I agree, but I would go beyond just “a game I don’t like” to a much more controversial “this game is actually terribly designed”.
Because of the way it’s designed it’s possible to randomly end up with a completely awful experience that ruins its “one time” playability for forever. I know this because it’s what happened to me. See, in my very first time out I ended up at like a 70% progression point to the final answer. Not because I’m “smart” or “good” mind you, I just got “lucky”. But it’s not actually lucky, because it now means 70% of the game is useless to me. It won’t help me get closer to the answer and it will (very frustratingly) take me back to where I’ve already been.
I think most people would counter saying the world itself is interesting/worth exploring on its own. But in one run I didn’t at all become engaged with the world itself (which is very reasonable). Certainly not enough to give a fuck about trying to go out and learn about it for its own sake. If it had taken me more runs to actually make progress then maybe I would’ve become engaged tangentially while working towards my goals. But alas. And FWIW, I did more than one run. I think overall I played the game for 3ish hours before getting fed up with going in circles.
If random chance can render most of your game not worth exploring, that’s bad design. Flat out.
Since no one has mentioned it yet -
If you haven’t tried setting Synapse up with the ansible cookbook you should. It’s almost push-button and has 1:1 voice calls by default. Setting up group voice from there is a bit challenging, but the cookbook has a section for it as well if you’re willing to try.
For those I interested in the etymology on the party names at the top:
The democrat side uses the characters “the people”, “lord”, and “party”. My interpretation is “the people are in charge party”, which makes sense because democracy is “th e rule of the people”.
The republican side uses the characters “share”, “peace”, and “party”. To me, this one doesn’t have an interpretation that obviously links to republicanism.