About This Game Zarya - 1 is a survival text based quest with elements of science fiction, horror, and occasional humor. In this game you will be able to alter the story by making choices, creating your very own adventure.If you liked Alien, Dead Space and Lifeline - you'll love this.THE STORY. In 2021 humankind received a distress signal from the far side of the Moon, and immediately sent four brave people to investigate its source. You will be monitoring the astronauts and make decisions that will directly impact the story and the characters. Each choice may lead you closer to - or farther from - the truth.FEATURESMind-shattering atmosphere, a mix of sci-fi and horror in the veins of Alien and Prometheus, spiced up with the occasional jokeCommunicate with the astronauts in real timeInfluence the story by making your own decisionsThere are multiple endings, including happy ones :)You can rewind the story and make another choice if the mission ends in a disasterWhat separates this game from other text quests like Lifeline, are the awesome photos that the team sends your way while exploring the source of the signal a09c17d780 Title: Zarya-1: Mystery on the MoonGenre: Adventure, IndieDeveloper:Your Story InteractivePublisher:Plug In DigitalRelease Date: 30 May, 2017 Zarya-1: Mystery On The Moon Cheat Code For Ps3 A brilliant game!Amazing story and writing!I love the pictures which are received through the story.The game would be event better with achievements and cards though.. Awesome Sci-FI text adventure, the story is really well written totally worth the small price. Minor spoilers, nothing that will give to much awayFor a text based game it manages to pull off a sense of tension, dread and urgency. The story is interesting all the way through. there are tonnes of endings, and you have a good amount of control over what the characters do, although once or twice they ignored my orders and sometimes i wished for more options. over all though there is a good amount of meaningful choices to make. there are 10 chapters (if you get the good ending) and 7 if you end up "elsewhere" i guess they ran out of time or something because i would have loved to see more branches from that area. I really wish we got to see what was on the hard drive you can recover (you can't to my knowledge) and it gets really tedious replaying sections of the story to find all the endings, something that really bugged me after a while... I wish some character motives were a bit clearer and also for a better understanding of what was happening in the soviet base. However, The game has a pretty good story that kept me hooked and the graphical style, even though it is mainly just text was really good, you should give your artist a raise. maybe you could add more branches and spend some more time with Sarge? also fix his graphic for the finial chapter, witch seems to be replaced with Bones' for some reason. Really enjoyed it. worth the $4. I'm pretty sure I've gone through and found all possible choices and endings for this game so I feel relatively certain I can give a proper review on the game. My feelings are somewhat mixed, there was clearly potential but a lot of bad decisions dragged the game down for me. The short of it: Good atmosphere, amusing characters, decent horror, very short story, bad monster, mechanics undermine the horror and the mystery aspects of the game, very bad and time wasting mechanics to fast-forward already visited sections.Now the long version: I'll try and keep this spoiler free, but I may have to give away some minor plot points, nothing really important though. I'll start with the major gripe I have with the game: the lack of fast-forwarding through conversations you've already covered. Sure, technically there is a mechanic to fast forward, if you like clicking like a madman on your mouse to rapidly skip through the text. The problem is that the image load screens can't be fast-forwarded, nor can certain fixed "load" screens which always appear despite them not really loading anything other than text! You can't even save manually so you can replay a specific choice you made. Instead you have rapidly mouse click your way through the section from the save designers decided to put in for you until you reach it and hope to all that is holy you don't accidently press the wrong choice again. This all creates a lot of unnecessary padding. Especially since there already exists a conventional method to fast forward through conversations that is far more practical and used by all other VNs!Whilst there are multiple death endings, there is only one categorically good ending and another somewhat good ending. If you found the good ending, then congrats that's the only way you can save your teammates, every other path leads to the death of all your teammates or the death of some of them. The good ending probably also the least informative route to take, since you are not given any information as to what the scientists back home found on the plot item that you take back to earth. The somewhat good ending will always occur if you don\u2019t die, even if you realise beforehand the major trick the game is trying to pull on you. There is no way to point it out and attempt to resolve the issue unless you follow the good ending path, and that's only because another character realises the truth and tells you something is up. It doesn\u2019t even make sense for your character in game to have not picked up on it, unless the organisation you work for only puts fools in charge of delicate operations. This leads to the next issue, your choices usually end up being binary (either option will funnel you down to two non-death endings, or lead to the death of all your team members) or being able to choose between several options, all of which result in a slightly different flavour of the same outcome. This means the game is very short, and not very content rich since no matter your choices, you will be railroaded down one of two paths.Now this would all be fine if they kept to core of what the genre of the game: mystery horror. Since this is a mystery game you would expect to be able to have bit more control over your teammates, maybe be able to ask them to look at specific items, take photos, ask a team with you back on earth to help analyse certain pieces of information. Instead, it's completely in your astronaut\u2019s hands as to when they decide to take the photos for you or describe to you what's going. Occasionally, you get the option to ask for a photo or be able to ask them to look around some more, but only when the designers decide it would be appropriate. Your teammates will even completely forget to mention side-paths that you use to reach the same room from during a different playthrough, all in the name of funnelling you down the two non-death endings of the game. This kills the investigative side of the story in my opinion, as it allows the designers to obfuscate aspects of the plot so a tinge of mystery remains as to what happened at the site of the anomaly. But did they at least do the horror right? Well, the atmosphere is quite creepy and well executed in my opinion, so no faults there. The major problem with the horror is the "monster", which interacts in a far more lethal manner with your team compared to how it acted with humans prior to your teams\u2019 arrival. It just blatantly tries to kill your team for no