Made in 30 days, this is a fun little game where people battle each other with words in order to get their way.

Likes:
+ No tired fantasy tropes (what!? You mean this isn't about a boy who needs to save the world??!). The game is set in a rather pompous dinner party held by a mysterious professor and the plot proceeds to get more interesting from there.

+ Great concept of battling with words. In order to persuade people to do things you must defeat them in a word duel which is very different from your conventional RPGMaker battle system. Combat resembles a tug-of-war as you try to gain power and tact, enrage your opponent and push the battle meter all the way to the end in order to win. The combat mechanics are fun with an element of rock-paper-scissors (circle-star-square) to them although I was initially confused by the symbols.

+ Characters with distinct personalities and competently written dialogue. There is no voice acting but the characters do hem and haw, which is initially amusing.

+ Ugradable combat abilities and wine-collecting mini quest. Equip more abilities via bowties, obtained by levelling up or purchasable from a ....um.... cat :P

Gripes:
The gripes were relatively minor but explain why I didn't rate this 5/5

- Quizzing each character on the different topics was rather awkward and involved quite a lot of button presses. It would have been easier to list them all inside the "Chatter" menu option.

- More distinctive combat strategies required to defeat each character would have really ramped up the fun and challenge but I can understand the time constraints. (Eg. background effects, aggressive characters, defensive characters, needing a win in only X turns etc.) Or maybe limit the number of abilities you can equip per battle, requiring the use of specific abilities to defeat specific opponents to increase the strategizing.

- More puzzles/optional sidequests would have been fun

- Initially it was slightly odd to see all the characters depicted merely as coloured shadows. I understand this has been rectified for the Steam release.