Blind 3

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: Overall much, much better brickwork than before. Not just in fidelity (which, as a reminder, doesn’t actually earn positives) but in style and design. We have well designed outskirts (see the MSQ beat down below)
2. Brickwork: Amazing work on how normal and simple the town itself looks
3. Brickwork: The run-down, falling apart apartments
4. Brickwork: The RUSTY apartments of the Otherworld which I have to give bonus credit for managing to look gross without being the kind of thing I want to stop looking at (gross without going overboard, in other words)
5. Brickwork: The Hospital, which is juuust abandoned enough to be creepy without going overboard
6. Brickwork: The Rust Hospital, which leaps over that line and is horrific
7. Brickwork: The Rust Town, which barely conforms to basic logic
8. Brickwork: The fog! They do some really good stuff with the fog here…
9. Brickwork: …arguably better than the original. Again, not for fidelity, but because of exactly how they use it to hide how much
10. Brickwork: The awful, awful prison (which is so bad I’m not even sure if it’s in the Otherworld or not)
11. Doodads: Initial town doodads. Great usage thereof to create the liminal space horror I’ll mention later
12. Doodads: The apartments. While it’s a bit on the, uh, decrepit side, I could still buy this as being a real complex (and have been in ones at about this quality)
13. Doodads: The hospital, again. Lots of details and doodads and bobs
14. Architecture: This is a weird one since so much of Silent Hill 2 R is more liminal space in its nonsense BUT every now and again they do some interesting stuff, either with the town or with some of the facilities, to make them feel much larger and more fleshed out than they are
15. Visual Storytelling: Decay, as with the original version. The sickly, rotten state of the town
16. Visual Storytelling: Water. What the water signifies is, as usual, up to you (I’ve heard about seven interpretations by now) but it’s definitely there. It’s also a nice contrast to…
17. Visual Storytelling: …frost and fire. Eddie’s ‘frost’ Silent Hill is wonderful in how little we see of it. His breath being visible is the most obvious thing, but I have to point out the ‘man’ he shot covered in frost and with visible icicles
18. Visual Storytelling: Rust. As mentioned earlier, I really like what they did with this. It’s such a great way to convey the wrongness of the Otherworld without defaulting to the usual meat moss or otherwise
19. Animation: So, I chewed on this one for a bit, but I have to give credit for the motion capture here. Obviously it’s ‘better’ but what really works most for me is the animation used to convey tone, personality, and opinion. Eddie’s very subtle expressions in his scenes, Laura clenching the letter close to her when James mentions her parents, James himself looking an inch down when mentioning his wife, little things like that. Whoever directed this put some real thought into it…
20. Animation: …and it deserves…
21. Animation: …a full triple
22. Music Direction: In the original this was a double, but I feel like they use the music even better here. Better sound balancing, better fading, better application per scene…
23. Music Direction: …and of course…
24. Music Direction: …the music itself
25. Character: Eddie is just… wow. This is probably the single most overt and obvious improvement in the remake. Eddie has gone from being kind of there to absolutely terrifying, in just the right kind of ‘not quite there’ way. A lot of this is on the new acting and animation, but it’s still there
26. Storyboarding: As with the original, some good thought is put into the framing and structure of the scenes…
27. Storyboarding: …with a few additional touches that improve tidbits here and there
28. Atmosphere: I mean, of course. I honestly have to add, between this and the next few positives, this game had me legitimately tense more than once, and people on stream commented on a similar vibe. I really think they nailed the atmosphere harder than anything else…
29. Atmosphere: …earning…
30. Atmosphere: …a solid triple, dovetailing into…
31. Sound Design: …the sound design. The creaking and groaning of the town, the skittering of the spider mannequins, the horse hooves seemingly coming right at you, the total absence of sound when applicable, the breathing…
32. Sound Design: …it’s…
33. Sound Design: …great stuff
34. Foreshadowing: More or less the same as the original
35. Babylon 5 Effect: And, again, more or less the same as the original
36. Cutscene: James meeting Angela in the graveyard is suddenly a really good scene. He sounds like he’s barely putting in the effort, she sounds like she’s disjointed, there’s subtle hints (his eyes lower when he says who he’s looking for, her recoiling at him, her mentioning of her family in different tones)
