Walking sims can be a great genre and has some awesome games to be found but it can also breed some lazy ones that fail to understand what make the great ones so good. The First Friend falls into that lazy category. For most of the game you simply walk forward to trigger more of the story being told. There is nothing to interact with; no puzzles; just walking. There is one section whereWalking sims can be a great genre and has some awesome games to be found but it can also breed some lazy ones that fail to understand what make the great ones so good. The First Friend falls into that lazy category. For most of the game you simply walk forward to trigger more of the story being told. There is nothing to interact with; no puzzles; just walking. There is one section where you have to find certain items to trigger memories before you can proceed but even then it’s just walking around until you find them and you don’t even have to click on them. The voice acting was pretty decent. The object detail on little things like kitchen tables; interiors; etc was also pretty good. The grass detail was pretty poor. The trees; water; and flowers were all decent. The sun and sky were great. The music was really good except that it could get repetitive at times. One thing I found weird was the sound effects. Things like rain falling were fantastic but at other times there were none. For instance I could walk on water and there was no noise at all almost like I was hovering over it. I also found jumping to be poor, almost like it is in the Elder Scrolls games where you can jump up the side of a hill and just feels weird. Luckily you only have to jump once.
I played The First Friend on Linux. It never crashed on me. I did notice some glitches though. There was a lot of textures popping in and was noticeable. There were also some flickering textures. I also noticed little things like a table cloth that was going through a chair as well as water going through a tree when viewed from a hilltop. There were no options at all for audio and video. You couldn’t remap the keys but you won’t be pressing many buttons anyway. Alt-Tab didn’t work. The game auto saves at the start of each level and there is just the one save slot. You have to disable subtitles both at the start of a new level and when you boot the game up each time if you want them off. As with other Unity games that use OpenGL on AMD GPUs, the performance and GPU usage was all over the place regardless of if there was a lot going on. The visual quality of the game doesn’t justify the frame rate drops.
Game Engine: Unity
Graphics API: OpenGL
Disk Space Used: 5.4GB
Input Used: Keyboard and Mouse
GPU Usage: 0-100 %
VRAM Usage: 1093-5764 MB
CPU Usage: 3-26 %
RAM Usage: 2.1-4.2 GB
Frame Rate: 32-144 FPS
Overall The First Friend was average. I liked the story but from the game play to the performance; to the lack of options; to the technical issues; there left a lot to be desired. One thing I also want to say is that the developer seems to have poor customer support and probably should not be making video games. One user on the Steam forums who was having issues with the game crashing apparently got this response:
“The truth is I am terrible when it comes down to coding. To put simply, I don't like coding and I'm just incapable of understanding code. However I understand how essential programming is in not just games but in today's world and it's a real shame that I can't get into it. The First Friend does contain C# coding and thanks to the many YouTube tutorials I managed to code all the mechanics needed for the The First Friend. If theirs any questions regarding programming, I would honestly recommended to just google it because that will help you a lot better than I can.”
If this is true then it is tough to recommend giving them your money. I finished the game in 1 hour and 17 minutes. I paid $1.98 CAD for it and can say I have played worse games but also better ones even at the cheap price.
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.2.5 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Manjaro 21.2.0 | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 5.15.7-1-MANJARO… Expand
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