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A very interesting Puzzle/Mystery held back by poor writing and execution

blindXpot is a short (around 1-2 hrs) Puzzle/Mystery game. You play as Leon, a young man who wakes up in a strange place and doesn't remember how he got there. Quickly you meet 3 other characters in your same predicament. Noticeably inspired by the Zero Escape series, there is a masked mystery man behind all this, and you're stuck until you solve all of his puzzles. That's as spoiler free as you can get when explaining the game's story. It's a short game, so even the smallest of events play a big role in the game's plot. Since I have a lot to say when it comes to Plot, I'll save that for the end!

Graphics and Sound

A fantastic artist worked hard on this game, that is very clear. There is even a Gallery you can check out that holds around 70 different CGs from the game, that's a lot for such a small game. Not to mention the face portraits and menus. On the graphical side of things, this game is incredibly strong. There is really one tune that plays throughout the game (maybe 2 more appear near the end) and its very catchy. I thought I would get tired of it considering how often it played, but it fit so perfectly with the game's themes and mood that I barely noticed. I'm not sure if this is a custom made song or not, but it works really well here. The mapping, however, does not live up to the quality of the game's other graphical areas. It's pretty bland, but it gets the job done and isn't an eyesore.



Gameplay

When you aren't solving puzzles you're walking around the building in a very linear fashion. You walk from one plot point to the next, which isn't a bad thing, but much of this could probably be cut out. Like I said before, the maps are bland and nothing to really look at. The game appears to be inspired by the Zero Escape series, and their solution to room traversal was making interact-able CG images to look at, which served as your current location. Instead of manually walking around a room, you just looked around the room (rotating and such) to display your environment. Since the core gameplay of the Zero Escape series is taking note of your environment to solve that room's puzzle, this sort of movement system works perfectly. blindXpot's approach to moving about is different, it is completely manual. Besides one other instance in the game, walking about the environment doesn't play much of a factor in completing the game's challenges (there is one Maze). Still, you have to manually control your character to go from point A to point B. As small of an issue it may seem to be, simply put these 2 things do not work together. The game is categorized as being part Visual Novel, so why not put VN style room traversal (as in selecting to move to Room 1 or 2) and being presented whatever scenario you're required to then deal with. You get rid of those dull RPG Maker Maps and your game feels more in sync.


This is what the Nonograms look like

In blindXpot what you're doing most is solving Nonograms which are a sort of logic puzzle. The rules to solve this puzzle are told to you, and you take it from there. You solve a couple of these and move on. A good design choice happens in the very first room, where you aren't handling a Nonogram but something very similar to one. It's a basic matching game you do, but it feels sort of like a warm up to the Nonograms later into the game. After the first room you meet the first other character, it's Aria. You join forces and lend her your flashlight so that she can escape her own room. A poor design choice happens when you're tasked with guessing what number a computer is thinking of. I believe the number is from 1-400 (or 500) and you can ask it whether X number is greater or less than a number you say. You get 10 attempts to narrow it down, then make your guess. I managed to get it done on my first try, but randomness is usually a bad thing in logic based puzzle games, and others may run into trouble with it. The reason I call this a bad design choice is that you never do a similar puzzle to this throughout the game, so unlike the puzzle before this, you aren't being prepared for what's to come, it's simply a filler.