reason that I can gather other than that's what the designers decided monsters should do. It even inexplicably appears at moments when I know for sure it definitely shouldn't and couldn't due to the layout of the site of the site. Very disappointing. Now some of the good aspects: the horror is alright, the writing is decent, and the atmosphere is quite well executed. The characters are strangely eccentric and comically unprofessional for a supposedly professional first contact team. This however results in some light comedy to brighten the mood now and then, so I can\u2019t completely fault the designers for going this route. All in all, a very rough game. The price is low, so as long as you don't expect much I would say go ahead and buy it. But if you have even the smallest of doubts, then don't waste your time.. Zarya-1 is a "choose your own adventure" style story, but the interactive elements are very rare, quite limited, and -- which is the worst aspect -- the game is full of unnecessary and unskippable mechanics which only wastes your time and contribute nothing.The story is about a small team of explorers\/soldiers who are conducting an investigation on the Moon. You can read the conversation between the team members, and -- as being the commander who remotely oversees your team -- very rarely get to pick one of 2 (and a few times, 3) possible choices as response or command. Occasionally your team sends you a photograph -- though it's not very clear why they aren't broadcasting video, given that the story happens in the future --, which always arrives in low resolution and it's slowly enhanced which process takes about 20 seconds... and it's unskippable... and it's the same chore with every single image. Good thing after an hour of playing... I'm sorry, I meant to write: spending time... with Zarya-1, I have only received 10 image, but after the 3rd one I felt my will to live draining away while I waited watching the same, boring "image enhancement" effect.I understand that this interactive story was designed that you're expected to rewind the events if your team is stuck, so you can select other choices and see where those would take you. This mechanics is a lot like in Steve Jackson's Sorcery! series, except here you can rewind only to specific "save points", and until you arrive to the point where you can make the next decision, you'll have to re-read the conversation you're already familiar with -- but, again, it's unskippable, so it becomes a chore very quickly and kills the mood.Now and then, when the team is about to do something which takes some time, a countdown is started, and unless you press a "skip" button, you'll sit there, watching the numbers on your computer screen for minutes (maybe even for hours), and it won't make any difference at all, even though there's a button with which you can request an update from your team, but their response will always be something like "we're busy."Because of all these very annoying and purposeless time wasters I cannot recommend Zarya-1, albeit the story and the characters seem interesting, the sound effects and the music is adequate, and the visuals are nice. If the developers allowed to skip conversations which have already been seen, and got rid of the mandatory "image enhancements" and countdowns, I'd have arrived to a different verdict without a doubt. Of course, should an update arrive which fixes these issue, I'll change my review accordingly.Addendum: so it looks like all these time wasters are actually delaying mechanisms for the ad-supported mobile builds, where players could only fast-forward time (at countdowns I've mentioned) and remove the ads if they've paid for the game. Dear developers, I think you should have completely removed these annoyances and enabled the "skip the talk" code which allows skipping already seen dialogues (at least I've found the messages for these in the strings.json file at indexes 197--199) in the Steam build, since you've obviously spent a great deal of effort to design and create this otherwise nice interactive adventure and it's a shame that the game experience is ruined by this oversight. Please try a bit harder next time!. I have been surprised by this game, to be honest. I have not played anything like this before, very inventive and thrilling way to make a horror game. (Even though I think this may not be the first text based horror game) The writing is great, scary and entertaining and it makes everything a lot better that you can interact sometimes. The crew is believeable and interesting, the story is as spooky as it should be. The only, but not so small negative is that when failing the mission, you can only rewind the story to certain points and you will have to rewatch a lot of conversations, just so you can make a different decision later. A great thing on the other hand is, that you can't get the whole story from one playthrough and you will have to do a lot of the endings to get a full picture at what was happening, even if your crew must die. All in all the game is great, but the time jumping should be reworked even now. They might add a few achievments as well, it would make the game more fun.I wish to see more from the developers, they did a great job!Also the game is available on phone, where it is cheaper for some reason!. I like it. Kinda like playing a text adventure with limited still image graphics on a C64. I would say that this is for once a game where I actually want to find all possible endings, and find the truth of what's going on.. Originally played the free version on phone but I bought it here so I can support the developers of this great gameZarya-1 is a different take on horror\/thriller game than these run & hide games.You're not taking control over some random speechless person, you take over 4 people with different personalities and pasts indirectly, sitting in front of a computer and listening (reading, in this case) to your crew talking to you. You cannot see what your crew sees, so you have to depend on their describing of certain locations. Sometimes you will receive camera pictures of one of your crewmates, but other than that. You see nothing.It's like telltale games except all you can do is depend on your choices and your crew drastically, because it will have an extreme value in life of death.The game is set place on moon, where nobody will hear your plead for help, the place where nobody will come to help you.Lateron its set on the Research Site Zarya-1 (Dawn-One), an old 1988 Soviet Site sending an unknown signal to earth which you have to investigate the unexpected.Even if its not "view-through-the-heroes-eyes" game, you will still feel thrilled upon your discoveries. Perhaps imagining them if they really happened, or what happened to those who you encounter. But I can't tell you for sure, you will have to see it for yourself. It's worth it. If you have failed and resulted in your crew's death , try again! Since you'd understand what you did wrong, doing something else will bring completely new results! The game is almost fully explorable even if youre not behind the astronaut's eyes.The soundtrack really does match the theme and feelings you will feel upon discoveries or certain events, or even ambience.So, i'd totally recommend this game to you if you like storytelling soviet-related thriller stories.
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