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Review of City of Broken Dreamers

SubjectCity of Broken Dreamers
ByHelpfulness: 0
Vote: 9
publicnuisance on 2020-11-15
ReviewPhillyGames have outdone themselves. This may be just Book One of City of Dreamers but there is a lot of content here and it is fantastic. The art and backgrounds are gorgeous and ooze sci-fi class. The plot is very well done with not a single wasted character. Everyone was interesting and worth getting to know. There were loads of nice references to movies as well as a nice cameo of a character from Depraved Awakening. The game contains a glossary detailing back story and terms. There is also a great stats page listing where you stand with certain characters. It isn’t complete though as it doesn’t list all characters and it doesn’t list depravity points. The animations are some of the best I have seen in a visual novel and the production value is top notch. Even things like the opening credits are better than most visual novels out there. The music was good but there are points where there are no sound at all due to there being no voice acting.

I played City of Broken Dreamers on Linux. It never crashed on me. I did notice one spelling error in chapter 3 where it said “mayhap” where I think it should have been “maybe”. There is also an issue of the skip option not working. The button to skip the dialogue to the next choice is there but greyed out. You can manually save whenever you want and there are 63 save slots. Alt-Tab doesn’t work.

Game Version Played: 1.04
Game Engine: Ren’Py 7.2.2.491
Graphics API: OpenGL
Disk Space Used: 4789 MB
CPU Usage: 8-64 %
RAM Usage: 2.7-4.0 GB

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed the first book of City of Dreamers and can’t wait for Book 2. There are tons of choices to be made; a great world to get lost in, great art; lots of lewd scenes for those that want them; great humour; the game has it all. I finished my first play through in 5 hours 12 minutes. I paid $11.49 CAD for it but would have found it worth it even at $45 CAD. If you enjoy visual novels you should try this out. You can find the first few chapters for free on Itch.io and the full version of Book One on Steam. PhillyGames has come a long way. Depraved Awakening, their last game; was a good game in it’s own right but City of Dreamers is them finding another gear and taking things up a notch.

My Score: 9.5/10

My System:

Intel I5-4590 | 16GB DDR3-1333 | Intel HD 4600 1536MB | Mesa 20.0.8 | Mushkin SSD 120GB | Trisquel 9.0 | Mate 1.20.0 | Kernel 5.4.77-gnu
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