One other problem I had with this puzzle is that you switch into controlling Aria here, but you never switch between characters any other time in the game. Later on when you've met the other characters, they all go into separate rooms, so I thought I may get to choose who to follow perhaps, but there's a room designated to you all, and no one else may enter. It makes that one moment where you get to control Aria a bit misleading. In this new section it's just you and Aria (you control Leon) solving a quick logic puzzle, then you're put into a maze that is entirely out of place and unnecessary. A major flaw with the game is its lack of flow (out of sync, again). There are parts of the game where you're really feeling it after solving a puzzle, then you're drained by long dialogue or jarringly off put by a 'puzzle' that should not exist. I can't give full credit to the creator for puzzle design since Nonograms are already well established puzzles, but from one developer to the other I recognize the effort put into getting the systems all working. I hadn't heard of Nonograms before playing blindXpot, so this could serve as a pretty sweet introduction to them. Going even further than that, if this game literally centered around exploration and Nonograms it would be great. The game never really embraces what it is, instead it tries to be a whole lot of different things. Give me a progressively challenging Nonogram Solving game with Visual Novel aspects here and there and I'm sold. When you throw in random number guessing, mazes and drawn out cutscenes you start to lose me.

Story/Writing



The above image kinda sums up the game's issues with writing when it comes to dialogue. You could argue that this sentence doesn't flow well and could be adjusted a bit, but that's not really this game's issue. I believe the creator is not a native English speaker, but the grammar throughout the game is serviceable (there may be a translator actually). I can look past the small errors here and there, but I couldn't look past the way characters spoke to one another. In the above image Aria is speaking to you because there were some loud noises after Leon escaped his own room. He gets pretty spooked out and runs into her here. There is nothing natural about this little interaction, it feels like instead of talking to Leon, she's talking to the player, trying to reassure me that there is nothing spooky afoot. "It is just me falling around in this room! Yes, those creepy noises came from me, not whatever you were thinking it was, certainly not a monster!" (not actually what she says) That's what it feels like she's saying to me, err Leon, as if everyone's in a play performing for an audience.

There are multiple instances throughout the game where the characters are literally explaining to you their every thought, your every thought, his every thought and yours again! This makes the characters feel very robotic and theatrical and pulls me right out of the game. I won't go into any spoiler territory, but the ending is told to you on a black screen with text boxes. It's a back and forth dialogue between all of the characters as they unravel the mystery of their situation. It's downright silly to read and feels like the game's writer was on a strict deadline to get this story finalized. The ending was abrupt and unsatisfying. There are supposed to be 3 endings, I hadn't managed to find the third, but I did find 2. One of the game's Bad Endings also suffers from the "black screen while I tell you everything going on behind the scenes" scene. There are some cool CGs thrown in along the way, but that doesn't save it. The Bad End just makes no sense at all and the Normal End (at least I believe it's the normal one) is so forced and out of nowhere that you won't even believe what you're reading.

The game's story was clearly cut short at some point and had to end. That's the only explanation for this game's Ending. The masked mystery man who is even shown on the title screen is shown once. I had completely forgotten about him until the game was over and I realized he hadn't made any more appearances. Clearly he was supposed to be a major factor in the game's Plot but something cut it short. Everything feels like it was cut short. The characters have half the development you'd want, the Puzzles never become big time challenges, and of course, the Story is not even close to what you anticipated. If anything I'd call this a proof of concept for something much bigger. It just isn't all there and needs some work.

Conclusion

blindXpot is a fantastic display of ambition. Sadly, that's all you get coming away from this game. I know the developer has great ideas and I feel like they wanted this to be much bigger than it turned out to be. Without slapping "Fan Game" onto the project they captured much of what makes me enjoy the Zero Escape series so much. An unknown environment with an oppressive yet intriguing atmosphere.... ALL WHILE SOLVING PUZZLES! There's something about that combination that I love, but here, the finished product doesn't do those ideas justice. There are little flaws throughout the game that add up and hurt the overall experience. blindXpot is not a bad game, but I can't recommend it to just anyone. Here, however, I highly recommend the game. Since we're a community of game developers and artists I believe we could recognize the passion put into the project and provide insight to the dev and his team. Still, I would rather not factor things like passion or ambition into the Star Rating, but know that I feel it! I sincerely hope the developers continue making games because this can be the start of something great.

Posts

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Thank you for writing a review, hiromu!

