The first part of "PinesQuest 2D: The Gravity Falls Game That Almost Was," a massive video taking you through the whole game from start to finish, is now online! Part 2 will be coming tomorrow, Friday, August 9th! Thanks for watching and please look forward to it!
Am I the only one who didn’t enjoy Pinesquest 2D at all?
I was interested when I heard it was being shown at a convention so I checked out and I feel, in the state the game is in it doesn’t earn the praise it gets. Please don’t feel offended as I’m simply trying to offer my opinion and critique to help improve the game in the following review. Mild spoilers for the plot... maybe... I guess??
(Hey Gobblewonker... Where are you looking? Is it interesting?)
The game uses the most basic assets like standard RPG-Maker Menu-systems and sound effects, screenshots and some music of the show, vectors of Gravity Falls characters/oddities and more premade assets for enemies. HP is just HP, MP is just MP, and even standard RPG-maker texts such as the ones at the start and end of an encounter weren’t creatively altered.
(Would be nice if the game explained this to new members of the community.)
During my playtime of about an hour I haven’t encountered one puzzle that’s fun. Either it’s nothing creative or clever and just feels thrown in there, but if you’re not familiar with deciphering ciphered text, there’s not even any clues on how to solve it near the start of the game where you’re immediately greeted by a box you have to use a ciphered text for. No clues, nothing. You’re just expected to know because it’s Gravity Falls, a game made for fans, and not people new to the show that notice the game and decide to check it out.
(I was quite pleasantly surprised by the first areas of the game.)
The sprites that are done are impressive and the art style is nice, but there are also small issues such as the scale and some of the character sprites having ugly differences in pixels. I don’t know if every single element in tilesets and charactersets is original either.
(Notice Candy’s glasses and Fiddleford’s eyebrows. Also note that the table is HUMONGOUS and the computery-thingy looks like it doesn’t belong here.)
The plot seems pretty weird, too. Most of it is just “This doesn’t make sense, but it’s Gravity Falls so it doesn’t need to!” instead of coming up with something clever. The title seems to be based on the novel “Flatland: A Romance Of Two Dimensions” by A Square (Edwin Abbott).
With the weak writing so far my prediction is that the game focuses on Bill, and either an abusive sibling (Liam??) or obsessive girlfriend trying to get back at him, or forcing him back into his former life in Flatland. Involving “lustreverence”, it’s likely(and hopefully!) the latter, but... “lustreverence”? “lustreverence”?? That sounds very, very stupid and out of place. Lust should have no place in a video game based on a show about two kids solving mysteries! They’re only teens!
The appearance of the Flatlanders as I’ve seen on the blog could be clever if there was a proper explanation for it, but from the clues I’ll assume that Flatland is in-tact in this game, which doesn’t make sense at all given Flatland was flattened by Bill and realistically, nobody should’ve survived. (This doesn’t mean that somebody could, with proper explanation as of why). Nullify my statement about Flatland if there is an explanation, I was too disappointed to play too far into the game to see if it improved. But the designs of the Flatlanders themselves and their custom battle stance is interesting, but I wasn’t bothered to actually make it to later parts to see if I could encounter or learn about them.
Again, I mean no offense by complaining about a lackluster experience. It is simply my opinion, free to be ignored, but I do hope that the creators will find this, and maybe consider my ‘review’ to maybe improve the game a little bit.
