Glad I grabbed the demo when it was available since it's gone now.

I enjoyed the demo. I'm keeping an eye on this one's reviews.

And they should update the game's description on the store page.

Mmh... No achievements, but they were there a few days ago. I hope they are added later.

Yeah, was gonna snag this and put it into my cart, yet the steam reviews gave me pause as the gameplay seems too bare-bones for a full-price purchase... I'm hoping there are future patches to fill out the game before long as the game's art direction is amazing!

Into the wishlist, it goes!

The developer is Japanese:

https://twitter.com/playismEN/status/1382234669035495426

The bad reviews seem about what I expected based on the demo and the limited time between then and now. Hopefully they will improve it a bit, although I'll eventually give it a try even if not.

Ah thank you, from that twitter page I went to their website and then their mother company. All checked out. I'm fine with the gameplay, I just checking the origin of the company.

Anymore it's a thing for localization companies to get credit for games instead of DEVs. It's kinda like how publishers get credit for making a game, too.

Visually it looks nice and sometimes I'm in the mood for more "relaxing" games. However, I'm concerned about the lack of interactivity as well some technical issues.

On another note, since Playism closed in its own stores, I hope they will bring more titles to GOG.

Not necessarily unreasonable since publishers get to decide when a game is in a state they are willing to release, although unfortunately few of them make reasonable use of that and are fine with releasing unplayable games. Also, my understanding is that publishers often do quite a bit of work on games, particularly in QA (for instance having a wider variety of test systems than the developer) but not limited to that. Localizers are publishers also and often are porting from console games and even if not often fix up remaining issues in the game being localized or add convenience features.

In this case the developer is Orbital Express and I couldn't find a website for them (even clicking on some links on mostly Japanese language twitter accounts who mentioned the release) or even really anything about them in English. But someone who can read Japanese would likely have more success :).

Edit: Looking again quick, it seems Orbital Express is the game company of the illustrator who started out intending it to be just a limited release but later when wanting a wider release decided to sign on with Playism becuase the other publishers were too pushy about what they wanted in the game (sounds like Playism is the publisher in Japan as well; I'm not sure how often that is the case with their games). I can't tell if "Oribital Express" is just a one person developer. The earliest demo was a walking simulator and additional gameplay elements were added later (makes sense with the illustrator being the developer :) ). This is from the Google translation of this article:

https://www.famitsu.com/news/202104/15217831.html

The illustrator's twitter page is:

https://twitter.com/nocras666

I think the Orbital Express website might just be this tumblr page:

https://nocras666.tumblr.com/bespin00.tumblr.com

I hope so also. It is too bad that they couldn't make the store work, GOG could use some DRM-free competition (more selective than Itch and that isn't entirely DRM-free, although the Playism store wan't 100% DRM-free either since it had a few that were Steam keys only but other than that they didn't have DRM while Itch does allow DRM in games hosted there).

Don't get me wrong, i understand publishers often don't get the credit they deserve, but, in reality, they still do much, much less than the actual devs. Is it the worker or the supervisor that does the most work? Because you're largely describing publishers as supervisors in your model.

As for localizers, most do such a terrible job that it's hard for me to take them seriously. They do do more work than most publishers, but, well... There's a few that are notoriously bad, like NIS (these guys refuse to publish localized updates for games) and XSEED (these guys love to change content significantly, from what i hear).

EDIT: I have little experience with playism, but they've been fine so far where that limited experience exists.

I agree that the developers should get most of the praise and blame. Somewhat less of the blame since the main job of the publisher should be to make sure it works well before releasing it.

I've enjoyed all the Falcom games I've played that have been localized by XSEED and NISA. Almost all of those are on my favorites list. I still hold a grudge against NISA and FURYU for Alliance Alive, but while I didn't like Disaster Report 4 nearly as much as I had hoped only a tiny part of that was at all NISA's fault.

It's hard for blame, because the power of localizers and publishers to make their own changes is too great, and alot of games usually end up being criticized for bad translations or censorship. NIS stalled character DLC for another game i played, that required little to no translation (the dev actually spoke enough english that he was complaining about it in the game's english discord server). Marvelous (XSEED) was behind issues with Monster Hunter Stories updates in the west. We also had a thread here on GOG where XSEED came to defend censorship, claiming they didn't do it, then defending it when it was pointed out.

They have a lot of products, but we don't see the full extent of the things they do because we're out of the dev loop. I've made my mind that i'm going to prefer purchases that have the original versions included over translated versions. Since Japanese is not a problem for me, i'm taking the time to try to get PC releases of some indie games from Japan itself.