Dyscourse

This was the very first game that I played on steam and is what started my fascination with choice based games.

This game definitely wasn't for me. I don't know why, but I hate everything about this game: the graphics, the animation, the music, the plot, the characters, dialogues. Everything was so annoying to me, I stopped playing before completing a single hour. I bought this one on sale, but I found this game so boring, I really regret buying it, and I couldn't get a refund. I wanted to wipe it out from my brain, so I uninstalled it, but the game cover is still there in my library, like a curse, as a reminder of my carelessness on buying games on sale.

4/10 Promising on paper but dull and underwhelming in action.

I’ve really struggled with this decision as I don’t like writing negative reviews, especially when it can be boiled down to personal preference but when I asked myself if I would recommend this game to anyone I know based on its own merits, the answer was a decisive no.

The average playthrough is about an hour long but has such a wide variety of choices that you could play the game for hours if you were so inclined to see all it has to offer. Which by itself is really impressive however the game failed to engage me to a point where I would want to explore these options. The endings, to put it bluntly and with no spoilers, are unrewarding.

The game focuses on keeping your small group of six survivors alive (and trust me, at least one of them will die) but the characters themselves are simple caricatures and fail to get you invested in them enough to want them all to survive. I thought maybe they would develop as you got to know them, but they remained rather one note throughout. They’re not deep, they’re not interesting and they’re not even funny.

Despite being a CYOA walk and click-style game there are large areas with very little to interact with. You will find yourself doing very little as it felt like walking to and forth a string of cutscenes.

The game has a charming art style but I found everything else about it to be quite lacking and simple. There is a whole extra section called Indie Island but I haven’t played it and doubt I will play this game again.

I recognise that a lot of this is probably just a matter of personal preference, but I find myself disappointed because I wanted to like this game and couldn’t. Maybe you can and if you do, I really do hope you have fun with it but if you’re looking for CYOA games I would recommend spending your money elsewhere.

It's difficult to be sniffy about Dyscourse. It's frank in its intentions, makes few pretensions above its station and manages to be sweet, but not saccharine.

The premise is of a garden variety – an amalgam of Lost and Lord of the Flies, played by the cast of an American sitcom reading a script heavily workshopped by indie game developers. It's not as funny as it might be, but it manages to eke enough out of its cookie-cutter characters to raise its replay value.

This is essential, since a single, successful playthrough of the story is likely to take well under an hour. Giving more attention to individual charcaters who may otherwise die or retain their carefully teased secrets – your time is sensibly rationed from day to day – is one incentive to hit the restart button at the end of an adventure. Another is to explore alternative options for your survival or escape from the island, and this ends up being the more rewarding. Characters respond differently to different situations, and the game was still managing to surprise me with new and often progressively uglier scenarios as I peered further into the depths of the island.

Admittedly these depths are fairly shallow. Do not expect ground-shaking revelations or profound plot, but rather the gradual disclosure of additional, neat set pieces, with pleasingly varied outcomes depending on the characters that remain in your party. Whether or not this is likely to hold your attention as you wade through the early scenes of the adventure each time will differ from player to player. However, the addition of a 'day rewind' feature after you've played through the story once, allowing you to reset to any given day on your current adventure, will please those wanting to test out different permutations of the plot mechanics and achievement hoovers alike,

Ultimately, if you enjoy choice-based adventures you're unlikely to be disappointed with Dyscourse. If it's not on sale the price is perhaps on the high side – having clocked four hours of gameplay I doubt I'll go back for more. But the simple and lovingly created art style is really worthy of commendation, however one-dimensional the characters often are.

An addendum – while it is largely confined to the scripting of one character and some painfully dull extra content (really, do not play this), Dyscourse suffers from a syndrome that manifests when game developers talk so much about game development that they convince themselves it would be interesting to add myopic industry chatter into their game. I hope I can speak for all lovers of story-based games when I say that we'd much rather they spent their time on intelligent writing and refrained from indulging in self-satisfcation of this order.

It was a surprisingly interesting adventure game with survival elements and grim humor. One of the details I liked the most is character voicing. Along with the soundtrack, the voices sounded quite condemned and therefore dramatic, I spent some time trying to imitate it. Another cool detail is that you see the consequences of your choices in the end (not just statistics as in some other choice games).

I absolutely LOVE this game! Every play through is so quick and concise, thus making it incredibly replayable. You play as Rita, one of the six survivors of an airplane crash, and getting stuck on an island forces you all to find ways to survive together.

