YIIK: A Postmodern RPG

YiiK is a sleep paralysis demon, and it doesn't go away when I wake up.

This game has contempt for its player. It gives away the entire plot within the first hour, if only to prove to itself that the player would completely overlook it. That indictment extends to the protagonist Alex, who's meant to be a stand-in for the player (the game literally describes him as "he's just like you!"). Several vital plot points reveal around him being either illiterate or ignorant to the point of absurdity.
At one point, you're tasked with recovering an LP record that's central to the entire plot, but your character fails to read the record sleeve, revealing that the musician was a member of your party who inexplicably refused to accompany you to search for the record. The devs are clearly communicating how they feel about you through this character.
At the same time, this protagonist is someone who on the surface should be welcomed by the game devs. Alex is a massive fan of the devs first game, Two Brothers, he namedrops one of the lead developers as his favorite musician, he even draws his inspiration to prevail over the final antagonist from a dream sequence involving Two Brothers. But all of Alex's friends hate him. They mock him and chastise him constantly. His arms are always crossed. His ambitions are selfish and oftentimes hurt his friends. He's emotionally disconnected and manipulates others. His entire quest was an excuse to avoid helping his mom when she needed him most.
This game was a passion project for the devs, who programmed the game beside their mother's death bed. During loading screens, the game will display satirical tips telling you to bathe regularly, make sure you have clean food and water for your family, and above all else: Video games are not a waste of time. Then they turn around and put you in situations that seem to exist purely to waste your time. The aforementioned quest to locate the LP record turns out to "be a waste" of time because you never find the LP record despite travelling to several cities, acquiring multiple party members, completing side quests, and expanding the playable world.
It forces you to re-evaluate whether the time you spent playing that section would have been better spent had you actually found the LP record. The common response is yes, it did waste my time, but the game has a prompt response to that notion. Alex immediately expresses regret to your new party members for wasting their time, but they completely ignore your assessment. They're more concerned with the detail you glossed over about a stray party member named Rory, whose sister committed suicide in the previous chapter. Your character never bothered to tell them, and gets actively irritated that they stop focusing on the LP record once they find out.
This is you. You're so concerned about the destination that you won't enjoy the journey. The game expects you to gloss over its true content based on your preconceptions as to what's "rewarding" in a video game. There's a mechanic whereby you get bombarded by Mimics if you open too many chests for loot, the game literally admonishing you for being greedy. It's so on the nose, and all the while so over your head.