37. MSQ: The walk up to the town is wonderfully dreadful. The whole town feels completely normal. There’s signs of life (a truck, some gas tanks piled up, bit of hay, obvious signs of activity) and yet absolutely nothing is there. This devoid works so well in adding to the initial experience
38. Moment: Seeing Pyramid Head down the corridor is still a chilling moment (I particularly like how he glows the same ‘hey look at this’ red the save points have)
39. Sound: James in combat. The man is frantic and almost animalistic in how terrified he sounds
40. Camera: It still dips a bit (especially into the dutch angles plague) but it still does some really great shots…
41. Camera: …for a double
42. Cutscene: James and Angela’s mirror confrontation is such a good scene. The usage of the mirror, the progression of her tone, the tension we feel in James…
43. Cutscene: …great stuff
44. Cutscene: Laura and James on the wall. His irritation blending into concern, her obviously being hurt, subtle moments. And of course this serves as his primary motivation for… honestly a huge chunk of the next segment of the game
45. Cutscene: Maria’s first scene. It’s more overt than before, but it’s very well done regardless. She is so manipulative here
46. Cutscene: Maria and the (probably made up) story, and James’ fatigue and fixation. He looks so damned tired (do you think he’s slept at all in the last few days?) and as she’s talking about this he isn’t even processing it because he’s still fixating on Mary
47. Cutscene: Maria tempts James with alcohol in the bar. This is a mean, mean scene. The usage of camera and his hand do a great job of showing just how tempted he is here. I decided to look it up and I was right; James used to have issues with alcohol, so this is a great example of ‘show don’t tell’ in how you can see he’s struggling
48. Cutscene: Eddie in the theatre. I swear every Eddie scene is just gold in the remake. The way he’s already mostly zoned out, licking at the ice cream, and James has to keep working at it to even get him to respond
49. Banter: I wasn’t sure about this, because it’d be easy for this to be overdone, but I do like the banter between Maria and James during the explore segments
50. Cutscene: James and Maria in the hospital. Walking along the ‘rain’, her being fatigued and needing to recoup, and one of the first times we see James notice and care about her (honestly a lot of his focus at this point has been solidly on saving Laura, especially during the Hospital dungeon)
51. Cutscene: James and Eddie in the cafeteria is legit terrifying. This might be my favorite scene in the remake so far. It’s hard to even do it justice without just reciting it, but the way Eddie so casually threatens James, the subtle expressions, the camera focus, the bits of frost, James’ reaction to it, it makes Eddie out to be a serial killer in all the right ways…
52. Cutscene: …earning a solid…
53. Cutscene: …triple
54. Moment: The nope spider Mannequin. There’s a moment where you turn on a light, and there’s a spider mannequin in the hallway in front of you. Being spotted, it skitters right up the wall and out of view… aaand then the lights go back out. Lovely moment
55. Visual Storytelling: The prison in general, but especially that damned church. The pews have belt and ankle bindings to keep prisoners in there, and the confession booth has a device I won’t describe in detail that keeps the prisoners in place while their hands are tortured
56. Cutscene: Eddie and James in the depths. As with basically every cutscene that includes Eddie this just knocks it out of the park. He is so properly terrifying, and James’ reactions are a lot better than the original
57. Moment: The death of Eddie. It’s a little thing, but he just… dies, in silence, staring
58. Cutscene: The reveal scene has an issue (Laura) but aside from that is really solid
59. Character: James. The unique flavor of broken that he portrays throughout is excellent…
60. Voice Acting: …helped by a truly amazing voice actor who nails the role in almost every scene
61. Voice Acting: Angela. As much as I wish she wasn’t even in this story, I have to give credit to her voice actress
62. Voice Acting: Mary / Maria. Another one of those wonderful actresses
63. Voice Acting: Eddie, however, is so… so good. This game has good voice acting, but Eddie is above and beyond…
64. Voice Acting: …and deserves his own double
65. Moment: Walking down the hallway while listening to Mary and just how bad she’d gotten
66. Brickwork: The Hotel, of course. Just enough clean so it gets even worse later
67. Outro: The UFO Ending. Seriously, they did such a better job with it. SPACE JAMES!
68. Outro: The Bliss ending is more or less perfect and, honestly, what I’d expect from a game like this. It’s just ambiguous enough while still being sad, pleasant, and a combination of both
69. Theme: The same basic theme as the original; Acceptance and moving on, or lack thereof

