HASVERS'S PROFILE

To clarify, I don't necessarily mean that these little gamifying things (flashy UIs, QTEs and unrelated puzzles) are worse than having nothing at all - sometimes they can be (e.g. if they divert the focus from the game's vision), sometimes not (e.g. if they provide a pleasant break in the tension).

But I think they're definitely not as good as what you could do with the same basic ideas and almost no additional effort. What I call "superficial" gamification makes sense for people who are primarily film writers trying to shoehorn their script into a videogame - Heavy Rain and so on - as an expedient to make the experience a little more engaging; it's not an optimal use of the medium, but if the story is really cool, I honestly don't care.

On the other hand, I believe that you think much more like a game designer. Your UIs and popups and stuff are suggesting tons of ways of doing just this:

"making gossip more fun than just reading to get to the next spot where you read more"

But concretely, getting to the next spot to read more is still what the player does, despite the UI (because we have no way of knowing what to do to advance on a given conclusion, so we just read everything). Whereas you need very little more to make this UI useful as more than a pretty quest journal. Simply by keeping the exact same ingredients (such as a grid of POIs, with conclusions being tetris-shapes on it) and making them meaningful instead of just aesthetically pleasing - for instance, by turning them into hints on how to advance.

Anyway I think I'm starting to repeat myself so I will stop there. Of course you are entirely free to completely disregard these suggestions :P It's just that I feel you've gone 90% of the way to a stronger, and very unique, game experience about collecting information in a non-linear, non-brute force, clever way... and stopped there, which makes you a terrible tease in my personal universe.

Mostly my criticism hinges on the fact that information collection proceeds pretty much as in any CRPG (talking to everyone about everything until something new pops up), but is presented as a more elaborate game mechanics, with a specific puzzle-like UI (with geometric shapes for the conclusions, and levels in Last Word, and other game-like trappings).

This really made me wish for a game where that UI would actually be more than a fancy way of representing something usual. Where instead it would be part of the game - for instance, based on the positions of the POIs and the shape of the conclusion, there would be some way of guessing who may have some missing information needed to complete a conclusion, or how to obtain it. Anything that goes beyond brute force.

Even better if it's actually suboptimal to talk to everyone about everything, and if there's some way of guessing what our choices will influence instead of making them blindly, so we now have real stakes and trade-offs going on. Not necessarily trying too hard to turn this into a full-scale investigation game, more like a GM behind the scene rewarding the player for elegance and good roleplay, or intuition, or theme-sensitivity.

I am fine with weird metaphors by the way, as long as they are not excuses. I haven't played Catherine, but if there's really a sense to how puzzles are used to represent the narrative, even a very abstract one, well there's a weird but consistent metaphor relating what you do to what it means. Which is not the case in RPG fetch quests where the devs are obviously trying to give the player something to do, anything, to pad the game in-between two cutscenes. In my eyes, Fleuret Blanc's bouts are valid gameplay insertions, but not To the Moon's jigsaw puzzles, as the latter are not meaningful in any way to the narrative - sorry to the puzzlemaker ;)

Perhaps it's because decades of playing RPGs have conditioned me to the idea that anything with a battle system requires more suspension of my disbelief, but here I do think that the bouts are, quite remarkably,
- almost nonintrusive
- internally consistent and not "metaphor breaking"; at any given time the protagonist has as much reason to want to bout as the player. (Moreso than in Last Word for instance)
- useful to the narrative: more plot points arise from the bouting thing than are devoted to trying to justify it, so the slight awkwardness of some of the latter is really no big deal. It's easily accepted as part of the base conceit of the story itself, as it would in any medium (for instance, many gambling mangas have more artificial premises involving people trapped on boats and forced to play mahjong or whatnot)

It's really the POI system and the whole "talk to everyone" mechanics that I feel is deceiving: it is made to look like something gamey but it doesn't allow you to play with it, doesn't give you ways to perform. You can only follow and generally hope to be as thorough as possible. In a slightly obsessive way which arguably fits the theme, but still :P

I have the same problem with Ace Attorney games, which are very often frustrating because the whole gameplay seems to suggest that you are here to make leaps of intuition, but you're only allowed to follow a totally linear path which doesn't even always make a lot of sense. It's like QTEs on a gamewide scale: you're just here to find the one action that the devs want you to do, and do it to progress to the next step; for me that's dirty cheap gameification, but the real problem is that what the interface and premise advertise is constantly at odds with what you're doing in the game.