Review of Gnosia
| Subject | Gnosia Gnosia - Package Edition |
| By | Helpfulness: 2 Vote: 9.5meirin on 2021-10-25 last updated on 2022-01-26 |
| Review | This is going to be more of a "counter-review" of sorts since every time I see people discussing this game I always see the same criticisms being brought up, yet I feel most of them are misguided complaints. I don't particularly care if someone dislikes the game, everyone has their own tastes after all, but at the very least I would like this game to be valued for what it is and not what most thought it was going to be. So here it goes. "The same lines of dialogue get repeated over and over! This is by far the most common one and also the one I feel is the most misplaced. To put it simply, the game needs to have their dialogue lines being repeated, otherwise it just wouldn't work. Let's imagine they aren't and depending on the role the characters have different lines of dialogue. It should be obvious, but at that point there's no room for deduction, you would only need to look out for changes in their speech patterns and that's it. All the subtlety this game has regarding their behaviours would get thrown out of the window in favor for something much simpler and boring. But let's imagine they do try to fix this, having tons of different variations in their dialogue and what not. Remember though that this isn't a game that's over in a couple of loops but often in more than a hundred. So how would one be able to fix that? "Maybe having those lines being procedurally generated by some AI?" But if you do that all of the characters would lose their personalities. "Maybe having the trials being scripted?" Which at that point the game would cease to be what this game is going for. In other words, the repeated lines are a necessity for this game to work. Besides, you aren't meant to be reading those, the UI is already designed in a way so that it conveys all the crucial information needed, and once you realize that you can basically fly through rounds without stopping to read what each and every character is saying. "The AI is really dumb! I'm always getting voted even though it's obvious who the Gnosia is!" It's important to keep in mind that this game is as much of a deduction game as it is an AI manipulation game. Simply knowing who the Gnosia is is just half the battle, knowing when and who to accuse or support is just as important. The commands aren't meant to determine who is getting voted but rather to influence how each trial is going to develop. The commands themselves might seem limited by they really are more than enough to push forward. "The game is extremely repetitive!" So this is the only one where I can half agree. Yes, the game has a lot of repetition, but I feel it's not as bad as most make it out to be. I've played this game through completion more than once, and on my second playthrough things went significantly smoother. Having a proper understanding of this game's mechanics meant that I was clearing events which on my first playthrough took me multiple loops, on my first try, and their trigger rate was also considerably higher. What I took from this is that this game's repetition is nothing more than an adaptative difficulty, the more loops it takes the easier the game becomes overall. This is the same principle you see in JRPGs where, if you want, you can grind and one shot almost all enemies, or go underleveled and tackle the game with a more challenging approach. I will conceed though that it would've been more accessible if there was an advanced event search option, one that allowed you to straight up pick the event you wanted to trigger and be dropped into that loop without too much hassle. But still, for me personally the rate at which events triggered was decent enough that I didn't see this as a major problem. My own personal thoughts I'm sure anyone reading this is looking at the score right up there in the corner and thinking I'm overrating this game. And you know what, depending on your own judgement, maybe I am. But even so, I still believe that this is a incredibly tightly designed game, with a great story, charismatic characters, unbelievable good ost, and a unique premise that is not only fullfilled but also works wonderfully. There's really no other game like it out there, and the fact that such a tiny development team managed to pull it out is more than commendable. If I were to complain I would say that the secret event with Yuriko is quite hard to trigger and people might miss it, but that's kinda about it really. |
| 2 points |