Fictif: Interactive Romance

UPDATE: the company replied to my review and said the app is being maintained as-is, but that’s entirely my point: the stories that aren’t finished will never BE finished, they seem to have no plans to tackle them other than to keep what’s there available which is SORT of laudable if you consider that despite the fact that the unfinished stories will never be finished, the company that bought the content and app are perfectly happy leaving the in-app store open. anyone downloading this app should be warned in advance so they don’t spend money they can’t get back for incomplete stories that will never be completed. that was the purpose of my review. do not buy anything. there is no point. enjoy it for what it is. the app still works of course, and there are some finished stories on here that are worth reading, but anything that hasn’t been finished isn’t going to be finished, which is sad. i have no idea why they bother to update the app for compatibility instead of just migrating all the finished stories over to the dorian app, which is the company that now owns fictif. sure, i prefer the formatting of this app to dorian, but what’s the point when it’s totally stagnant?

I used to love Fictif. Unfortunately, I got into it too late. It’s been a little under a year since Dorian has decided not to update The Arcana OR Fictif with any new content, and it shows just how little they care about either. With the Arcana it’s not as big of a deal since the main stories are over— but Dorian only cares about the Arcana in order to promote their own app. Fictif doesn’t get those annoying pop ups that the Arcana app does alerting to every new fanfiction written on the dorian app, nor does it have the community tab, but that’s both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it means Fictif has remained completely untouched from the days it was still owned by Nix Hydra, where we were actually getting content and these stories were actually owned and written by people who CARE about them, instead of just trying to profit off of fans while putting in little to no work to actually provide fans with any content. However, Fictif being untouched also shows just how little Dorian cares about these stories. The Arcana, at least, is profitable to them. It’s less risk due to being an entirely finished story, and has a bigger fanbase to appeal to. Out of the three Dorian properties on the App Store, (the arcana, Fictif, and the dorian app itself) the Arcana has the highest rating— and it’s well deserved, I think, as both a fan of The Arcana and Fictif. However a lot of the recent reviews are praising DORIAN for The Arcana, when they didn’t actually put any of the work in to make it the COMPLETE story we know and love. Then, notice the majority of the recent reviews and complaints for Fictif— that there are no updates. And then look at every single response! It’s all Dorian urging people to move to the Dorian app if they want more content. Even in the update logs, it’s been eight months since Dorian has last updated Fictif. Heck, even look at social media. The Arcana’s socials are being used almost exclusively either as promotion for things happening on Dorian or sales (whether they be merchandise or on the app) whereas Fictif’s socials have remained untouched for months. They’ve even removed the Fictif tags from the Arcana socials’ bios, which seems SO MINISCULE— but it shows that they don’t care about whether or not attention goes to Fictif, otherwise they’d put those tags back in to draw attention to them from their bigger, related fanbase, The Arcana. Dorian DOES NOT CARE about Fictif. Whatever automated response they’re going to give doesn’t make that untrue. Edit because Dorian responded about “preserving Fictif” and how Fictif stopped updating under Nix Hydra, how the Arcana’s storyline was finished in 2021 etc. etc. blah blah blah. I’m MORE than aware of that. I acknowledge both those things— in fact, I clearly state the latter as a reason why you people only care about the Arcana. Because you think it’s “safe” to work on. You’re not taking chances with a finished storyline. You claim you’re working to preserve Fictif as well, but then why do the update and version logs claim that the last update for the app at ALL—and I’m not just talking about stories, but bug fixes or ANYTHING else—was eight months ago? What was the purpose of removing any trace of Fictif from the Arcana’s socials? The purpose of not making Fictif an account on Threads, when you’ve made one for its sister app? This review was about how you don’t care about Fictif, and how you only care about the Arcana because you see it as “safe” to experiment with. That’s proven even in your response— you only talk about “fostering growth within the Arcana community”. Nothing about Fictif, which DESPERATELY needs more work and whose community is worse off and deader than the Arcana’s, largely because you’ve given us NOTHING to work with. I said that whatever automated response you’d give wouldn’t change that you don’t care about Fictif— and the automated response that you DID give proves that perfectly. Thank you for proving my point. Update: Feb 2025 So that initial review and following edit was made in October of 2023. The “update for compatibility with modern devices” was made shortly afterwards. Since then there has been no update on Fictif (bug fixes or the like) and after scrolling the Fictif subreddit, I believe that Dorian also never finished porting over Fictif’s content and sprites to their app (if they ever bothered at all). The Fictif accounts remain untouched, and Fictif remains unacknowledged by both official The Arcana and Dorian accounts. But tell me again about how you care SO much about this property and these stories, right? I would still fully encourage people to interact with Fictif and play through the stories, but that’s because I love the stories and the worlds that Fictif gave us. It has NOTHING to do with Dorian, because god knows they’ve given the community absolutely nothing to work with. But who knows. Maybe if people play, Dorian will finally try to give Fictif some attention and feed what little of us are still here.

i used to love this game and check daily for updates of my favorite stories. but it has been years and there have still been ZERO updates. they claim they're still "maintaining the fictif stories" but until they actually follow through on their word theres no way im giving above one star. if you're not keen on reading a story that likely will never be finished do NOT download fictif.

Hey used to love this game please update this and the arcana 😔. I do NOT wanna play durion or whatever it’s called

dorian bought out nix hydra and ever since then, none of the stories have been updated. it's so disappointing to see so many amazing stories and characters essentially go to waste because of what feels like corporate greed. this is a warning to anyone wanting to download!! stories have been left unfinished and will likely never be finished. 💔

so like, um, the endings please🥺??

In 2022, the Fictif instagram account said that they planned on updating the stories after a hiatus. Two years later with no word from the company and 11 months since the last app update, I’m more than sure that it has been completed abandoned and figured I’d warn others. Some games are complete but a lot aren’t and probably never will be. So I wanted to give a fair warning before people pay money into something that is never going to be complete. Honestly kind of shameful that this is Dorians legacy.

I haven’t played in a few years and one of my favorite series: last legacy, into the mist, monster manor, etc. Are STILL ongoing and still not finished. This app is really cute and I love the stories but I wish the devs paid more attention to actually finishing stories before making new stories! Great art and stories, very very poor execution. I wish they took this app more seriously. If you want the same kinds of stories with actual endings, download MeChat ❤️

The stories are quite interesting with a variety of stories to choose from, my only issue with this game is the stars….it takes awhile to just get enough for one choice let alone if the story your reading has multiple. The star choices for me at least are 25 PER choice! and it’s quite hard to say the least to collect them, perhaps the developers could add offers or more ways to get stars (I do understand they have to make money though) but besides that, amazing game!

i checked back after like a year and there’s still no updates