I streamed this game for this review. The link will be below.
Pitch Black Secrets of Epiotica (which is a mouthful, so I'll just call it Pitch Black from here on out) is a game with a lot of style and a lot of flaws. It has a lot of potential, but as it's just an early beta, I recommend holding off playing unless you plan on providing valuable feedback to improve the direction of the game.
Pitch Black should immediately be eye catching to you. The developer clearly has an eye for design as each of the UI windows, map design, and character designs all look quite stunning. But this design may impress you at first, but the veneer will quickly slide away as you play more.
As an English player, the dialogue has clearly been machine translated, and it has not been particularly well executed. A lot of the dialogue gets lost in translation. There are glimmers of interesting moments in the dialogue, so I think if you were a native speaker (of whatever the dev's native language is), the writing would impress. However, as an English speaker, things are translated laughably, and sometimes results in a tonal whiplash. What exactly is the tone this game is going for? Is it a dark, Gothic mystery? Well the art style sure lends itself to that. Or is it a light-hearted hunt fit for the Mystery Machine crew? The execution in the dialogue certainly leans towards the latter.
When it comes to combat, it holds no punches. It throws you into the deep end (something that might be fitting of a grim-dark tone) and…really just feels like a pretty bog standard turn-based game with a lot of states to keep track of.
As Pitch Black is touted, it is meant to be a mystery solving game, but the dialogue drags on long, and the mystery solving lacks player agency, as the mystery will unravel itself so long as the player knows which NPC to talk to next. From what little time I had played the game (due to way too much dialogue), it never seemed like the game wanted to let the player use their brain to piece the puzzle together themselves.
I hope to see this game develop into something great, because it's got the visual aesthetic down, but it has a lot of other things that clearly need to be polished.
If you'd like to watch my experience with the game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing.
p.s. is this a kink game? It's even in the devs name. This is clearly a kink game.
Thank you, Nolan, I'm really grateful for your time and critique! I commented on some points under your video there, just wanted to hightlight one thing again: the entire text was translated manually (no machine translation at all), and the main creative goal was to reproduce the stylistic features of classical authors from the Renaissance, modernity, and the Victorian era. There are nearly verbatim quotes from Leo Perutz, Charles Dickens, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and François Rabelais - both the sublime Gothic style and the carnival humor. Anyway, thanks for pointing out the inaccuracies; there’s always room for improvement.
I finished the demo. And I was mesmerized by the setting.
There is a lot to like:
The maps are beautiful, and the main city is breathtaking.
The mystery is just the right mix of what the F is going without being overly creepy (yet?) and kept me going wanting to unravel this crazy thing.
Some of the side quests are well done, especially Dorothea's; I felt very invested in needing to know how it ends (unfortunately the demo ended before I got the conclusion).
The battle system felt like a standard RPG Maker battle system, and I found the battles to be more on the harder side. (Meanwhile other gamers felt the battles were easy).
I hope the writing will be more engaging in the future releases and characters become more likeable. Currently, there is a whole lot to read.
All in all, the game feels of commercial quality with cool graphics, custom art, and a whole lot of WTF is going on with this mystery.
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I streamed this game for this review. The link will be below.
Pitch Black Secrets of Epiotica (which is a mouthful, so I'll just call it Pitch Black from here on out) is a game with a lot of style and a lot of flaws. It has a lot of potential, but as it's just an early beta, I recommend holding off playing unless you plan on providing valuable feedback to improve the direction of the game.
Pitch Black should immediately be eye catching to you. The developer clearly has an eye for design as each of the UI windows, map design, and character designs all look quite stunning. But this design may impress you at first, but the veneer will quickly slide away as you play more.
As an English player, the dialogue has clearly been machine translated, and it has not been particularly well executed. A lot of the dialogue gets lost in translation. There are glimmers of interesting moments in the dialogue, so I think if you were a native speaker (of whatever the dev's native language is), the writing would impress. However, as an English speaker, things are translated laughably, and sometimes results in a tonal whiplash. What exactly is the tone this game is going for? Is it a dark, Gothic mystery? Well the art style sure lends itself to that. Or is it a light-hearted hunt fit for the Mystery Machine crew? The execution in the dialogue certainly leans towards the latter.
When it comes to combat, it holds no punches. It throws you into the deep end (something that might be fitting of a grim-dark tone) and…really just feels like a pretty bog standard turn-based game with a lot of states to keep track of.
As Pitch Black is touted, it is meant to be a mystery solving game, but the dialogue drags on long, and the mystery solving lacks player agency, as the mystery will unravel itself so long as the player knows which NPC to talk to next. From what little time I had played the game (due to way too much dialogue), it never seemed like the game wanted to let the player use their brain to piece the puzzle together themselves.
I hope to see this game develop into something great, because it's got the visual aesthetic down, but it has a lot of other things that clearly need to be polished.
If you'd like to watch my experience with the game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing.
p.s. is this a kink game? It's even in the devs name. This is clearly a kink game.
Thank you, Nolan,
I'm really grateful for your time and critique!
I commented on some points under your video there, just wanted to hightlight one thing again: the entire text was translated manually (no machine translation at all), and the main creative goal was to reproduce the stylistic features of classical authors from the Renaissance, modernity, and the Victorian era. There are nearly verbatim quotes from Leo Perutz, Charles Dickens, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and François Rabelais - both the sublime Gothic style and the carnival humor. Anyway, thanks for pointing out the inaccuracies; there’s always room for improvement.
I finished the demo. And I was mesmerized by the setting.
There is a lot to like:
The battle system felt like a standard RPG Maker battle system, and I found the battles to be more on the harder side. (Meanwhile other gamers felt the battles were easy).
I hope the writing will be more engaging in the future releases and characters become more likeable. Currently, there is a whole lot to read.
All in all, the game feels of commercial quality with cool graphics, custom art, and a whole lot of WTF is going on with this mystery.
Thank you, Ryder, for this high appreciation of my work.
I prepare some improvements for the demo right now (and play your beautiful piece too).
This is a really cool game.
I'm a young videogame music composer and I'm interested to compose some tracks for this game, let me know if you are interetsed.
Thank you, would be glad to cooperate in the future development.
Thanks. I will wait for your future hiring, if you are interested you can contact me via the email that you can find on my website
Look forward the updates I love rpg games
Thank you, I'll do my best to deliver!