Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Nov 3, 2015

  Cibele is a brief, raw look into first love and the struggles of an online relationship. It takes about an hour and a half to play, and is essentially a "walking simulator" genre game. The ending is appropriately abrupt, leaving the player to dwell in their thoughts. While this game is only the experiences of one person and may perpetuate negative stereotypes of online relationships, Nina is brutally honest and open about her experiences. I absolutely recommend it if you enjoy narrative games.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 3, 2015

  Cibele is a short affair that has you browsing Nina's desktop over the course of several months. You can read emails, view archived posts from her blog, and look at pictures. This all helps give a sense of the kind of person you're playing as, and I highly recommend exploring the desktop before launching the MMO every time you can. It helps give a sense of what's going on outside of Nina's conversations with her internet boyfriend. Some of it is cute, some of it is a bit sad. In the MMO, you mostly talk to Ichi while mindlessly clicking away at enemies. The conversations are not terribly romantic considering the subject matter, but the awkward exchanges really ring true to me as someone who is also very introverted and has had an online relationship. There's also other players who will try to chat with you while you talk to Ichi, and you're free to engage or ignore them as you please. I hesitate to say much more for fear of spoilers. The things you've heard about how this game explores relationships in the digital age, that's all there. There's also a lot of almost cringe-inducingly nostalgic details sprinkled throughout that feel very true to life. I felt feelings with this game.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 3, 2015

  this game isn't for everyone. but if you like indie-games that are story driven and take you along on an emotional roller-coaster then you will probably like this. plus: the art is really, really pretty! with that said: i loved this game. i know a lot of people would probably say that it's not technically a "game" in the typical sense, but since i don't care about that but about the message, it was a true experience for me. i've certainly never played anything like this before. i loved the exploration of nina's desktop and the photos and blog-entires. i found myself giggling as i uncovered her as a person/character, because i used to be that girl. almost exactly that girl. but this game does a great job at not making fun of her, but portraying her in a... loving manner. and as for the voice-acting of the in-game conversations, well... they are so close to reality that i found myself holding my breath as if i were actually chatting on ts. if you're looking for roughly 1,5 hours of emotional experience from a girl's POV, then go for it!
• gamedeal user

  Nov 3, 2015

  I really want to give this game a positive review, but there is a lot more cons than pros here. For what it is worth Cibele is a good idea that had a lot of potebtial, but the story itself felt very rushed,compact. The acting in the actual real life parts of the game seemed a bit stiff at times, along with a little of the voice acting(though the voice acting was good in others). If felt as though I was always waiting for the good part to start or waiting for something cheesy to happen, but it just left me with a sour unfulfilled feeling. The story ends so much faster than you think and that is fine, but the main arcs of the story are so brief that is hard to keep up with. I liked it for what it was worth, but in the long run this game made me wanting more background to the whole situation. Don't get me wrong if you plan to buy this game it is not a bad buy, but it really leaves something to the imagination.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 3, 2015

  This is less of a game a more of a short story. Spoilers ahead (Let me save you a few bucks): Essentially it's about the misadventures of a sexually depraved teen who thought she met a guy online who gave a damn about her. Turns out he didn't (big surprise) and just wanted to get in her pants. On a side note, the amount of time it took me to write this review is about the length of the "game". Worth a dollar maybe, as the overall acting was on par for what you could expect from real life interactions such as this, but do yourself a favor and do not waste your time and money on this short story.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 3, 2015

