Long Live The Queen! ...Why'd she die all of a sudden?

So lately, a game called Long Live the Queen has appeared on Steam as sort of a politically-based RPG/Interactive Novel.

I watched both parts of the ‘TB Is the Prettiest Princess’ videos, because let’s face it: it’s fun to laugh at TB. But as I watched more and more of the video, and saw more and more of the gameplay, there were some serious design concerns raised that are worth talking about.

1 - The GUI is not helpful. It regularly conceals information from the player needed to make decisions over what moods are influencing the training of what skills.

2 - The game is a guessing game. You won’t know what kinds of skills you need, until the need for it bites you like a Milk Viper. Sometimes you will get warnings about events, like ‘the ball’, but usually it’s in too short of a time to allow you to adjust your mood and train up.

3 - The amount of pink/uber-feminine themes. I usually take a neutral tack when it comes to visual things like this due to the cosmetic nature, but given the above two problems it seems like the idea of ‘Princesses’ and ‘Trial and Error Gameplay’ combined in a horrible way, and the best way to ensure sales was to cover it with as much pink and ribbons as possible (thankfully, no unicorns…yet.)

While there are some very interesting narrative choices you can make - like how TB made his first princess a freakin’ warlord - let’s talk about this game, and what could be done to improve games like it.

Certainly there is something to be said for ease of production, but the mechanics underlying this are kind of gnarly…

Number 1 is very true, and the fact that the menus don’t resize is quite frustrating. If you try to bump the resolution, the menus stick and you get to play a guessing game of “what option is my cursor on now” as you try to right the wrong. On top of the general bugginess, the GUI definitely doesn’t do this game any favors.

I actually enjoyed this game partially due to number 2. Sometimes it’s nice to just play a game based on guessing what comes next, and trying to prepare for as broad a range of outcomes as you can. It’s also humorous and has a very light “losing is fun” aspect. I use the word light because when I think of “losing is fun” I think of a heavy game like DF.

Number 3 didn’t bother me all that much. It takes some getting used to, but I guess I just felt it was part of the game/world.

Yeah, that’s the weird thing that has been bothering me. Normally, I feel much the same - a game’s graphic conceit tells the player a lot about it, but other than that is largely unimportant; replace ribbons with TRON lines and you still have the same experience, at least mechanically.

I guess it’s just that it feels very ham-fisted coming from a societally-correct male perspective (y’know, not being raised around too many bows, ribbons, etc., and getting laughed at if you did), and that colored my critique as I was watching this.

I like the cutesy manga theme. It’s aesthetically pleasing, and it is popular among text based life sims (Target audience?).
I agree about 1 and 2