Séance is at its best when you’re juggling multiple mysteries, but insists that you must see and solve everything before getting an ending - which caused the back half to slow to a crawl and seems like an overcorrection from Blue Prince’s lack of hand-holding.

However, I think it would have been a better game if you couldn’t 100% it.

Day 1 feels intense with all the exposition and unexpected events occurring unexpectedly. Day 2 in comparison is relatively uneventful and seems to exist to allow you time to finish those last mysteries, since it’s required

Borrowed ideas I noticed:
Evidence web from Outer Wilds.
Sentence-based hypotheses from Curse of the Golden Idol.
Unlocking exploration similar to Dangonranpa.

Overall I think the investigation engine that was built is a great achievement and powered the story well

Totally get that. Maybe a more apt metaphor would be money changing hands:

So yeah It’s good to get these numbers out but this is a pretty useless data visualization?

Like if you want to do a bar graph why wouldn’t you show other categories of spends and cuts? Why would spends and cuts both be positive numbers?

“Red Sox: Hand painted lettering of a monster plate” Except it literally doesn’t say Red Sox. The plate says “Boston”.

Why couldn’t you give all of the players access to all of the features?
Why would you hold a raffle for a Funko Pop (costs them money to make) and not a digital copy of the game(free)?

Just a masterclass on how not to get me (a huge fan of Dune) excited about your game 🤷🏻‍♂️

The whole experience just left me with so many questions.
Why make a shooter game in an IP where everyone has bullet-stopping forcefields?
Why build a demo for your not-yet-public game and have no onboarding?
Why separate players based on features when they were all playing the same experience?

There is a modest crowd of people around the worm as they announce that they will draw a ticket to win a Dune Funko Pop. They start pulling tickets and one after another, the winning numbers go unclaimed. I shit you not they must have gone through like 15 different tickets till they had a winner.

We fly ornithopters aimlessly. It isn’t fun. The 4 of us vehicle players just start dive bombing any worm or mountain we see. We don’t take any damage and can’t crash. The demo ends just in time for them to call out the winners of a raffle! (Anyone who played got a ticket)

A staff member taps me on the shoulder and informs me that I have entered the PVP zone and that I shouldn’t be there. I’m like “Oh okay, is there something I’m supposed to be doing?” and dude goes “No, you can just drive around and explore.” I chuckle. He does not. Eventually they spawn ornithopters

At this point I realize this whole thing is just a multiplayer sandbox (hah!) so I just try to have fun. I drive my bike into combat and try to run over some enemies I see. The bike does no damage to them. They shoot me. I do not die. This whole thing is starting to be so janky it’s fun when…

Eventually I figured I would just hop off the bike and start joining these big fights I was seeing in the distance. Aside from guns being the main combat method in the game, which in-universe would not make any sense, it was an average third person shooter. Then I got back on the bike again.

I drove off on the already-assembled bike and just sorta… wandered? I really didn’t know what I was meant to be doing and there were absolutely no clues about what the objective of the experience was. After a while I got swallowed by sand and my bike exploded. The staff spawned another one for me

They sat me down alongside the 30ish other players from other experiences and loaded up the demo server. I spawned in next to a motorcycle(?) in the desert and the quest text said to “assemble the bike”. No intro or tutorial or any explanation. Just assemble an already-working desert bike

I went to PAX on Sunday and lined up for Dune. The con was winding down so I didn’t have to wait long. When I got to the front, I was asked to pick one of a few possible experiences. IIRC the options were PvP, PvE, vehicles, survival, building. I picked vehicles.

Solving puzzles in Outer Wilds: “Oh sick, that’s so cool. I followed the footsteps of the Nomai!”

Solving puzzles in Blue Prince: “Oh you motherfucker, why haven’t I been writing down the color of every 5th doorknob”

Yeah I jest but at the end of the day I am glad that the rouguelike homies got something cool they like. Whenever one of these “must play” rougelikes come out there’s a small part of me that hopes this is the one that clicks and unlocks the rest of the genre for me but perhaps that’s a tall order 🤷🏻‍♂️

Boy howdy Tom I sure do love when I am following a juicy thread of plot/puzzle/mystery and the powers that be inexplicably force me to take 3 consecutive left turns, halting all progress! (It will be 4 days till I get another chance at doing whatever I was doing but this time I won’t be as excited)