What can I say? Each character is unique and nuanced, and there are tons of different things you can find out about them from subsequent playthroughs. I was pretty surprised by how much I didn't know a character until I went back and talked to them more, as well as get them to tag along for the daily task of survival. This could range from foraging for food, exploring the crash site for supplies, along with several ways to get off the island.

The combination of choices and outcomes seem almost limitless and you will find yourself wanting to explore the differences. And not all of them can be waited on, as there are some choices you need to make under a timer. These of course could mean life or death when your fellow survivors are about to be attacked by the island's wildlife. You'll be weighing your choices on what secret (if any) alliances you'd like to make with one or more survivors, and who to favour in your quest to survive.

What I love about the playthroughs I've done by now is wondering who to save and who to let go of. Sometimes I feel cynical and don't mind if someone dies, but then other times despite how inconvenient they can be, there are certain skills they posess that can help our group progress if I had only let that one person eat!!!

Anyways, I highly suggest this game at either full price or discounted. You can't go wrong with it. If you like choose your own adventure stories, this one has choices that matter and come up frequently!

Random sidenote: the soundtrack is BAWSS!!!

Dyscourse is a pretty cool game where you make decisions and carry your character and influence what other will do. Every decision affects what will happen. Many things are possible, one run is pretty short (1 hour for the first, and half an hour when you're used to it). What's fun about the game is trying to find some combinations, clues, and learn the story of every character. Of course there are 31 achievments for the lovers, some of them are pretty tricky to get.

This is one of those games that needs a 'maybe' rating for the review.

It's a good idea. Plane crashes on desert island, you, the sensible person, have to lead a group of idiots to survival over the course of a few days, while waiting for rescue.

Simple as that. Works rather well too, in the sense that choices certainly do affect the outcome of the story somewhat. But it is rather simple, and figuring out all the different 'pathways' and variations of those pathways can be a fun thing to do. However, it isn't as in-depth as people make it out to be, you can have a husband and wife be rather blase about one or the other committing murder for example, even when their relationship is absolutely rock bottom, where the expectation is for some actual 'reaction' to happen, to push them over the edge.

Where Dyscourse fails is in its characters and the direction the game takes with them. As I mentioned, the idea of the desert island survival story is a sensible one. But the characters are something out of a poor hack's comedy show. There's the husband and wife, who seem relatively normal. The absolute bat-snot insane conspiracy theorist, tin-foil-hat, rage inducing idiot "Teddy" who will spout off all sorts of ridiculous rubbish about THE NANOMACHINES! and the ALIENS!!!!!! And omg the sand has ears... Oh shut up, you delusional nutter.

There's the 'gamer', and I use that term ever so mockingly because apparently gamers IRL would go out in a thunderstorm and suggest a lightning strike means a Black Mage is nearby. Wut? Dude, get a grip.

And then the office jocky, who seems to have an unlimited amount of cigarettes, who mopes like that one friend who tries to find a negative in absolutely everything? "Good morning!" "Nothing good about it, oh woe is me, I wish some rock would casually stone my brains out." "Jesus Christ mate, all I said was good morning!" "And wooooooooe I am still alive, to listen to your mundane voice, please kill me now!"

If you find that sort of thing absolutely, knee slappingly, hilarious, then Dyscourse is right up your alley, a survival game with absolutely "hilarious" characters.

If, like me, you find that sort of thing absolutely moronic, then Dyscourse is probably not quite the game for you, and it is a shame because the idea is a relatively simple, safe one that really should work no matter what, and yet the developers somehow managed to actually make it almost unbearable to get through. (Additionally, turn the 'voice effects' sounds off, it will save your sanity.)

So yeah, get it on sale if you absolutely must. Don't bother if you feel those characters I summed up above are unlikable people, unless you want to buy it just to kill them, which some of you will, so go for it.

(Game rating: Mixed.)

Dyscourse is a bit unusual as a "decisions matter" style of adventure game because the unofficial tagline should be "MAKE ALL THE DECISIONS!!!".

You awake from a plane wreck on a remote island and quickly come across a group of survivors. You need to choose "wisely" to help the group survive, but once you complete the game you gain access to a day rewind option which will allow you to attempt pushing the story down different branches until you are literally pushing other survivors down branches just to see if they will fall and die because why not? This really is the main point of the game, and it's fun for a while but I got to a point where I was satisfied that I'd seen everything I wanted to see. According to the achievements list I've only seen 41% of all possible story events, but it just seems like it would be punishing to attempt to unlock every minor event. I'd rather put Dyscourse down while I still feel like it was a refreshingly unique game rather than grind my way through every possible arc just so that I can say I saw it all.

