I can't think of a nice way to say this, so I'm just going to say it. I played 1.1 for 5 minutes before closing the game and deleting it. Here are my observations from my brief time spent playing:
- The new character design is worse.
- The taller, lankier bodies aren't charming like the old ones and are starting to creep down the uncanny valley. I tried making a character that looked like the old design but it didn't look right.
- The flat faces just look wrong.
- None of the eyes looked appealing to me. The pupils were too small and I had no way to adjust them.
- Selecting a skin color preset didn't display its hex color value. This was annoying when I was trying to add a nose that wasn't meant to be a different color than the skin. There should probably be a toggle to make the nose color copy the skin color.
- I don't want my character to have a voice. I'm not sure if there was an option to not have one, but once I'd created a character with a voice I didn't see an option to get rid of it. I tried turning down the voice volume to 0, but this also turned down the burp volume to 0.
- The game still seems to be pretty resource intensive for something so visually simple. I can't fathom why it's 5gb or why I could hear my PC fans spinning up when I entered the apartment room (I'm on high-end, modern hardware).
- The 2d sprites for the NPCs (the tutorial girl/cashier) clash with the 3d style.
- Despite playing for such a short time, the game seemed buggy.
- The preview in the character creator kept randomly rotating and moving while I was interacting with the different options and sliders.
- Quickly changing the height of my character made the jiggle physics go nuts and stuff started clipping through each other.
- My character loaded in butt naked before all her clothes slowly loaded on one by one.
- All of the physics objects in the apartment still go nuts on load in, and a bunch of them end up knocked over.
- My character got bloated upon feeding her one single soda.
- The worst issue, which is consistent with previous versions, is the interface. I'm sure a few of the issues I mentioned wouldn't be issues if I could navigate the interface, but the interface feels unintuitive and unresponsive to the point where I wasn't willing to figure it out. Buttons and tabs for things are in places where they feel like they shouldn't be, and overall interaction with the interface makes it respond in ways that seem anachronous. I can't really break this down in a more meaningful and detailed way than this, as I don't have the background in interface design to do so, but an interface that works will go unnoticed and I noticed the one in this game a lot.
For all the work has gone into this version, much of that work has been directed towards things that either didn't matter or were fine as they were. The character design is a good example of this. I don't recall there being any meaningful complaints about the old character design, yet clearly a lot of time and effort went into changing it. Its been a point of criticism since it was first revealed on Twitter, thereby creating a problem out of something that wasn't before.
This seems like a the product of someone who's working entirely alone - that is, one working without meaningful input from one or two other people who they trust. I think many of the issues I encountered with this game could have been avoided if there was another person involved in development to give simple inputs like "this doesn't really need to be changed" or "this menu doesn't make a lot of sense".
For what it's worth, I'm leaving this comment here because I hope it will be read and considered, and because I care enough about this game to do so. Again, it's probably not the nicest way I could have said most of this, but I felt it needed to be said nonetheless.