Before getting started, while I do try to keep an open mind and be patient with titles, I’ll admit that the nature of supporting this site, and simply having a bit of ADHD, can make that a challenge. Typically if you’ve failed to get me hooked, or throw me a bone, to help me care within the first half hour of play, I’ll struggle to keep going, and my reviews and scores tend to reflect that mentality. There’s an eShop with likely over 10,000 games on it at this point, all vying for your attention. If you can’t make a concrete case for why I should keep playing yours, and not one of the others out there, within 30 minutes or so, I believe you’ve made a grave error. As you may have guessed you can count Terminal 81 as a title that did itself no favors to satisfy that test.

You’ll play as Lorena, trying to help make ends meet for her family by taking a job at a supermarket that happens to be located in an area called Terminal 81. As you can guess, it isn’t the best or safest place to be, especially as a young woman, but it takes a little while for that to fully settle in. First you’ll just have to wander around your mostly-empty apartment, then the mostly-empty and dark city, finally stumbling onto where you’re supposed to be working. Then you can spend some time toiling away as a cashier and janitor in the supermarket, before finally encountering some people who’ll help get the actual game moving.

I suppose I can appreciate there not being a lot of meat on the narrative bone here, so there’s a need to take time to establish the place, time, and mood before getting things rolling, but the minutes could not have dragged along more slowly waiting for anything of interest to happen. As I’ve mentioned in a previous review one of my commandments of game reviewing is “Thou Shalt Not Waste My Time” and unfortunately the up-front investment of wasted time feels both unavoidable and pointless, having you engage in busy work to help add some run time doing things that are pretty irrelevant to the overall narrative. Perhaps if you’re patient enough to sit idle and wait to dig into some characters and nefarious events the game will work for you, but this feels like something you could easily get everything relevant out of from a 30 minute YouTube video rather than drawing it out with filler.