6 out of 10, it wasn't a total plane wreck ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

this game is so stunning that i will even tell my worst enemies about it. i hope i have made it clear that i love this game and you should to because if you don't your mum will probably be very dissapointed in you

It's cliche, but if you know Choose Your Own Adventure, you know this style of game. Done well, it can be really engaging, and provide a lot of replay value in going back and finding different outcomes.

Unfortunately, this one didn't really resonate with me. On a mechanical level, the game is fine, with frequent decisions (some timed) that appear to have a substantial impact on the narrative. It's the narrative itself I take issue with -- the characterization is very one-dimensional, with each character serving as a simple stereotype.

A bit of personality shorthand is fine for a short game, but these characters are mere caricatures, where every single line is a repeat of their one overriding personality trait. It makes the game farcical, which removes a lot of (well, all of) the weight from the decisions; when someone gets hurt or killed, it's difficult to sympathize when everything they've said to that point has been the same exaggerated characteristic over and over again. Couple this with humor that borders on slapstick and emotional responses that seem sociopathic and it's hard to take seriously.

To me, for a game like this to work, the decisions have to be something I care about -- the tension comes from wanting to make the correct decision. Unfortunately, the relative silliness on display here in combination with the flat characters means that ten minutes in the decisions start feeling fairly arbitrary as I click through for my ending.

A very short game (about an hour) that banks on you wanting to replay it many times in an attempt to rescue more people than before. Unfortunately, it gets so bogged down in the dialog and the ten thousand times you seem to have to hit the "more dialog" button that after getting rescued an hour into playing, I had absolutely no interest in revisiting the game. A clever idea with a nice art design that suffers a lot from the tedium of its mechanics.

Overall rating:

9/10

Description:

a game that rely's heavily on story and player decision making where no two playthroughs are alike

Expected completion time:

to finish takes about 1 hour, but you will play through again and again

For those who like:

life is strange, the gods will be whatching, always sometimes monsters, the telltale series

Replayability?:

absolutly, you will play through this over and over, and that's what this game thrives uppon

Value for money?:

could be a little cheaper, but doesn't feel like you're getting ripped off

Collectables?:

no, but you will find something new every time you play this

Things of note:

the art style is beautiful, and things can get pretty crazy pretty quickly

This game has a great story, great artwork, Very funny sterotypical characters, Its a replayable game and the choices you make in this game totally reflect the reality of what it would be like if you were stranded on a dessert island. I would give this game like a 9/10 because of all the reasons above and its only 9 because the game does have its limitations on exploring stuff and its sometimes hard to find all the little things for the achevments, but besides that its a kickstarter success in my book =)

It's cute, but... that's about all I can say.

The gameplay is about an hour, but is intended for you to replay for different results. I've played through three times (and my sister played it half-way through once.) The thing is, the game lacks tension and can be really tedious-- especially afer the first playthrough. The graphics are sweet, like a children's cartoon (not really my cup of tea, but not terrible). There are far too many points where you are waiting while nothing of value happens. Like waiting while your charcter passes out water to other characters-- no dialogue, no story bulding, not even something pretty to look at... just... waiting. Some of the dialouge is amusing, but not the majority.

If anything can be said for it though, (minus the first 15 minutes) the choices you make do actually change how the story is told and determine who lives and who dies. Unfortunately, I never felt strongly about any charcter or situation, so all the excitment that should have been present in making a choice was lost.

I guess the game is interesting, but not impressive and not exciting. If the game is ever on steep sale, maybe pick it, but for $15....it's a hard pass.

Note: recent edit was done to fix spelling errors.

This game is absolutely dreadful, and I really wanted to like it. I tried my hardest. I guess the best way to break down my distaste for it would be to list the Pros and Cons.

Pro:
Interesting art style: The game looks fairly nice. It won't blow you away with graphics, animations, or character designs... but the art style itself is a change of pace from what one would typically see.

Soundtrack: Whatever else I may say about this game won't detract from the fact that it has a pretty stellar soundtrack. I always enjoyed what I was hearing in regards to that.

Disky: There is one twist ending that made me kind of chuckle. I'll give that due props.

Cons:
Terrible Characters: I disliked every single character in this game, passionately. For a strictly story driven game like this, that is a cardinal sin. All of the characters were hyperbolic annoying familiars of one character stereotype or another. And since they all spend the entire campaign b--ching, whining, complaining, fighting with each other, and generally failing at whatever task you delegate to them (though there were some successes in that regard), I found it very hard to find any character that I could truly align myself with.

