A glorious day with over 80,000 players is followed by chaos: The gloomy Sims clone The Turnaround can no longer be bought. We tested it anyway.
The reason for this are reports that Nobody – The Turnaround apparently does not run on older Windows systems. (A solution is already in the works). But that doesn”t seem to be the only problem: With only 65 percent positive (Steam Reviews) a third of all players currently rate Nobody – The Turnaround negatively. What”s wrong? What is it failing at? Is the criticism even justified? We plunged into the Chinese urban jungle to find out just that for you
Table of Contents
Hour 1: What a survival hell!
The game starts with the campaign: 30 days. That”s all the time we have to pay back the 10,000 yuan in debt owed by our runaway father to dangerous loan sharks. If we miss the deadline, they”ll kidnap our sister.
Tired, depressed and desperate, the character drags himself into the shared room of a flophouse. Unfortunately, that”s all there was to it. The misery around him gives him the last laugh. Without our control, he goes outside, drinks away the last of his money and wakes up the next morning in the police drunk tank. 29 days to go.
Hour 2: Misery terrifies and fascinates
Every day it”s: Who wins, you or the city? The keys to success in Nobody – The Turnaround are organisation, discipline, curiosity and cleverness. With a constant eye on the clock and the money, you must always check and maintain your character”s mood, hunger and hygiene.
Whether you work as a construction worker, security or cook, the job can be completed manually as a mini-game (for bonuses) or with an automatic cutscene. But that”s not enough to break out of the hamster wheel and move up in society.
Therefore, it is advisable to explore and test out all options. For example, if you get on well with the scrap collector, you no longer have to pick up every piece of rubbish on the ground and get dirty, but can go straight to acting as her middleman, taking the other shops” high-value rubbish and then selling it on at a higher price. Or you can lend money to the site manager to befriend him and denounce the tyrannical supervisor to him …
Hour 3: The everyday drama grips
This cleverness of acquiring more and more knowledge and influence, of exhausting everything, is the great survival art with which even the most dangerous situations can be managed, such as this one: It is 8 pm and 120 dollars are still missing for the next payment to the loan shark.
Since there is no more work, we take the risk and throw a few notes into the gambling machine. Then we steal two more batteries from scooters (without getting caught) and sell them to the scrap collector.
The money is together, the loan shark is satisfied and there is even enough for a single room. Showered and motivated, our character can sleep peacefully that night. But then our sister shows up, with a stolen dowry of 20,000 yuan.
What do we do now? Do we give the money right back or do we want to use it as the basis for a business to multiply it? In these moments the game works brilliantly, in these moments the survival aspect kicks in, in these moments we think: Anything is possible because we are the only ones who know how.
Hour 4: Monotony strikes!
But as gripping as the campaign is in presenting all the highs of Nobody – The Turnaround, it also shows all its lows. What is particularly unfortunate is that once we have completed the campaign and finally earned the sandbox mode, exactly the same gameplay awaits us there without any surprises.
Challenge mode, on the other hand, adds a new level of difficulty. But once the basic principle is understood after three days of play, which corresponds to about three to four hours, the game is virtually played through.
Once the first hurdles are overcome and the money flows dutifully into the till, there is no more danger or challenge. What follows is boring monotony. For that, the game has too few sources of danger compared to This War of Mine and too few interaction possibilities for normal life compared to The Sims.
The character goes to work every day, improves his skills in his free time, sells a few things on the market – and since there is nothing more to do apart from that, no conversations, no quests and everything has already been explored anyway, we send him to sleep immediately. Especially since the leisure activities like balloon shooting or karaoke are all fun only the first time and only waste money afterwards.
And then it”s: next day, same procedure. Of course, the game holds out the end-game goal – to own a luxury penthouse as a restaurant owner at some point – as a tempting carrot, but that just means many more days of grind. Then the character goes to further training and answers two questions per day until he has to answer all the questions correctly again in the final exam in order to get his certificate. And for what? For another mini-game or another cutscene while working?
After 5 hours: What a wasted opportunity!
This futility and lack of fleshing out is felt in one situation in particular: Nobody gives us the opportunity to take a lot of money for the services of a prostitute.
They pull out, the screen goes black, there aren”t even any lewd noises, he reappears on the street and just says quietly, “That was nice.” Yeah, good for you. Okay, his mood has improved a bit, but we would have achieved a similar effect by spending the night in a stinking flat. Or balloon shooting. Or with dog petting.
The whole action feels completely pointless to us, just doesn”t matter. Maybe that”s what the game is trying to tell us. But if that”s what it wants, it should have put far more effort into it.
In the beginning, Nobody – The Turnaround seems insanely complex and alive. It seems as if at every street corner there could be a new encounter, a new challenge waiting, a new opportunity lurking to play even smarter.
But after the first few dialogues, which also don”t have much impact on the game, these random elements disappear completely and all potential fizzles out, leaving only a pretty scenery without interaction possibilities. One time there is idleness in the game, the other cluelessness.
For Nobody – The Turnaround has, for the most part, no tutorials or guides to help us with our plans or ideas. Thus, it is often not clear what is even possible and how it is possible. This often leads to frustrating trial-&-error attempts, which are punished by us having to repeat whole days because the game does not allow own saving.
It remains to be seen how developer U.Ground Game Studio will now proceed and when they will make the game available for sale again. In our version, only one of the three campaigns was playable, plus the sandbox and challenge modes. Currently, the game lacks not only features, but also complexity. Especially since the basic idea that each player could find his or her very own survival strategy is not noticeable at the moment and everything somehow comes down to the same thing. In the beginning it”s not This War of Mine, in the end it”s not The Sims.
Preliminary Score Box
Editorial conclusion
Even though I was very much looking forward to the survival simulation, I am somewhat disappointed. The big aha at the beginning of the game was followed by increasingly quiet okays as the game progressed. It may well be that Nobody – The Turnaround started its Early Access too early. Or maybe the developer is still holding back all the promising aspects – will there be more crime features at some point, for example?
That”s all in the stars, but what we have right now is a game that hints at more complexity and possibilities than it actually has. Every now and then I wished I”d discover something fresh or that something new would throw me off, but after just a few days of play I”ve already turned a survival sim into a tough economic sim. Too bad.
