As we Know it

[got_quiet]

Name: As we Know it
Status: Complete
Site: https://scribbles.itch.io/as-we-know-it
Pairing: F/F or F/M
Description: A choppy post apocalyptic story in a bunker community
Controller Score: A

As We Know It is set in a future dystopia, where the surface of the earth is practically unlivable and people are retreating to underground communities. You and your mother have just recently been accepted into one of these communities, and the game is largely about learning to fit into the day to day with a little bit of a crisis showing up to spice things up.

 

The MC is strictly female, though you can make some skin tone modifications. And you have four LI options, two women and two men, plus three platonic relationships that you can work on. You get to meet all of them in the first few days of the game, and then the job you decide to take will be tied to one of the LIs, and the leisure activities you take on an evening to evening basis will be tied to the platonic NPCs. In addition to that you've got a stress and a standing meter, which don't move much at all over the course of the game excepting some major plot points it seems.

The choices are largely straight forward. You play every single day on the calendar, going to work in the morning and sometimes having something happen but just as often just getting a short line saying that the day was uneventful. Then you get to pick your evening activity, and and sometimes stuff happens there, and sometimes it doesn't. Occasionally people who are outside of the mains for that route will appear, but it's a crapshoot. On top of this, there is a main plot that happens in between these times. You and your mother arrive at the underground town called Camden together. Your mom immediately has the hots for the mayor, who does not appear to be elected but actually owns the town, and is friendly but also effectively a dictator. Your work is interrupted sometimes with community events, and then by a disaster on the surface that draws some ethical questions about what the obligations of a closed community has towards their desperate neighbors.

The narrative of each route appears to be largely on rails and the routes don't interact with each other, which can cause some issues if you start one platonic route late in the game after having focused on a different one first. For example 8 weeks in I started working on a second platonic route, and so was on the 3rd or 4th encounter, and someone asked me if something was going on between my mother and the Mayor. At this point your mom has already moved in with the Mayor and they are definitely an item, so when your character isn't sure what's going on between them... this is clearly a line assuming you've hit this scene within the first or second week of the game, not the 8th. But if you stick to only one evening option as I did it appears that the game runs out of things to give you, and starts showing you a filler scene with no choices every single time. Because there's no telling when the game might decide that I've hit a benchmark and can stop seeing content again, this made it tough to know if I could just move on or if doing something else would cause me to miss something.

The platonic routes are also clearly tied with some of the romance routes, in the sense that the characters focused on them have a relationship with one of the romantic options. I started to suspect that my choosing to commit to the gym was a mistake if I wanted a good end with Jude because it was all about hanging out with a little girl that had nothing to do with him, while the other routes had his boss or his kind of adopted mom in them. And sure enough I got fucked over in the end because of this. The high degree of filler and the way that the branching works (with break point checks mostly) made the game easy to replay to see the "correct" side plot and get the better ending. Doing the Library run the second time around also gave me the bonus of watching the guy I had wanted to romance in the first place, Trevor, find his true love with my LI's boss which is fine with me. If I can't have him seeing him get mushy over someone else is a perfectly fine consolation prize in this case.

There are a lot of endings for each of the four LIs. They seem to rely largely on a few choices, and what side track you commit to. In the Jude route at least these variables only had an effect on the final scene and everything else was identical, so I don't know if the branching goes beyond that. The endings I got were also abrupt. After the big crisis there's a quick immediate resolution, a comment by the main character that nothing will be the same again, and the game ends. I felt largely unsatisfied by where the game stops and wanted a little more about the fallout of my choices and where some of the characters I interacted with end up in the end. For example, in Jude's route I would have liked to know what happened to Trevor after I spent half the game cultivating a friendship with him. He's seriously impacted by the plot but we never find out how.

I didn't end up completing other romance routes. I started the other male LI's route but found myself too bored to really push for it. I ended up stalled out here for a long time thinking, "eh I should do another route," and finally gave up on it. There's a lot of repetition, and downtime, and the broader plot is what it is.The obligatory female MC didn't help either.

There are no CGs in the game, though there is an ending tracker.

 

The tl;dr of this one is: The story was alright. Maybe a bit disjointed and linear at times but it was interesting. There's more filler than I would prefer but skipping was easy. The characters were interesting and I liked the LI in the route I took, but I wasn't really feeling it overall.