Story Negatives:

1. Atmosphere: The Angela situation from the original remains and has the same general issues…
2. Atmosphere: …so…
3. Atmosphere: …triple negative for unacceptable gross
4. Cutscene: The reveal scene has one fairly large flaw; Laura. She’s… whatever
5. Moment: Angela’s non ending

Gameplay Positives:

1. Options: Quite a few, actually, so much so…
2. QoL: …that it even has good accessibility options on top of it
3. Map: As with the original, a surprisingly good map design. Areas you’ve already tried, areas you can’t, and noteworthy spots
4. Save: Multiple autosave slots…
5. Save: …for a double
6. Guidance: Surprisingly good guidance across the board. James’ glancing, the semi subtle usage of bandages or lights or wind chimes or just camera angles and geometry…
7. Guidance: …good stuff
8. Flow: Essentially every level has some really solid flow to it. In almost ever case you’ll grab something in a place either near where you’ll use it, or near where you need to go to progress forwards…
9. Flow: …solid stuff throughout
10. Enemy Design: So the enemy design was definitely touched up in this version. Enemies have some actual tactics and design to them this time around
11. Enemy Variety: Further, each enemy (especially the new variants) require different approaches and make fighting actually require thinking about what you’re doing
12. Encounter: The game also does a pretty consistently good job of encounter design. Some enemies are avoidable if you’re careful, some are trying to ambush you, some guide you to new areas, some change who they’re attacking with to force you to adapt on the fly, et cetera
13. Sound Design: More or less for the same reason as the original game
14. Pacing: Combat, explore, puzzle, repeat
15. Itemization: So this one’s debatable, but I do think the game does a solid job of item placement throughout
16. Core Combat: Locational damage and relevance to combat. An enemy may have X HP, but if you hit them in the leg and they stagger you can finish them off with melee much faster. Or a proper head shot can knock them down completely, at which point a single stomp can finish them off
17. Difficulty Options: As with the original, combat options and puzzle options which actually change both…
18. Difficulty Options: …and can be changed on the fly
19. Level: Apartments. Overall much more interesting level design and…
20. Level: …puzzle design
21. Level: Hospital. Weirdly this was just… really, really good. Good layout, good flow, good puzzles, good encounter design…
22. Level: …easily a highmark…
23. Level: …thusfar
24. Boss: Flesh Lips is also an actually interesting boss fight. Visibility based on either seeing it through the holes or by its impact on the ceiling tiles, and multiple avoidable attacks
25. Level: The Prison has a few issues compared to the others, but still has some solid stuff going on
26. Boss: Eddie is a weirdly good boss fight. He’s functionally the same in all three phases (he shoots after a delay, attacks, and dodges between the meat) but the second phase adds more smoke, obfuscating your vision, and the third phase starts up the machinery, filtering your audio…
27. Boss: …good stuff
28. Replayability: The usual second positive, for endings and routes and difficulty variances and puzzle changes
29. Level: While it has some issues (in fact it’s the worst dungeon in the game), there’s still good stuff (and multiple solutions too) for the Hotel level
30. Controls: Controls pretty well actually, and has good rebindings

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Padding: Apartments. This dungeon draaagged far beyond what it needed to be. We actually sat down and compared maps, and the new maps have far fewer ‘inaccessible’ rooms and far more ‘accessible’ rooms, each one being almost 150% more
2. Padding: The Otherworld Town segment immediately after the Hospital really did not need to be as long as it was, especially given how little was going on
3. Walkthroughitis: The Prison has more than a few points where ‘where the hell do I go next’ finally hit me
4. Padding: The Hotel. There’s still some decent stuff here, as usual, but it’s probably the single worst level in the game overall. To use just one specific example, you do a (good) puzzle to progress… but it doesn’t let you progress. Instead it gives you a code to open a safe to get a key to open a door to get another key to open another door. This is just unnecessary at this point…
5. Padding: …for its own double

