Furries & Scalies & Bears OH MY!
Nov. 14th, 2023 12:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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playingstoryName: Furries & Scalies & Bears OH MY!
Status: Complete
Site: https://steg-game-dev.itch.io/furries-scalies-bears-oh-my-complete-edition
Pairing: M/M, M/F
Description: Wander around in a daze for a year chatting with furries.
This is something of a Furry issekai. You play a human named Oz, and end up walking through a portal into another world with your best friend Dorothy (get it?). Here in this world furries are everywhere and the only two humans around also ended up coming through a portal years ago. Once you have sort of set yourself up in town, you're told that it will be maybe a year before the scientists can figure out a way of getting you back, and you have nothing to do but wait for that to happen.
Gameplay is based loosely on a day cycle, where you chose places to go and people to talk to and then there's maybe a set event at the end of the day. The unmissable scenes form a semi-disjointed plot, but the entire game felt discombobulated. Oz's motivation was non-existent because your goal is "wait around a year." And what appears to be the main plot has nothing to do with most of the other characters you can choose to spend time with. Typically when I play VNs I ask myself what the pathing looks like, but in this game it was impossible for me to figure out the first run.
There is a reputation system which is transparent but also a little odd. You get a text notice of reputation gain in something like 80pt font every time it happens, and sometimes these are based on an option you choose, but there were chunks where as the player I had no choices at all and I still got random reputation up notices. These did not appear to be from missable scenes either. The writing in the whole game is has a clipped feel to it. There is pretty much no descriptive narrative, just the dialog, and although the cast is broad, with something like a dozen characters, they all pretty much have the same voice, even if they also have distinct enough personalities. Without the narrative there's also almost no exposition, which can cause problems when stuff happens, characters act like everyone understand why it is happening, and no, no I don't.
All of these strange bits sort of compound so that in my first playthrough this is basically what happened. I decided I was going to try for a dragon's reputation path. I basically chose him every time I had the option to, but the affection breakpoint seems to be quite strict, and saying just one or two wrong things seems to result in a failed romance. On top of that, for a good third of the game he just simply wasn't around as the game railroaded me into what appeared to be a subplot about a different trio of characters. And then at some point in the game your friend Dorothy (who you don't really interact with at all until this moment) comes up to you and is like, "you can date now, pick someone." I picked the dragon, you go up to him and are like, "Do you want to date?" The dragon told me, "No, I want to stay friends." I said, "Ok." and that was effectively the end of his route. To be clear, none of this involved anything that appeared to be forwarding any sort of plot either. Picking a character's option means choosing to make small talk with someone for the day.
The game page says there are sex scenes, but in both the routes I took there wasn't even a suggestion that this was possible. Maybe I didn't hit a very demanding affection score or something.
I also get the sense that there are so many moving parts in this game that the Devs didn't really know how to make it coherent. There are choices at the very end you can make that imply a strong intimacy with some characters, even if you may have never talked to them once in your game, and those choices will affect the ending kind of in the way suddenly getting to pick the red or blue laser affected the ending. Like, ok, last minute of the game, what's gonna happen? Because the dialog is so sparse and nothing is explained, the main plot, if there is one, didn't make much sense. Summarizing it would not really tell you anything.
I basically spent most of my time struggling to find a place to become invested and failing. I wanted to find a hook and maybe focus on one of the characters and have some sort of arc with them, but it honestly felt impossible outside of three characters that I was obligated to interact with every cycle. I tried playing a second time, just to see if I could successfully ask out the dragon, but the game does not allow for winding back so I had to save at every option instead (removing basic VN functionality does not stop players from doing what they want to manipulate your game!) and this time did manage to successfully ask the dragon out. The date was about as lackluster as the rest of the game, which I suppose I expected. You get the chance to ask the same questions you'd ask without the date, but this time you get answers, which provide a little bit more information on the character but are by no means satisfying. The game also gives you only six save slots which deters further exploration. I tried dating a different character and again it's one scene, and then the game goes back to the completely unrelated story. In fact, after you go on these dates your boyfriends basically disappear and you can't interact with them most days.
This feels like a game for which there was inadequate planning. The characters themselves are kind of interesting, but pursuing them was not satisfying, and they just didn't seem to actually have anything to do with what I could comprehend of the story. Yes, there is some overall plot about a character behaving a little badly, but it wasn't very good. Looking at the game page, there is evidence that the developer made some changes to the writing after a user complained that the black character had an antagonistic role in the game, and in my run at least he had pretty much no role at all (which was the same for 90% of the cast) so I don't know if maybe the coherency was better in a previous version or what. Regardless, all I can say is that the writing in Furries and Scalies makes it feel kind of noobish, but it looks like the dev has made a whole bunch of games, so I'm just confused.
