7 Days: An NPC Story

7 Days: An NPC Story really is about the daily life of an NPC in a small quiet village.
You can see adventures and other people visiting, and .. enjoy .. doing some random fetch quests before you can sleep and sleep and sleep some more.

There are no battles, there is no exploration to do except for the few houses in your village.
What you can see are small changes in the environment - from adventures coming into town, leaving town, and coming back all beat up.

The problem is that there is too little of it. There is so little dialogue, so little happening that you are simply bored. There are some tropes such as pots being broken by adventures (and a possible explanation as to why these rooms exist in the first place, oh crazy potlady).


I get it. I get it already.

There are games focusing on NPC interaction or even NPC stories like "You are not the Hero" which still make for a more dramatical take, but it shows some potential even bystander can have. For example, there is a dragon atop of the mountain with a staircase leading up to it from the very village you live in - a warrior stands watch there and hopes it will be slain by the adventures.
But why is that all we get to know about it? Why is there no gossip? Why is there not any sign of the threat this enemy poses? Especially as NPCs who can't fight it! There is no punchline, there is no depth, there are only a few tropes in a mild manner and just random stuff happening.
The Sunken Spire is a great example of how engaging, funny and interesting a NPC-filled town can work. While there is dialogue complementing each other (like the bartender commenting how that merchant is drinking his sorrow away), there is only one line for one very obvious change for the day. It feels too flat.


.. sure.

There is no wonder and no excitement.
Why isn't there anything our character can do - aside from chores? She could go for a walk outside, go for a swim in some pond, enjoy picking flowers, she could try to follow the adventurers or watch them. Hell, this is one game where I could even imagine minigames (like cardgames) going really well with.
What makes this particularily boring is that there is no interactivity at all - you can only listen. And fetching stuff. The end.

There are some technical errors such as not obtaining an item after you pick something up - you can deliver it just as well, but talking with other people afterwards sometimes causes the event to reset and thus send you back to pick it up. While the dialogue choice stayed on the "have a nice day// you did it already"-line, it does work. It also happened to me that I went back a day when I talked to my mother on sunday, got a line about having finished a chore.. and woke up on sunday again.
While there are no bigger grammatical errors, there is some odd phrasing every now and then, but nothing big. It is, however, fairly bland.


Oh don't mind her, that's all she can ever say.

All in all:
It looks mediocre to subpar, there is barely any interactivity, there is barely anything happening, and you simply don't come to care about the characters, the town or any of the environments. Thus giving the few good ideas there are less of an impact.
It is a boring game. You can imagine a NPC life like that, surely. Standing on the same place every single day of the week. But if you take videogame logic as such, at this face value, then a punch-line game of you either using one set path every day or doing nothing at all would work better to get the point across.