SIMULACRA: Pipe Dreams

I'm not entirely sure what to think about this one. It felt really short and unsatisfactory after Simulacra. I loved Simulacra. The character and the game. Simulacra was just the biggest bum of a demon who just doesn't get the point of human life. He was decently voice acted. He criticized social media and "pretenders". It was cool and scary at several points. Whatever the demon... thing here is called, I don't like her. She's a weak, annoying rehash of what made the Simulacra so cool and intriguing. He was a malicious creature who follows you through the game but doesn't reveal himself until the end. She's always there and the ending feels really mediocre. I didn't get invested into.. any of the characters, honestly, the game was just too short. But especially not her, which I thought was quite sad considering how much I loved her counterpart. There seems to also be a sort of lack of morality questions? also the ads. guys I'll gladly pay you for your games but I am going to go crazy if I have to watch another real 40-second ad, i know its criticizing pay-to-win culture. i get it. please don't make me watch more real ads. i'll watch ninja-foxeroo over and over. Furthermore whos idea was it to have the play store open after every real ad? THAT is super annoying. Gameplay is great, as always. Very immersive. Clean UI. Crashed once but I blame that on my phone (shoutout to bq for that one). Would have been great if only there was more content.

*spoilers* This is a fantastic game, finding the videos was a lot of fun and seeing the discrepancy between the "two" Teddys in them and in the texts made a big difference in my emotional connection to him and my drive to free him. Though it did take me a bit to find the boxdrop website in the in-game browser but that's kinda necessary so that it's not too obvious that there are videos available for download. I also like that there are additional information making everything more plausible.

Very interesting from a social commentary point of view. I personally found the in-game fake ads very entertaining, but found the watching real ads to progress with the story (because the levels are designed to be impossible) somewhat grating. But I get it. Game developers need to make money, too. Anyways. It's a good game.