Absence of Gameplay: Its pretty tough to call this game a game, there isn't really anything game-like involved with it. Most of the time you are crawling through dialog, and in those rare moments when you can control a character, you have an extremely limited range of movement within a restricted area, and your actions are only ever temporarily extended beyond doing nothing into picking up a couple of objects. Once you pick up those objects though, you're done "playing" anything game-like here. Its back to the story. Which would be fine and all, were it not for the above grievance combined with the below...

Absence of Choices: The game bills itself as a Choose Your Own Adventure style game, and I dig that. But for a game whose focus is on story and choices, you don't seem to have a whole lot of decision points. You make a choice here and there and then spend the rest of the time watching everybody react to those choices. Sometimes, the distance between making a decision on something is so large that I forgot what kind of game I was playing for a bit. Its really like an elongated cutscene. When you get to the moments where you make decisions, most of the time they are pretty milquetoast (choose who finds the water, choose who gets to eat, etc). For a game with interest points far and few between, you'd think they would make all the decisions you would have to make be a bit more.... exciting. I went to look at other story driven mobile games just to compare, because I felt I wasn't being fair to Dyscourse with my expectations. I played a story driven game on iOS where every other sentence my character said was a decision point; I had the ability within the game to completely drive the conversation, and as such, the direction of the story. More to the point, even the minor choices I made felt like they carried more weight; they informed my character and allowed me to respond to situations the way I would respond. It may be unfair to compare to Dyscourse, but for a game devoid of any real gameplay and focusing on story and choices, I could have certainly used more. A lot more.

Petty Storytelling: There were a number of times in the game where the storytelling just felt.... petty. For instance (Spoiler Alert, I guess...), there was a moment I encountered on a mountain where I had found 3 eggs in a nest off of the cliff. I was able to get two of them, but couldn't get the 3rd. With 3 of us in the party, I had to make a decision: who gets to eat these two eggs? Well, one of the dialog choices presented to you is "All 3 of us will share the eggs", which is an easy thing to do with eggs. But then you are told "No we can't do that, you must choose between 2 of the 3" for no real reason whatsoever. Its obviously a Sofie's Choice moment, choosing who will live and who will die. The petty part is, I had made great strides getting to this point in the game without any characters dying, and I was literally on the last night before rescue. There was NO reason for anyone to die other than the game just said "Nope someone's dying lol". What am I playing this for? This was only 1 of several examples within this game.

Dull: All in all, the game is just dull. The story is horrendously generic (plane crash, desert island, etc), and none of the characters to a lick to improve on that. As stated earlier, they are all annoying characters. Add to that, they all speak Simlish. Not normally something I would say is a bad thing, but when you have annoying characters in a dull game talking about dull things (do I really care about George and Jolene's marriage?), the Charlie-Brown-teacher-wompwomp effect only helps to underscore the appropriate level of attention I end up paying to the whole thing. Wompwompwompwompwhatever lets move this along so I can get to the next decision point.

Short: Maybe this should be a positive considering my feelings on this game, but for a 15 dollar "game" of nothing, being able to complete it in less than an hour seems... borderline criminal. That iOS game I mentioned earlier provided me a much more robust storytelling and decision making experience at the same length, for free (for the first episode, the 2nd costing about 2 bucks, which is still substantially cheaper than this). Why is this game so short? Its not at all worth 15 bucks for the litany of reasons listed above, but even ignoring all that, 15 bucks for less than an hour of playtime is a steep, steep price to pay. Is this an early access game? No no, that's not a good excuse. I've poured countless hours into Darkest Dungeon and other early access titles. I just don't get it. Maybe the lame, rote, predictable, cliched, boring story just doesn't lend itself to a long lifespan of playability. Whatever the case may be, its a quick burn, so be prepared for that.

Ending: I don't really want to spoil the ending.... suffice to say that if you like looking at corkboards, you're in for a grand treat.

OVERALL: I cannot NOT recommend this "game" enough. I am honestly completely baffled and dumbfounded by the positive reviews its been getting. I don't get it at all, not even a little bit. I can usually understand one way or another how popular games I don't like are at least popular with others. For Dyscourse? Its as much a mystery to me as the island itself.

Dyscourse is my newest favorite choose-your-own adventure game. I thoroughly enjoyed combing through each path to unlock the variations of each possible ending. I found myself often looking back in time at least 2 or 3 times per playthrough to find out what went wrong. With that said, a lot can go wrong (and that's a good thing). Small details matter in this game especially if you want to aim for 100% of the achievements. I also want to note that the art style is very easy on the eyes. The characters dialogue is also well-written. Personally, Steve was my favorite out of the group with his bleak outlook on life and his trusty stapler.

