called "mania", which happens to be ALL OVER the city and causing lots of random people to get sick, transform into monsters, or gain superpowers. Many of those people obviously have not done anything wrong, and the game railroads you into trying to enslave at least one - an emergency trauma nurse who is busy trying to save lives in front of you. Cool and normal!
But maybe this is subversion or deconstruction or some other narrative approach I'd know the word for if I went to school. That's possible! Except it is clearly not. When the player is actively given a choice the writers try their hardest to make you seem caring and sympathetic while simultaneously railroading you into expanding your harem-adjacent army of slave prisoners, many of whom don't seem to have done anything wrong and probably never faced a trial. To unlock character stories you throw characters into an interrogation room to harass and torture them into spilling their secret crimes, like - for example - "I stopped 8 cops from beating a woman to death using my healing powers", and then you get to decide whether to gently tell them "you're a good person and you're going to stay in evil slave jail" or to scold them for not helping the friendly cops kill an unarmed woman.
The part that kills me about this is that the writing frequently strays close to actually having things to say or being interesting. Characters frequently call the protagonist a lapdog or a tool of the higher ups, which is true! You're a disposable tool only valued for your powers. But at the end of the day you have a comfy office and can make all these people do whatever you want. All it would take to recontextualize all of this and make it far more interesting would be for you to also be a prisoner, someone placed above all the others and forced to use your powers against them. Make the way society forces people to oppress each other explicit, make the player confront how their character is complicit in all of this and how by protecting themselves they're hurting others. Ask difficult questions! Many of the plot beats would not need to change at all.
But doing that would ruin the vibe. They wouldn't be able to make their gacha the "arrest" screen where you have thugs go round up random sinners for you to hit with the shackles, you wouldn't have a comfy office and the freedom to take people out on little expeditions as a reward for good behavior, and the prison staff wouldn't be deferential to you. That wouldn't be empowering, would it?
What a massive waste of potential. Games in 2022 are depressing.
P.S. you can find some more screenshots and video clips in this twitter thread, where I mostly was complaining about bad translation and bad UI. https://twitter.com/antumbral/status/1585491252879196160
