Luca Le Fae has had it. His work as a author for Leviathan Games, one of many greatest sport builders on the planet, could pay properly, however it’s creatively unfulfilling. A fateful encounter along with his outdated acquaintance, Jey Zhang, at a celebration could present Luca with the escape he has been on the lookout for. Jey, a profitable music producer, remembers Luca as an unbelievable songwriter and asks him if he has any samples he might ship her. Suddenly the unthinkable, a single, an EP, even perhaps precise stardom, appears inside Luca’s grasp, however life tends to get in the best way even while you’re able to take the possibility of a lifetime.

We Are OFK could be described as a 3D visible novel or a mildly interactive five-part TV collection you simply occurred to purchase on Steam. The first two episodes can be found on launch day, with episodes three to 5 releasing weekly after the sport’s preliminary launch. Each one comes with its personal opening, which actually sells the sensation of catching a brand new episode of a miniseries every week. With every episode, you observe the story from a special band member’s standpoint, from their preliminary choice to be band-adjacent to taking their first wobbly steps in selling themselves as artists. Joining Luca on his journey are pianist Itsumi Saito, who works in social media administration at Leviathan, and Luca’s housemate Flores, an audio-visual results artist.

We Are OFK is commonly fully passive. You observe conversations and typically get to decide on a dialogue choice displayed as a personality’s ideas. It’s an attention-grabbing conversational strategy because it’s a lot nearer to how folks truly resolve what to say reasonably than the precise phrases displayed on the display, however it additionally means you may not precisely know what you’ll get when a personality opens their mouth. Not that it issues an excessive amount of, We Are OFK could be very clear about gamers being an viewers with no management over the story. There’s additionally loads of texting. Rather a lot of texting. Here too, you get to make alternative, however neither your texting selections nor your dialog selections have any bearing on the plot.

The dialogue and voice appearing, nevertheless, are robust all through, resulting in very natural-sounding conversations that drift from courting to work to a TV present one of many characters watched the opposite day. Sometimes they sound extra like youngsters than working professionals, injecting drama into conditions that on the face of it actually aren’t all that dramatic, and a few backstory that’s alluded to is so nebulous it went straight over my head. I suppose you needed to be there. I do recognize the Final Fantasy references, although.

We Are OFK is a biographical sport about an actual band, which turns the sport right into a type of cross-media expertise. Each episode incorporates an interactive music video, the music to which you’ll be able to truly purchase and stream. Various band members have been streaming on Twitch as their digital counterparts and arrange their character’s social media profiles.

Various band members have been streaming on Twitch as their digital counterparts and arrange their character’s social media profiles

The sport’s music movies which might be mildly interactive. The first episode’s video gave me excessive hopes that We Are OFK might change into a extra narrative-focused non secular successor to Sayonara Wild Hearts. But, sadly, the sport does not attain the these highs, and whether or not you truly work together with the music video or not doesn’t make an enormous distinction.

Despite not a lot interactivity, We Are OFK actually is aware of how one can inform a narrative visually. The vibrant environments and character designs are very memorable, and I took screenshot after screenshot of lovely digicam angles each in-game and throughout the music movies. Both omniboi’s soundtrack and the band’s songs – sung by the sport’s director and Luca’s voice actor Teddy Dief – are actually catchy. It’s a kind of synth-pop that basically suits the band and the sport’s total ambiance.

Since OFK are an actual band, and never one recounting the story of their meteoric rise to fame, the sport focuses predominantly on the enterprise of getting folks to note you and far much less concerning the act of creating music. You can watch Luca fret about deciding on the fitting demos, or attempt to community his approach by means of events, however these are arguably We Are OFK’s least attention-grabbing components. It’s additionally troublesome to hook up with the sport’s inherent L.A.-ness. Characters meet in hip bubble tea outlets or at golf equipment to speak store, and when assembly potential purchasers there’s speak of initiatives and non-disclosure agreements. This is a special world for a lot of, and it could be troublesome to hook up with when you don’t work in music or sport improvement.

We Are OFK is a sport concerning the irritating feeling of getting to decide on between your ardour, a gentle revenue, and about how the highway to success is paved with annoying dudes who wish to speak “vibes” and “synergies”. Issues like profession development are distinctly middle-class considerations, nevertheless, and typically OFK falls within the entice of sounding precisely just like the issues it supposedly makes enjoyable of: a set of Los Angeles hipsters whose greatest issues are their courting success charges and discovering good recording gear.

I ended up liking the sport finest when it talked about issues I recognised. Each band member has considerations that transcend the band – relationship issues, parental expectations, and the odd feeling of being as afraid of success as you’re of failure.

In its quiet moments, We Are OFK is a good looking and shifting examination of anxieties that felt very acquainted to me, questions like how lengthy you are going to keep associates with the folks you like, if there may be extra to life than work, or what it means to be good at one thing. As a inventive, I recognised myself in We Are OFK usually, however it is vitally a lot a sport that stands and falls with how a lot you possibly can establish your self with its characters and their particular person journeys. Most of us merely don’t know any music producers or firm CFOs. In order to inform these extra private tales, the sport would usually transfer away from the subject of music creation fully, particularly within the latter episodes, making We Are OFK sometimes really feel like a number of separate video games and tales mashed into one, or a TV collection with distinct filler episodes.

At this level, each within the sport and presumably in actual life, OFK doesn’t really feel like a ‘real’ achieved band. We Are OFK isn’t a conventional story that provides closure, which could be irritating, however in some ways that’s We Are OFK’s complete level – life occurs to you, whether or not you need it to or not.