Don't like the art.
Message:Way worse than what I was doing for Space Gamer and I was lot cheaper. (I'm better, now, but still probably cheaper than the $4k budget allocated from the Kickstarter.)
Points for honesty with the, "Hey we'd like to pay ourselves for two years." There's a point they'd be able to make more games? Will they be any good? I dunno.
Gotta appreciate a goal of "zero prep."
Addenda:
Had time to look at the demo ruleset. It's fine. Light and workable. Like Conrad said, it's nothing special, but it doesn't really have huge gaping flaws. It works. I've seen better and worse. Better Games players should appreciate the halfway point between wounds and HP. One wound, Ow, Two wounds, you're really messed up. Three wounds, you're dead. Find a thing in-game to drop a wound a level. It works. It's better than Hit Points. Then again, I was always a fan of Grazing/Serious/Vicious/Dead (Spirit).
Yes, the "Save Point" mechanic is a bit of a cop out, but they did say it was video game inspired. Then again, gaming 202 reads "house rulez is good," so, if you're a ref who doesn't like the concept of Save Points, just don't put 'em on the map. Or, pull a "Paranoia," and set up a limited number of Save Point "credits," and, once those are used up, no more saves (six clones), or, make a Save Point a skill check. Success all is well, Mixed, you broke the Save Point and this is your last life. Fail and you're dead-dead. Easy!
Ok, zero-prep means rolling on random room tables. Whatever. I like cards, both for the greater number of initial options and the limited non-repeatability of results (until a reshuffle), but even the mighty Red Rahm has resorted to boring, linear d6 tables in some recent designs. Keeping it simple. A boring d6 table is faster to use than flipping through a 10-page Tarot deck table and takes less time to write, which is why even Red has written games using boring d6 tables.
Still, the Demo is a longer form of a two-page Zen game. This design could easily cut the page count by 2/3 but everything is laid out with way too much white space and the worst art ever in a game.
The art is really really bad. Hopefully the monies allocated from the Kickstarter will go to an artist with some skill. It's distractingly bad art. The art is so bad it overcomes by contempt for generative AI and makes me say, "Dude, seriously get on Stable Diffusion and just let the AI do it. Put Wombo Dream on your phone and prompt everything in the "line art" style. Do not put those chicken scratches in your game, and stop wasting half of your page with clip art swirls in the margins, FFS.
Yours,
IronMike
11-Mar-2023