Story Positives:

1. Humor: The training sessions are way funnier than they have any right to
2. Humor: The whole game has this tone of ridiculous spy thriller and war crimes that makes it genuinely amusing
3. Voice Acting: Hilariously bad
4. Humor: God the cutscenes are so incredibly bad

Story Negatives:

1. Storyboarding: Cutscenes are… off. Very mid PS1, and not in a good way
2. Cutscene: There’s… so many bad, bad cutscenes. They’re hilarious, don’t mistake me, but man they are BAD
3. Cutscene Incompetence: Gabe is just… absolutely incompetent in every cutscene he’s in
4. Outro: So we find out what Dark Mirror is in the ending and it’s… SUPER nerve gas! Then Addison (I want to remind you she was invented FOR this game) gets a ‘goodbye’ Addison and thaaat’s it
5. Outro: The extra ending is worse. Extra horrific death dark doom torture porn for no good reason
6. Writing: I have to comment on how honestly bad the writing is. It’s amazingly unnecessarily edgy, and that’s funny, but good lord is it bad
7. External Continuity: Mara gets killed poorly and like a punk in a bonus mission

Gameplay Positives:

1. Level: General. A lot of levels don’t do anything super noteworthy, but are still enjoyable to play through
2. Core Mechanic: Terrain interactions. I wish there were more of them, but they’re still good
3. Kit: Honestly, some pretty solid kit. The taser, knife, punching, good spread of guns, mines, grenades, and the special rounds…
4. Kit: …for a solid double
5. Level: 2-2 and 2-3. Some interesting mine and setpiece navigation
6. Mid Mission Checkpointing: Variable. Sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re not, but there’s enough good to qualify
7. Itemization: Good spread of pickups and drops for ammo and guns
8. Sound: Good general sound design
9. Viscerality: Good general audio viscerality

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Controls: I get the hardware limitations but these are some bonkers controls. Up on the d pad to select, hold
2. Boss: Red Jack. Single guy with a short range flamethrower in a gussed up single corridor with a big obvious weakpoint on his back and no AI but to wander around randomly
3. Terrain: When the terrain is bad, it’s pretty bad. Singular routes, inconsistent interactions, and a lack of proper cover in some segments
4. Level: Audio Spam: Addison will NOT shut up during 3-2. She yells at you the millisecond you can move, spams you when you’re not moving, and yells everytime enemies spawn or she’s hit
5. Bug: Cover. Entering cover is straight bugged, and not in a way I could ever adjust to. It just works sometimes, and sometimes it doesn’t. Given how important cover is to the game, huge swaths of frustration were had when desperately trying to enter cover while actively being shot at and it just…
6. Bug: …really…
7. Bug: …sucks
8. Core Mechanic: Stealth just… isn’t. It’s binary, player-based stealth; You are in stealth, or you are not. Thus the moment you are spotted every enemy knows that you are there and where you are. This sucks in general but what really pulls this down is how much it gets in the way of properly utilizing the (good) kit
9. Level: 5-1. No checkpoints (at all!) and a sprawling area with mines and lots and lots of guards with SMGs
10. Outro: Boss: The final boss legitimately sucks. So let’s track this. First, he’s immune to headshots by virtue of being immune to all damage on his head. Second, he has the stupid EMP armor which recharges way too fast. Third, he has an infinitely respawning array of mooks to distract you. This fight really, really sucks…
11. Outro: Boss: …and deserves…
12. Outro: Boss: …a triple
13. Enemy AI: Almost non-existent. Enemies either stay put forever, or run right for you

Story Positives:

1. Humor: Timing and references. Regardless of the individual quality of the humor, the game does a good job with humorous construction
2. Spritework: Surprisingly good and distinct for stick figures
3. Brickwork: Only a few areas but they’re good stuff
4. Animation: Shockingly good animations, which adds to the slapstick
5. MSQ: So, let’s type this all up here, because I’m not going to just list every joke and exactly why it works. I could, I’ve studied humor for quite a while at this point, but nobody wants that. So let’s just put it this way; the ‘main’ path through each stage is funny, well constructed, and deserves a variable amount of positives based on how good it is. So this first positive is for the Bank / Vault stage
6. Secondary: Similarly, each stage has a bunch of what’s called failure paths. In classic CYOA or Point & Click tradition these lead to failure and death, but the thing is they’re also animated (and in some cases voice acted) and in other words are still content (in fact the game goes out of its way to encourage you to do them all!). This then qualifies as Secondary content, and so will similarly be getting positives relative to quality per stage. So this one is for the Bank stage
7. MSQ: This is for the Prison main arc
8. Secondary: This is for the Prison failure states
9. MSQ: The Museum main stuff…
10. MSQ: …is our first double
11. Secondary: The Museum failure states similarly…
12. Secondary: …deserve a double
13. Voice Acting: Weirdly good for only having like two voice actors
14. Internal Continuity: Lots and lots and lots…
15. Internal Continuity: …for a double
16. MSQ: This is for the Airship stage which, again…
17. MSQ: …deserves a double
18. Secondary: And the Airship fail states…
19. Secondary: …also deserve a double
20. MSQ: The Wall and our partner in crime…
21. MSQ: …deserve a double
22. Secondary: The Wall and its fail states…
23. Secondary: …deserve a double
24. Branching Narrative: Rarely have we covered a game with this level of branching narrative…
25. Branching Narrative: …as is befitting a CYOA…
26. Branching Narrative: …for a triple
27. Character: Charles is just… weirdly legit throughout
28. Background Lore: Bios. This is a weird one; every character in the game (yes, ALL of them) have a small bio with a bit of backstory for them which is weirdly well thought out. It’s fun bonus background lore
29. MSQ: Completing the Mission, the final stage, has a LOT of permutations. Some are better than others, some are longer than others, but…
30. MSQ: …all of them…
31. MSQ: …are really…
32. MSQ: …good
33. Secondary: Completing the Mission also has the best fail states in the entire game…
34. Secondary: …so…
35. Secondary: …enjoy…
36. Secondary: …all of these…
37. Secondary: …positives
38. Characters: Supporting cast in general. Memorable and fun

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. NG+: The ‘map’ which allows for functional mission select
2. Choice: Lots, as is natural for a CYOA style game…
3. Choices: …earning a solid double

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Unskippable Cutscenes: Weirdly, quite a few. And no way out of them that doesn’t involve ALT+F4ing

Story Positives:

1. World Building: The core premise is amusing enough, and they use it reasonably well. Everyone’s a vehicle (car, plane, tank…) and the rest sort of naturally develops out of that
2. Tone: Ridiculousness. When you have flying tanks fighting aquatic tanks who are blasting you with lasers and chainsaws, you know what you’re in for
3. Humor: Several moments that legitimately made me laugh (bonus points for the hopping tank)
4. Spritework: Actually yeah. I’m shocked at how good these tanks look, considering they’re essentially chibi versions of real world tanks
5. Dialogue: So the localization is absolutely atrocious, and it’s hysterical
6. Animation: Weirdly enough, some good animation to indicate what’s happening in cutscenes…
7. Camera: …and decent camerawork too

Story Negatives:

1. Localization: Funny or no, this is atrociously bad
2. Outro: The ending was… not. Literally no dialogue, no cheesy silliness, no nothing

Gameplay Positives:

