General Practitioner is a very ambitious game and in some ways it succeeds but in many ways it was underwhelming. The number of ways you canGeneral Practitioner is a very ambitious game and in some ways it succeeds but in many ways it was underwhelming. The number of ways you can play the game is astounding. You can play in the normal mode where you have to manage your day to day routine; the clinic itself and your love life. You can also play just the examinations as well as a visual novel mode where it is just the story and dialogue choices. The fact that the developer did this is awesome because each gamer can try to get out of it what they want. I have tried both the normal mode as well as visual novel mode. The normal mode is a bit tough to get used to as many of the mechanics aren’t explained well. In the tutorials unless the game says you did something wrong then you won’t lose points for the exam but after the tutorials you can indeed lose points for things without the game telling you during as well as for other things you may have gotten points for things the game tells you were useless or not needed. The exams themselves are very in depth and the codex the game gives you about different procedures and symptoms are fantastic. There are a crazy amount of control you can have over things such as physique; sex experience; who you date; medial knowledge; etc. The day to day routine does make the game’s pace very slow. The visual novel option had several flaws. Relationships start and end with no warning. I would be dating someone only for them to disappear. It was mentioned I was gay but I never dated another man. I became engaged to someone without any input for me and seemingly out of the blue. Other times I would only have one option as to whether to end a relationship or make other major changes. It felt like the game was trying to pick and choose select features and people from the normal mode to make a cohesive story out of but it felt schizophrenic and made little sense sometimes. The art was decent but not great. It felt a little dated in terms of visual pop for many things and sometimes the people had a fuzzy like quality to them. The story itself was very deep and covered a variety of topics and characters.
I played General Practitioner on Linux. It never crashed on me. There were a slew of spelling and grammar mistakes throughout though. Too many to count. Many times it was something such as a wrong tense. For instance “I wake up earlier today” instead of “I woke up earlier today”. I wouldn’t be so critical but there were a lot of these mistakes. I play a lot of visual novels and a developer who doesn’t speak English as their native language is common but Bruni needs a better or more fluent proof reader. Another issue I noticed was once the wrong photo and name was attached to who I was talking to so the name I was using to address them didn’t match who was on screen. Alt-tab didn’t work. The game allows manuals saves whenever you want and has 42 save slots.
Game Engine: Ren’Py
Save System: Manual
Disk Space Used: 4.5GB
CPU Usage: 6-38 %
RAM Usage: 2.4-2.9 GB
Overall it isn’t a bad game but it is very rough and could use a lot of improvements. The normal mode was a grind at times and took a lot to get used to but the visual novel mode was way too chaotic and picked random stuff out of normal mode to build a fractured yet deep narrative. I paid $26.34 CAD for the game and for it’s depth and variety it was worth the price but the quality of each mode was too suspect. Neither mode was as good as it could or should have been. I finished the visual novel mode in 3 hours but the normal mode would take far longer to complete.