/vr/ - Retro Games

Not even a little. It's a great first draft, but there are a lot of little design decisions that are baffling and should have been either iterated upon in a sequel or questioned during beta testing.

The children and the A-Life system are utterly pointless in the final game as released. Why go to the bother of programming an explorable 3D environment with a rich artificial life element when the game itself actively dissuades you from exploring it due to the alarm clock mechanic? It doesn't matter how lush the environments are or how deep the nightopian breeding system is if you're never given any chance to explore it. Being able to disable the alarm clock after finishing the stage as NiGHTS would at least afford the opportunity to explore. Maybe the children would have to find some form of boss key and bring it back to NiGHTS to finish the stage.