  This is a story driven game, and so it absolutely crashes and burns when the story doesn't hold up the game at all. The story is incredibly short, but less "short and sweet" and more "well, where's the rest of it?". It understays its welcome, and having such a short story means that the characters are not given time to grow at all. The relationship between the two main characters is the main focus, but the player isn't shown any of that development. Instead, the two characters talk, one of them delivering extremely creepy dialogue that wouldn't be out of place in a stalker movie, and then there's a time skip, and then another section starts and they're somehow magically closer to each other. The sudden transition from friends to "I love you" is jarring and really poorly paced. And speaking of which, the sections where most of the story is delivered is in an MMO within the game itself (gameception!). The main problem of this is that this segment is so incredibly poorly programmed. The pathing around is practically broken, which makes the "combat" frustrating when your character gets stuck on a piece of terrain. There's only ONE combat animation per character (and the character with an arm cannon doesn't use it to attack, but rolls up into a ball and glows instead?). This can be forgiven if the story being delivered was decent, but as stated above, it's not. These MMO segments quickly become a chore, since the story won't progress until certain markers are met. The three different MMO segments are basically just palette swaps of each other, and don't hold the player's attention at all. The game seems to rely entirely on the underwear cutscenes to draw attention and sales. The way it plays out, it seems like the developers wanted to make a short movie rather than a game, but decided a game would sell better. They say it takes 1.5 - 2 hours to complete, but I finished everything in 50 minutes. This game really would have benefitted a lot more from another hour or so of content, with more time to develop the characters. Instead, it immediately jumps out of the gate and falls flat right on its face. "Based on a true story" doesn't excuse the story and characters from being lifeless. There's no replay value, the story is just boring, the gameplay is frustrating to non-existent. I requested and got a refund. Definitely not worth the launch price of $7.64. Definitely not worth the full price of $8.99. Definitely not worth your time.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 3, 2015

  It pains me so much to have to give this a negative review. It's mostly meant as an encouragement to the writer and developers to do better next time, as they clearly have a lot of talent and inspiration and I will still support their originality and their much appreciated personal "touch". Anyway, bought, played, and finished Cibele yesterday, all in about 30 minutes. I don't mind short games, they are like short movies or short stories and I have an appreciation for all of that. But in this case, I must say I am quite disappointed. I *AM* the target audience for this kind of games, as I like stories, I like human exploration and I do not consider "emo" a bad word. So I hate that I have to give it a negative review, in fact I supported the project and the effort by buying it right away, but the end result is simply too shallow, simplihistic, and as a consequence of that it results inherently narcissistic, to carry any weight (it is important that you understand why I put "narcissistic" at the end of list, as it's the least problematic part). I did not dislike the game/story being told, and I appreciated the way Nina Freeman, the writer, chose to tell it. But after three very short jumps ahead in the timeline we are left with a conclusion that fails to convey much intensity by hurrying to a bare bones conclusion which almost reduces the two characters to a cliché. None of what happens in the story and none of the lines being said are out of place, and it is all very faithful to a reality that lots of us probably know first hand. But that's exactly why the characters, their emotional confusion, chaos, turmoil, insecurities, armours and all, deserved a bit more than what, when the end titles roll, feels like a High School project more than a College one (let alone a 10 dollars professional product). I am glad I played it. I don't hate it, and I enjoyed my time with it. But I was hoping for MUCH more. It probably reminds me a lot of my own old journals, and there's a reason why I don't sell them. (And please, do not think that any of the opinions so far expressed is based on the price tag. Everything I wrote in the first two paragraphs would stay true even if this were shared for free).
• gamedeal user

  Nov 4, 2015

  It could have been good but it is bad.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 4, 2015

