There are some good ideas present in Drinks With Abbey but it didn’t produce a great game out of them. It’s concept of the whole game being aThere are some good ideas present in Drinks With Abbey but it didn’t produce a great game out of them. It’s concept of the whole game being a first date and the conversations that take place was interesting and done well. The dialogue was well written and flowed together nicely. The art was great with an interesting look somewhere between cell shaded and realistic. The music changed frequently with the conversation and worked with the scenes. My main issue, which was a big one, was the game is very rigid and sometimes doesn’t make sense. For instance if the date is going badly at one point and you’re playing darts then there is no way you can hit a bullseye no matter how hard or soft you throw it whereas if it is going well at that point then you can hit the bullseye with the right choice. The dialogue doesn’t match what is going on either at that point. If I choose to throw normally it says that I fall short but if I choose to throw harder then it still falls short where if the date is going well and I choose to throw harder then I get a bullseye. There is also little to no indication during the date whether it is going well or not save for one moment. The game’s plot paths branch at certain points but if you asked me to explain how that one dialogue choice makes any difference then I would be unable to do so most of the time.
I played Drinks With Abbey on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any spelling errors. There is no save system at all, and the date has to be started from scratch to see any different paths. The game developer makes this clear on the main page for it and it is a short game but I still prefer manual saves. There is also no option menu to adjust volumes; text speed; etc which is usually a standard for Ren’Py games.
Game Version: 1.0.0
Game Engine: Ren’Py
Disk Space Used: 240 MB
CPU Usage: 3-9 %
RAM Usage: 1.6-1.8 GB
Overall I don’t think Drinks With Abbey is a bad game. It has some good ideas and I would be interested in future games from the developer. Overall though I find it hard to recommend this game due to the inconsistencies in plot and the lack of a save feature and other options. There are also many other visual novels out there it has to compete with that do things with more polish and options. The game is short but has a good amount of endings given a large amount of dialogue choices you can make. I finished each play through in about 15 minutes or so give or take. The game is free but it is easily worth at least $5 in my eyes.
My Score: 6.5/10
My System:
Intel I5-4590 | 16GB DDR3-1333 | Intel HD 4600 1536MB | Mesa 20.0.8 | Mushkin SSD 120GB | Trisquel 9.0 | Mate 1.20.0 | Kernel 5.4.77-gnu… Expand
