You are a writer. At first, your job is a lonely one – writing books one by one, hoping to find a publisher and appeal to your target audience, breathlessly waiting for the reviews to come in, taking side jobs in a desperate attempt to make rent each month. But as your popularity grows – and you invest in your various skills – you can hire editors, create your own publishing house, research different genres and formats, and ultimately grow your very own publishing empire.
Plot Twist, developed and published by Sagittarius Fox, advertises itself as a cozy management simulator with a literary twist. As a die-hard lover of all things bookish AND all things cozy, I jumped at the opportunity to review this game…and, unfortunately, found myself incredibly disappointed.
At its heart, Plot Twist is a grindy clicker game wearing the glittering, lovingly decorated cover of one of those Enhanced Classics editions you see at stores like Barnes & Noble. You pick a book, you pick a genre, and then you furiously click on bubbles that pop up on your screen. The more bubbles you click, the better your book is… unless, of course, you click on too many bad “ink blot” bubbles of which, of course, there are many, with the number only increasing as the writing process continues.
Then, you publish your book, and it either does or doesn’t do well. You get some money, you get some XP, you invest in skills, eventually unlocking more formats and genres and the resources to hire editors and publish your own books. But even then it’s still just wash, rinse, repeat. Find a genre combination that does well with the public, and then make a million of that same book over and over again. Money is plentiful but XP is not, leading to frustrating bottlenecks where you are so ready to move on to the next stage of development but you just gotta keep clicking until you get those last dozens of XP you need.
Clicker games aren’t inherently bad, but Plot Twist isn’t a good one. The cursor is slow and laggy, something I experienced no matter how much I adjusted my mouse sensitivity. The ratio of ink blots to “good” bubbles is bad, and clicking on even one or two ink blots can absolutely tank a book’s reviews. And EVERYTHING is clicking. Writing a book? Clicking. Taking on a side job to earn more money? Clicking. There are a handful of mini-games that can occasionally pop up, such as a typing one where you enter a writing contest, but they are infrequent and do nothing to break up the monotony.
I wanted to like this game. I really did. And I can tell that the developer does want to make a good literary cozy game. The design of the room the player sits in to write and the music that plays throughout are lovely. You can title every single book, leading to some hilarity as reviewers are forced to give serious criticism to such masterpieces as “the lonely banana”, “i need more coffee”, “no more clicking please”, and “astarion’s perfect hair” (I decided that my author never used capitalization in their book titles. They’re just cool that way). The skill tree shows a clear knowledge and understanding of how the editorial and publication processes work. There’s so much good here – it just cannot make up for how simply bad the bad is.
The cozy aesthetic is there – but the gameplay just isn’t. I was bored out of my mind within fifteen minutes, and it only got worse as I persevered, hoping that things would get better and eventually realizing that that simply wasn’t going to happen. I was so disappointed by this game that I went to the store and bought myself some new books to cope, though, so I guess Plot Twist succeeded in one regard – even if that regard was “desperately wanting some real books instead of these digital clicking messes?” (the books I ended up buying were really good though).
There could be something good here. There really could. It’s just held back by the clicking to a degree that it makes me actively not want to play this game. Frantically clicking on bubbles with a laggy cursor just destroys any coziness that the game might otherwise have, and leaves me stressed out rather than relaxed. I have hope that the developer may hear player feedback and de-emphasize the clicking in favor of a more cozy experience. For now, it’s too grindy and repetitive to be a good management sim, too frantic to be a cozy game, and requires too much in-person clicking to be an effective idle game. I cannot recommend Plot Twist as it currently stands, but hope to see improvements made in the future, because a really solid, really cozy literary-themed game would be a dream come true for me.
Kate played Plot Twist on PC via Steam using a provided review copy.
