They seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth the moment people started criticizing them, despite their "we don't care about the criticism" stance. It's a shame though, as it sounds like if they cleaned it up a bit, it'd be an awesome graphical text adventure.

I thought about about buying this I admit, the website is quite professional and I like text adventures like Zork.

So the general conclusion is that it's shit?

Well that's just terrific... maybe theyre patching Cypher or something like that?
I hope

I don't have it but people are saying both the text parser and the English transcript seem to not recognize common trappings of the English language, so to speak.

But apparently everything else is great. It's just that it's a text adventure, so the parser is a critical part of playability.

I have no idea. :/

I see.

Then the developer should just hire a professional translator, someone who an English native speaker, to retranslate or at least clean up the existing translation, from whatever language it was translated from.

Bad publicity is basically a death sentence for niche indie devs

The real shame in it is how on the outside, they appear to have just given up after the first patch.

If you want to run a business, it doesn't matter how small the communication is, you should always set aside 5-10 minutes at least once a week to communicate. Everyone has at least that much time, even if it means cutting 5-10 minutes into sleep. And that's something a lot of companies, big and small, seem to not get these days.

It's not shit. Far from it, in fact. The artwork, the aesthetic, the packaging of the traditional idea of the text adventure...all of it is really, really, really good. Yet, as cases like the original PC release of Rage have shown us, packaging and promises are all well and good – but if the actual underlying core elements of your gameplay are technically broken, then there's no real point, is there?

Right now, things unfortunately don't look good for them. There's been little to no official communication from them outside of their posts to places like RPS blog comments, and GOG after their first wave of publicity. AFAIK, the text parser and the English translation are still seriously broken (even though the English translation is less broken than before). As I noted on another thread, there seems to be some indication on their support forum that they don't even think that their parser is broken at all. All in all, I find it deeply insulting.

I wouldn't call it shit, not yet at least. If there hasn't been an appreciable improvement in the state of the game (or at least some comment about it from the devs) by the end of the year, then I'd be ready to pronounce it dead, and move on.

I'll keep an eye on this. =/

To be honest, the thing that bothered me the most was their reaction to criticism: They acted like any criticism, legitimate or not, was some sort of insane personal attack with no real merit (" Carlos is on the roof with his shotgun right now trying to keep the angry mob at distance but I don’t know how much longer he can– oops, sorry gotta run."). As someone who highly values interaction with developers, this is really grating to me.

Hi!

We just ran a promotion this week: win a free copy of CYPHER.

http://www.cabrerabrothers.com/cyberpunk/

You guys can participate if you want! ;-) LOL, just because we didn't posted on RPS or GOG doesn't mean we vanished! You guys... hahaha ;-) Okay, here's the long response:

The game has been a HUGE hit on france, spain, russia, etc. We had to work with these communities too, not just two sites, although we came here and posted a two weeks ago. We had official communications through our own channel at http://news.cabrerabrothers.com , the mailing list you can subscribe on the web site, the mailing list you get subscribed when you buy the game, twitter, facebook and several blogs and magazines (outside RPS and GOG). Things look GREAT for us right now, we put a game out there, people is buying it, there has been tons of youtube let's play over the last two weeks and the players response is just amazing.

We spent a lot of time improving the game through: we patched it twice (that's since it launched) and there is another patch coming out this week with some more improvements. The parser we are improving just a bit (tiny bit), but it will be mainly the same parser so if you think it won't be fun to play like it is for you because either you're an old school text adventure player (although we have a good bunch of these playing the game without complaints) or you are just too used to play with the inform or infocom parser, then it may be best for you to move on and find something else. There are a bunch (literally hundreds) of free inform games out there and the inform parser is the BEST there is. You can't go wrong with these. I just played a game a CYPHER fan made just a couple of hours ago and I had a blast. Here's the link:

http://www.textadventures.co.uk/review/495/

You won't be playing CYPHER though, but that's a personal decision everyone should make. There is just so many potential on text adventures and authors around these sites I can't even start thinking what the future will hold for us IF players. We can only hope other dev can make more modern text adventures with graphics and sounds and a lot of things that just work on a IF environment.

With CYPHER, we managed to steer a lot of new players (I'm talking about guys who played Call of Duty, Counter Strike, LA Noire) into playing text adventures; there has been reports of people moving into other IF games and even trying to come up with their own which is just amazing!

A guy (smart, clever guy) even made a plugin for CYPHER to export his savegames and be able to play your CYPHER game on other machines and shared it with the community. So now if you have a 1.5hs trip to work, guess what you can do? And you can pick up your game right where you left it at home. That is what we were hoping to see, people getting in there and getting excited with the genre. This guy could be doing a counter strike mod or something else, but he chose to go with CYPHER and after that, text adventures in general because he got really excited about the whole thing.

If we can make a new guy/gal play text adventures, and he or she wants more after that, then its mission accomplished.

Like I said, there are a bunch of Lets Play video online now, and reviews too, so you guys can check these out and see what the game looks like if you are still unsure. If not, there's always another game to play. ;-)

I will be checking this forum from now and then but the posts will be made in our official forum and the news.cabrerabrothers.com site for those who want to keep up.


Cheers.

Glad to hear you guys are still working on it, but from what I'm hearing, if the parser doesn't change, it probably won't be an enjoyable experience.

I'm really interested in the game, but I just can't support paying for a fundamentally broken game that the developer has already stated they probably won't fix.

Given how awesome it sounds, though, I'd more than be willing to give it a shot for free, so I think I'll enter that contest.

I'm cheap, and I have an English / Spanish translation degree, guys. >_>;

Glad to hear you'll enter the contest! ;-) The game isn't broken though, the parser works, it just isn't inform or TADS parser, is a custom built parser. We'll appreciate if you guys could stop saying things like "the game is broken" or "its a broken game" since that isn't true and may scare other people from trying the game. Just because the parser its not a regular inform parser but a custom built one it doesn't mean the game "doesn't work" or gets frustrating to play. For most people (and I'm talking about 95% of our players here, who never even heard about text adventures or inform parser) the parser is just right, and if it leads them into playing other text adventures because they dig the idea well, then it's mission accomplished.

That said, we thank you for your support and we are thinking about doing other promotions before the year is over ;-) so keep an eye on us!

Cheers!

We never got an email from you mate, are you sure you sent it to the right address?

i'm pretty sure, but i'll send it again now
support@cabrerabrothers.com right?