YIIK has a lot of problems. possibly more problems than.. not problems, i guess? i just want to start off my review with that. the recommendation for this isn't a "this game is perfect" kind of recommendation, but is a "this game is interesting enough in various ways that i think it's worth experiencing" recommendation.
so, let's try and talk about YIIK. i am gonna start with positives to slightly offset the many reviews of this game that regurgitate the same negative points. first of all, though i don't love that YIIK proudly calls itself "A Postmodern RPG" right in the title, i DO appreciate a game that explores metaphysical and postmodern themes. i'm not going to say it always nails it as well as it could, but honestly it is an area where i appreciate the effort. sometimes it tries a bit too hard, and sometimes it just feels weird for weird's sake, but sometimes i think YIIK actually manages to pull off some pretty fun stuff with its writing and themes.
this is good, because... most of this game is, well, writing. there are long stretches of YIIK where you essentially do nothing but talk to people, and i'm personally more than ok with this. a lot of my favorite games revolve pretty heavily around just talking to characters. several characters actually end up being fairly interesting, one of the more noteworthy examples being Vella, who succeeds at being a lot more compelling than i would have expected. i also found chondra pretty interesting, but unfortunately, she has late-game character syndrome where she does not get as much time to shine.
unfortunately, a lot of other characters are kind of weak. michael basically disappears into the background of the game after the first few hours and says basically nothing until the final act, claudio has some depth but is often a pretty one-note joke about anime fandom, and rory ALSO sort of disappears into the background after a certain point. i think a lot of these characters have a good start, but they never really manage to capitalize on what could have been.
i think a part of the problem is that there's a really inordinate amount of focus given to unimportant things, which isn't a bad thing by default, but it feels like it was time that could have been spent with the characters you actually spend the whole game with. at one point, a character who appears in one scene delivers a fully voice acted monologue about how metal music is cool, and also about this cool tea that he has. this scene lasts about twenty minutes, has nothing to do with anything (i even tried to think about the contents of it in a metaphorical way and... couldn't come up with any explanation) and i ultimately would have rather had claudio talk to me about himself or something for that time period. this is a thing that happens unfortunately often, characters will often go on unimportant tangents that would be fun if i actually -knew- them, but ultimately i just don't know them.
speaking of tangents, no YIIK review is complete without talking about alex, the game's protagonist. alex is a prick. a lot of reviews treat this like an inherently bad thing, and i think that's dumb. having a main character who is kind of a dipshit is not a bad thing, there are plenty of books and films and games that revolve around this, and YIIK does too. ultimately, alex's pricky-ness is also pretty important to the plot as a whole, so it isn't like it's some unintentional oopsie the devs made or something.
where i think the problem arises is that characters are often way too quick to forgive alex. he will say something horrifically shitty, then 30 minutes later the character he said it to forgives him, or even acts as if they were being unreasonable by being upset by it. it's sort of irritating playing a character who is not especially likeable, and having that be a point of the plot, but also having other characters seemingly accept his shittiness as something that is acceptable at every turn. i also found alex to be pretty unrelatable, personally. a flawed protagonist is a lot easier to deal with if the viewer can see themselves in that character to a degree, but i felt that alex's shittiness was so turned up to 11 so often that it was sort of alien to me in some spots.
one of the most notable examples of that is, of course, his monologues. alex really likes to turn to the camera and monologue for long periods of time. i get the point of this, alex is kind of a prententious dude who thinks he's a lot smarter than he is. however... it still... kinda... fucks with the pacing of the game... a lot. there will often be an actually fairly well written, intense moment, and then all tension is dissolved as alex screams "WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING!" at someone and then monologues at the camera to explain what just happened for ten minutes. again, this is frustrating because YIIK -can- build an interesting moment, but it just seems to love deflating itself.
now, we must talk about YIIK's combat. it starts off as something that comes across as kind of cute and fun. all moves make you play some kind of minigame, cool! then twenty hours in, you are still playing these minigames, and they've become exhausting, and every fight takes over ten minutes because they're so slow. it's frustrating because, like parts of the story, it's a cool IDEA, and there's definitely potential there, but it's just executed ever-so-slightly off in a way that makes it a huge drag to play. it is worth noting that the devs have taken notice of complaints about this, and there is apparently going to be a combat overhaul some time this year, so that's nice. if they change stuff up, i will update this little bit because i would love for YIIK's combat to be good. unfortunately though, as it stands, the best way to enjoy it is to use the LP Toss ability often because it is weird and broken and gets more and more powerful every time you use it until by the end of the game this one ability does literally 100x the damage of every other attack in the game.
i also found about half of the puzzles in YIIK's dungeons to be pretty neat, and the other half to be either lacking or downright frustrating. YIIK tries to appeal to nostalgia sometimes, so i don't know if they were trying to make a fun reference to the era of game where RPGs often had bizarre tasks you need a walkthrough to know to do in them or what, but there was some really bizzaro stuff that is not at all self-explanitory. again, though, it's not that EVERY puzzle is bad, it's just... some of them are REAL bad.
overall, i think YIIK is worth experiencing both for what it does right and for what it does wrong. i, at the very least, felt engaged enough to play through the whole thing, even if i didn't like, 100% it or anything. there are some really interesting ideas here, even if a lot of the time the execution gets fumbled. but in a way, the fumbled execution of these ideas is interesting, too. i think YIIK would be worth a wholehearted recommendation if its pacing was a bit better, if it gave its characters more time to shine, if the plot didn't get as wrapped up in itself as it does, and if the combat was just... better, in general. but as it stands right now, i still think it's worth a look, even if it's a skeptical one. you might find something you really like in here, if you don't go in ready to repeat the same kind of off-base complaints everybody seems to have about it.

I liked this game. Don't play it.