  One of my favorite horror novels, Mark Danielewski's [i]House of Leaves[/i], begins with an unforgettable dedication: "This is not for you." This game may not be for you. However, if you spent your first years of college staying up until three in the morning chatting with online friends instead of going to parties, and if you have ever experienced friendship or love online, and especially if you have ever been a nineteen-year-old girl, this game is for you. In [i]Cibele[/i] you play as the MMO player Cibele (Nina in real life), an autobiographical version of the game developer herself, as she falls in love with another player, Ichi. Following in the tradition of other confessional genres, Nina Freeman uses her own old notebooks, fanart, chat logs, and, yes, lingerie-clad selfies to create a realistic history for her character. As a result, the haphazardly organized photographs, poem drafts, and archived personal websites on Nina's laptop could easily have been taken, with only minor changes, from my own computer when I was a teenage girl. That's when I took a deep breath and knew that I was really in for it. In the reviews I've been reading of [i]Cibele[/i] so far, there's a certain point where everyone begins talking about themselves and their own experience of love on the internet. When I was in high school, I met a girl whose name I now cannot even remember through Livejournal. We had so many nicknames and shorthands for each other that I know I won't think of her name until the end of this review. She lived in Baltimore, Maryland (or as she taught me to call it in a mockery of her accent, Murlan) and I lived in California. She was falling in love with me, and as a girl who had never thought about being anything other than straight, I was totally clueless about it. "ilu," we would sign off to one another on AIM as birds began chirping outside our windows. We saved our lunch money to buy phone cards and lost even more sleep. The months went by and she became increasingly jealous of the friendship I was developing "in real life" with the girl who would become one of my best friends, and I became increasingly aware that there was something going on under our jokingly explicit declarations of undying love, and everything slowly, gradually fell apart. It was a relief that we had never met face to face, and that I could simply ward off uncomfortable feelings with an AIM away message. In that relationship, I was Ichi. "What are we even doing?" Nina giggles at one point, as you float aimlessly together through the calming pastel world of Valtameri, killing enemies with little sense of purpose or direction, and talking in much the same way. What is it that we even do in these early internet friendships? [i]Cibele[/i] manages to capture some of that sense of endless time spent online, chatting with friends, keeping up with your PMs, writing bad poetry, the whole world ahead of you. Ichi isn't Nina's only online friend--we get a sense of her wider life in Valtameri, an ex who shared a private photo, a female friend missing out on their "girl only" boss runs. But he's the one who makes her giggle nervously, who encourages her to complain about her college friends taking her away from the game, who inspires her to have expensive underwear shipped to her dorm and pose awkwardly in front of the mirror. We know where this story is going, but [i]Cibele[/i], short as it is, won't let you flinch and miss any of it. Ichi (whose real name is Blake, we piece together after another between-act absence from Nina's computer, only to find it exploding with mentions of BlakeBlakeBlake) tells Nina multiple times that he isn't interested in a relationship, but she believes he'll change his mind once they meet "face to face." Nina's vulnerability is painful. At times you want to reach through your computer (her computer?) and tell her to get offline, to go out on a blind date, to go to a party, to just go to bed. But she is still learning, about relationships, about love, about female friendship, about who the self is that she wants to be. For Nina this is a moment of transition and pain as well as love and romance. Like some other reviewers, I felt that the story wrapped up rather quickly, ending right at the end of Nina and Blake's brief relationship. I really wanted to log on to Valtameri one more time, to feel that emptiness, to see more unanswered emails from Nina's classmates, to find Nina's folders reorganized, maybe with her photos of Blake buried out of sight with those of her family home and her high school grin. But perhaps the aftermath of the story is less interesting because all of us, Ninas and Blakes alike, know what comes next. Graduation, adult relationships, the fading of that magical online world. We can't go back to the [i]Cibele[/i] stories in our own lives, and we're probably all thankful for that. But with this game, for an hour or two, we can.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 4, 2015

  Interesting concept but very poorly executed. I get that some games prioritize telling a story over having enjoyable gameplay, but Cibele basically has none. The gameplay itself is just incredibly boring, and doesn't offer the player any substance. All it consists of is playing a fictional game where you click on enemies, and nothing more. It is excruciatingly boring. This game should have just been created in the form of a short video. The story itself is told via voice-overs and files on the player's computer. At first I thought the story would be somewhat interesting, but it is told in a terribly cringey way, which made it impossible to relate to the player character. Having the main character say "i always do my best to look anime ^_^", and yes that is a literal quote, is the easiest way I've ever seen to drive people away from a game. Not only is the method of storytelling executed quite poorly, but the story in itself is nothing to write home about. I found myself completely unable to care for the relationship between this Nina and her internet boyfriend.