else Heart.Break()

You play as Sebastian who moves to the city of Dorisburg to start his new job as a soda salesman. Your first task is to find your hotel, and after locating your room; it seems your room is just a bathroom. After walking back out, you come out of a different door to what you used to walk in. I thought this was a bug since the character didn't seem to have an appropriate reaction, but when you speak to the hotel owner, she explains that door has been problematic, and she will send an engineer. After your first night's sleep, the hotel owner tells you your soda salesman contact came looking for you, but has since left. She sends you to a Café, whose owner then send you to Bar Yvonne; which isn't even open. At this point, you do wonder if the game is always gonna be this vague... and it is.

I didn't actually meet the salesman until days later; at which point he told me I have been sacked for 'showing a lack of interest'. Even though you are given the task of finding the contact, your destiny is to go to Bar Yvonne to meet a girl called Pixie. Sebastian seems to take an instant liking to her, but is denied since she has a boyfriend. You are supposed to become obsessed with Pixie just like Sebastian is and therefore try and pry more into her life. She is secretly a type of hacker, and this is the game's main premise.

At first, the game seems like a point-and-click adventure since you navigate with the mouse, pick up objects and talk to characters. However, the game's real focus is on programming, although there's not really much of that (if you just stick to the story). You will only acquire a modifier (hacking tool) a few hours into the game, which is far too long to wait.

The city seems fairly large, and you have a vague map and find signposts to guide you. By talking to the citizens, they may tell you that a certain location is interesting, and maybe there is some kind of event on at a specific time. When you get told these hints, it's important to follow them up, so make sure you are there at the correct time. If you don't follow them up, then you will just be wandering around aimlessly, picking up fairly mundane items and having fairly mundane conversation with the citizens. As time passes, the citizens go about their daily schedule, so will go to their workplace during the day, then return home at night. You need to make sure your character goes to bed too...or maybe just collapse in the street.

The dialogue is mainly based on small-talk and there's plenty of unnatural reactions which is really jarring. There's a lack of character development with the more important characters too, making everyone seem rather dull. Another problem I had is that characters at certain points don't even say anything when you click on them, even though you would expect them to tell you something useful. When you are stuck and characters are not saying anything; you do wonder if you have broken the game.

The coding system allows you to hack into many in-game objects and rewrite their programming. It's not just computers and electronic devices you can hack, you can even hack some everyday objects like drinks and cigarettes. I even found a turtle I could hack and change his movement pattern and make him say stupid things.

When you get your modifier, you are given some basic information. Finding certain characters can give you simple programming tasks to try and introduce you to basic programming. I had the advantage of being a Software Developer in real life, but I'd imagine the majority of people would be confused.

Each object has an API; a list of programming methods which it can recognise. Doors have a Lock, Unlock and Toggle (this just switches between Lock and Unlock), whereas the drinks can change the users state such as Sleepiness, Charisma, Smelliness. Since you are quite limited in what you can do, you just end up making minor tweaks such as changing a light's colour. Once you learn how to find object's names, there's plenty of scope for transporting yourself and objects. Remember Sebastian's first experience with his room door? – the door made him go to a room he didn't expect. You can do a similar technique to teleport, although I found an actual teleporter fairly early on, so I just used that.

In a lot of ways, the game is a sandbox where you can mess around, but really you should be thinking of how you can progress the story because this will expose you to more programming ideas.

When you try hack into the many computers you find in the game, you will see a variety of programs. Some are completely useless whereas others can be useful if you adapt them. The various floppy disks you find usually contain absolute nonsense and will probably confuse most people. There's some computers which have simple games such as a version of the classic Asteroids; so contains hundreds of lines of code on them. The thing is, even though there's scope for doing some inventive things, the game only really requires you to change strings (text) and modify 'If' statements. To get through an entire game using such basic puzzles when this is supposed to be the focus – is just insulting and boring. Also, showing players such complex code will imply that they should understand it because they will need it. This will be very daunting to most players.

It took me around 15 hours to get to the end of the game and I was completely shocked when it ended. I didn't feel there was any kind of build up; it seemed like the plot was just beginning to unravel and then it just ended. You are told the Ministry is up to something big, but you never find what their motivations are. You steal some data fairly early on, but you are never told what that contains. Pixie says something like “I haven't had time to analyse it”, but you expect she will later on in the story. Yulian is determined to prove his suspicions with the Mayor but this is another unresolved plot. Araki is very mysterious and you expect their personality to be revealed at the end and have an impact to the story, but it never happens. The story just feels bare-bones and the game feels unfinished.

I think a lot of people will quit this game within the few hours. The vague direction means you wander around aimlessly, and not everyone will pick up on the hints to pry into Pixie and her friends. Without this, you could go hours without being given the ability to write code, and even when you do, there can be a massive learning curve before you work it out. I felt the game should have been more explicit with what you need to do, then give you the option of a detailed course on programming. Of course, this needs to be backed up with great ideas for puzzles.