Status: Complete
Site: https://steg-game-dev.itch.io/furries-scalies-bears-oh-my-complete-edition
Pairing: M/M, M/F
Description: Wander around in a daze for a year chatting with furries.
This is something of a Furry issekai. You play a human named Oz, and end up walking through a portal into another world with your best friend Dorothy (get it?). Here in this world furries are everywhere and the only two humans around also ended up coming through a portal years ago. Once you have sort of set yourself up in town, you're told that it will be maybe a year before the scientists can figure out a way of getting you back, and you have nothing to do but wait for that to happen.
Gameplay is based loosely on a day cycle, where you chose places to go and people to talk to and then there's maybe a set event at the end of the day. The unmissable scenes form a semi-disjointed plot, but the entire game felt discombobulated. Oz's motivation was non-existent because your goal is "wait around a year." And what appears to be the main plot has nothing to do with most of the other characters you can choose to spend time with. Typically when I play VNs I ask myself what the pathing looks like, but in this game it was impossible for me to figure out the first run.
There is a reputation system which is transparent but also a little odd. You get a text notice of reputation gain in something like 80pt font every time it happens, and sometimes these are based on an option you choose, but there were chunks where as the player I had no choices at all and I still got random reputation up notices. These did not appear to be from missable scenes either. The writing in the whole game is has a clipped feel to it. There is pretty much no descriptive narrative, just the dialog, and although the cast is broad, with something like a dozen characters, they all pretty much have the same voice, even if they also have distinct enough personalities. Without the narrative there's also almost no exposition, which can cause problems when stuff happens, characters act like everyone understand why it is happening, and no, no I don't.
All of these strange bits sort of compound so that in my first playthrough this is basically what happened. I decided I was going to try for a dragon's reputation path. I basically chose him every time I had the option to, but the affection breakpoint seems to be quite strict, and saying just one or two wrong things seems to result in a failed romance. On top of that, for a good third of the game he just simply wasn't around as the game railroaded me into what appeared to be a subplot about a different trio of characters. And then at some point in the game your friend Dorothy (who you don't really interact with at all until this moment) comes up to you and is like, "you can date now, pick someone." I picked the dragon, you go up to him and are like, "Do you want to date?" The dragon told me, "No, I want to stay friends." I said, "Ok." and that was effectively the end of his route. To be clear, none of this involved anything that appeared to be forwarding any sort of plot either. Picking a character's option means choosing to make small talk with someone for the day.
The game page says there are sex scenes, but in both the routes I took there wasn't even a suggestion that this was possible. Maybe I didn't hit a very demanding affection score or something.
I also get the sense that there are so many moving parts in this game that the Devs didn't really know how to make it coherent. There are choices at the very end you can make that imply a strong intimacy with some characters, even if you may have never talked to them once in your game, and those choices will affect the ending kind of in the way suddenly getting to pick the red or blue laser affected the ending. Like, ok, last minute of the game, what's gonna happen? Because the dialog is so sparse and nothing is explained, the main plot, if there is one, didn't make much sense. Summarizing it would not really tell you anything.
I basically spent most of my time struggling to find a place to become invested and failing. I wanted to find a hook and maybe focus on one of the characters and have some sort of arc with them, but it honestly felt impossible outside of three characters that I was obligated to interact with every cycle. I tried playing a second time, just to see if I could successfully ask out the dragon, but the game does not allow for winding back so I had to save at every option instead (removing basic VN functionality does not stop players from doing what they want to manipulate your game!) and this time did manage to successfully ask the dragon out. The date was about as lackluster as the rest of the game, which I suppose I expected. You get the chance to ask the same questions you'd ask without the date, but this time you get answers, which provide a little bit more information on the character but are by no means satisfying. The game also gives you only six save slots which deters further exploration. I tried dating a different character and again it's one scene, and then the game goes back to the completely unrelated story. In fact, after you go on these dates your boyfriends basically disappear and you can't interact with them most days.
This feels like a game for which there was inadequate planning. The characters themselves are kind of interesting, but pursuing them was not satisfying, and they just didn't seem to actually have anything to do with what I could comprehend of the story. Yes, there is some overall plot about a character behaving a little badly, but it wasn't very good. Looking at the game page, there is evidence that the developer made some changes to the writing after a user complained that the black character had an antagonistic role in the game, and in my run at least he had pretty much no role at all (which was the same for 90% of the cast) so I don't know if maybe the coherency was better in a previous version or what. Regardless, all I can say is that the writing in Furries and Scalies makes it feel kind of noobish, but it looks like the dev has made a whole bunch of games, so I'm just confused.