If you want something to compare it to, I'd say it is like a slightly longer and more evolved 'Monster Loves You'. I definitely recommend this game for those who enjoy adventure games. Even if you don't normally play adventure games, this is actually a good starting point for the genre.

A short choose-your-own-adventure type game with a interesting art style.

Pros:
Art direction and graphics are good for what they are
Story is decent - new aspects found after more playthroughs

Cons:
Very short
No strong desire to complete multiple playthroughs to see different outcomes
Some story arcs don't make the most sense and seem contrived. Possible spoiler: Poisonous gas magically formed in a cave with previous life in it and killed part of my party? WTF?

Overall: The game is too short and simple to be worth the $14.99 asking price. The price for the deluxe edition would be crazy. Pick it up if it's half price or less. Otherwise, watch a let's play on youtube and you'll quickly see more money would be a waste.

Grade: C-

You'll definitely like this game if you like choose your own adventure games, or just adventure games in general. Going through the story once hasn't taken me more than 2 hours, but don't let that make you think this game is small-- it's packed with tons of different paths to take in the storyline, with each path revealing a different part of the story. I found myself replaying to piece together the whole picture, favoring some characters over others to get new information out of them. If you find yourself having trouble committing to a long video game, or forgetting where you are in the game, Dyscourse might be a good match for you, as it was for me.

Additionally, the style of the game is beautiful and very quirky, and the colors are a nice balance of saturated and subdued. Very easy to look at for long periods of time if you find yourself playing for hours on end. Music adds a lot to the mood of each scene, and the writing is smart and charming. Pay close attention to what you read! And choose wisely. ;)

Overall: Buy this game. Throw your money at it. Play it forever.
ALSO: There's a cute cat with fluffy ears in the game. Do it for the cat.

Dyscourse is a really different any intresting game, overall its a solid game but has some flaws.

The pros:

Its like if 'Lost' had choices that YOU choose (Similar to Life is Strange or The Walking Dead), the artwork and atomsphere is really well done. Every moment in the game I feel nervous and eerie and the amount of outcomes and choices are so hearttearing. The characters a realistic and have their pros and cons, there is no one character that is perfect or evil.. which I love because they're not cliche. For instance one guy is super nice but is always paranoid and it gets annoying, one lady is kind but doesnt make the right choice and it a bit of a critic. The timer when you make choices also adds to the tension and is great, after every choice you instantly feel like you made the wrong one which was perfectly done. The varity of deaths are also really cool and it has an amazing amount of reply value, I want to reply it to get every single outcome.

The middle:

There is some stuff to say in the middle, the beginning is pretty aburpt and i'm not sure how I feel about it.. it doesnt pull you in the first five minutes of playing and takes awhile. The puzzles are generally simple which is a con and a pro, there was only one puzzle I struggled with and it was unique which was good, so the puzzles are unique but simple. I'm also mixed on the soundtrack, it was good but I feel like if the devs went a little further on the soundtrack it could have improved the game.

The cons:

I actually dont have a lot of cons, I wish they did voice acting instead of mumbling and exploring your area can be fustrating sometimes because the controls can make it awkward to move around. Sometimes the choices confuse me though, for instance I gave food to one lady one day and didnt give her food another day and then she died from starving.

Overall: Overall this game is solid, if you enjoy games about choices and point & clicks this is for you. I'd give it a solid 8/10.

Target Audience: Those who love choose your own adventure books

Summary:

For CYOA lovers who loved reading every possibility. The games graphical style and aesthic is its strongest asset, and there's some good elements of story telling here. But some of the CYOA elements don't work well with the main story, and character shifts will be off putting. Not a lot of gameplay, but that's not the game you would be buying if you picked it up.

Gameplay Footage and Video Review: http://youtu.be/clBv5I_e_kE

Lists:
Positives:

• Art style and different locations play off fabulously.
  
• Branching paths, a lot of different story elements
  
• The ability to rewind a day to try something new
  
• Some likeable characters, and good dialgoue between the two.
  

• Inconsistencies with story telling, in particular, with character trials and reacting reasonably to a situation given what they've gone through
  
• Rapid character changes at times don't make any sense.
  
• A lot of guesswork, think Maniac Mansion/Sam and Max type of logic at time.
  
[*] sLack of interaction, even for a CYOA there's little stuff you're actually doing.