1/ I'm not sure if this is a custom made song or not, but it works really well here.
The sound effect and background music are not custom-made. I got them from free music sources, as they were mentioned in the credit and the manual file attached with the game.

2/ When you aren't solving puzzles you're walking around the building in a very linear fashion. You walk from one plot point to the next, which isn't a bad thing, but much of this could probably be cut out. Like I said before, the maps are bland and nothing to really look at. The game appears to be inspired by the Zero Escape series, and their solution to room traversal was making interact-able CG images to look at, which served as your current location. Instead of manually walking around a room, you just looked around the room (rotating and such) to display your environment. Since the core gameplay of the Zero Escape series is taking note of your environment to solve that room's puzzle, this sort of movement system works perfectly. blindXpot's approach to moving about is different, it is completely manual. Besides one other instance in the game, walking about the environment doesn't play much of a factor in completing the game's challenges (there is one Maze). Still, you have to manually control your character to go from point A to point B. As small of an issue it may seem to be, simply put these 2 things do not work together. The game is categorized as being part Visual Novel, so why not put VN style room traversal (as in selecting to move to Room 1 or 2) and being presented whatever scenario you're required to then deal with. You get rid of those dull RPG Maker Maps and your game feels more in sync.
I agree that the map and the freedom to interact with things or go around are ones of the game's weaknesses. There are very few options for the players to choose, which is bad, and this is what we have to improve more in the future.

3/ A poor design choice happens when you're tasked with guessing what number a computer is thinking of. I believe the number is from 1-400 (or 500) and you can ask it whether X number is greater or less than a number you say. You get 10 attempts to narrow it down, then make your guess. I managed to get it done on my first try, but randomness is usually a bad thing in logic based puzzle games, and others may run into trouble with it. The reason I call this a bad design choice is that you never do a similar puzzle to this throughout the game, so unlike the puzzle before this, you aren't being prepared for what's to come, it's simply a filler.
It is randomness, but if you use the right way to narrow the searching range, you can always get the right answer. I had to test it so many times. If it is based only on the luckiness, I guess I'm in hospital now.
About it is just a filler, I think you got a point. I haven't thought about it at the beginning when I designed the puzzle. I like the binary algorithm so a guessing game would be nice. One of the most interesting point about this puzzle is that you might think of it as a randomness, but it has a certain way to win. Also, this is a game so a random puzzle wouldn't hurt. As you have finished the true end (it is what you called "normal end", I suppose), these rooms were designed by four of them. They can make whatever puzzles they like and implement them into the rooms that they are in charge of, so there is no need for the puzzles to match with the overall theme. Besides, those puzzles are not really fillers in my opinion, because they show a part of the creator's character. As in Zero Escape, June was in charge of creating the puzzles, so of course she tried to make them base on the overall theme.

4/ The game's story was clearly cut short at some point and had to end. That's the only explanation for this game's Ending. The masked mystery man who is even shown on the title screen is shown once. I had completely forgotten about him until the game was over and I realized he hadn't made any more appearances. Clearly he was supposed to be a major factor in the game's Plot but something cut it short. Everything feels like it was cut short. The characters have half the development you'd want, the Puzzles never become big time challenges, and of course, the Story is not even close to what you anticipated. If anything I'd call this a proof of concept for something much bigger. It just isn't all there and needs some work.
I have to admit that story/writing is the biggest weakness of the game. However I can't find someone to do the part other than myself (whose writing is already bad enough :-P). I will try to find someone to do this job next time so I can focus on the other parts.
I want this game to be small since I don't have much free time and I'm new with this engine, so giving the players more choices, making more plots,... mean I have to handle more bugs. With this small size of the game I have already had many bugs to handle, and I'm afraid my current ability won't allow me to make a bigger game. I'm sorry. But thanks to this small project, I guess I can make a bigger one next time.
I still have many things to learn. As a reviewer, you did a great job. We will take your words into consideration and develop these aspects more.
Again, thank you very much, hiromu!
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