1. Core Combat: What can I say, it’s fun to zip around and blow things up as a tank. Can we get more tank games please?
2. Kit: Lots of weapons, and lots of tanks to choose from…
3. Kit: …for a solid double
4. Build: Also surprisingly good variety of builds possible, with lots of mixing and matching
5. Itemization: Actually, yeah. I was worried at first but missions and Arenas give a pretty solid amount of cash to help you constantly buying new gear
6. Terrain: Intermittent, but now and again the terrain matters and is decently designed
7. Minigame: So first we have the arena itself, which is nice, but the ‘expert arena’ is where this really shines. Fun, silly minigames which encourage you to try out totally different builds of tanks to progress…
8. Minigame: …overall…
9. Minigame: …great stuff
10. Modes: Skirmish mode, against the enemy, horde mode, or versus
11. Level: General. There’s nothing that stands out a lot by itself, but the stages are generally enjoyable throughout…
12. Level: …for a double
13. Boss: Again, an aggregate for all the bosses, but I did enjoy them for what they were. When I wasn’t chainsaw double flamethrowing them anyways
14. NG+: I can’t believe it but yeah, there’s a new game plus mode in this one
15. Visual Distinction: Distinct and well designed, especially in terms of color, throughout

Gameplay Negatives:

1. QoL: Buying stuff is just too irritating. Every shop has different items, you want to vary your kit or build up (for fun or mission profile reasons), and roaming around checking each damned shop is honestly just frustrating
2. Level: Protecting the king… against an endless array of tanks that beeline and good lord this is an awful mission. What’s worse is I was absolutely chipper shredding the enemy and it still wasn’t enough

Story Positives:

1. Voice Acting: Really solid for what it is, even though it’s mostly just the two principles
2. World Building: Little tidbits. These devs usually do some good stuff with the background and this is a good example of that
3. Brickwork: Most of the overworld, especially how the barren greyscale advances to green
4. Moment: The slow walk through the desert is actually a pretty solid downer moment emphasizing just how lonely and bad things have gotten

Story Negatives:

1. Character: Rani. This woman can go straight to hell. She is unsufferable, selfish, rude, and inconsiderate to the person actively trying to help her…
2. Writing: …and she was right all along! Yaaay
3. Fake Drama: Also the third act break up is pretty bad (and short!)
4. Theme: ENVIRONMENT!

Gameplay Positives:

1. Core Mechanic: The core ‘sucking’ mechanic is pretty decent for what it is
2. Viscerality: Some good audio and visual feedback in absorbing loot and gunk
3. Itemization: Upgrades and loot are smooth and reasonably well spread out
4. Kit: Not too shabby for what it is
5. Level: Initial stage stuff. It’s fairly basic, but it’s a good introduction to the puzzle platforming
6. Level: Gunk Tower is when things get more interesting when it comes to the aforementioned platforming
7. Level: Mine factory has some nice puzzle sequences
8. Level: The path to the Garden is another nice segment
9. Outro: Level: The finale does some pretty fun interweaving stuff (outside of the bug issue)

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Bug: There’s an issue with framerate in the central elevator of the final stage. This isn’t just irritating, it actively screws with the final stage
2. Outro: Boss: The final boss is… fine, I guess, but what pushes this down into negative territory is the screen shake. It got legitimately hard to even tell what was going on at times

Story Positives:

1. Writing: Wonderful writing throughout. Tight, well constructed, differing speech patterns to indicate who’s talking, great stuff
2. Storytelling Mechanic: Notes in general. Good background stuff with the books especially
3. Doodads: I honestly want to give more positives here because this is great doodad usage
4. Background Lore: The plot leading up to now, the escalation, the surviving the apocalypse
5. Visual Storytelling: Lots. The shrine to the dragon queen, the prisoner / research room, the prisms and their colors, the mirror
6. Music Direction: Great usage of specific songs in specific rooms and for specific events
7. Sound: Love the soundscape. Special mention to the Prisoner’s area and the Oasis
8. Cutscene: The encounter with the Prisoner. There’s so much pain and anger here, and a lot of implication
9. Cutscene: The encounter with the Riddler. Funny, moroseful, and thematic
10. Cutscene: The encounter with the Mirror. This is already awesome for the ‘advanced AI dialogue’ interactions, but the further inferences from what specific information wasn’t copied adds so much
11. Atmosphere: Lovely dread throughout, though there’s enough mystery and sorrow alongside it
12. Character: All of them are interesting and distinct
13. World Building: Quite a bit actually. We have an ancient civilization, ANOTHER old civilization (or three), dragons with nukes, advanced technology, magical elements… all kinds of stuff

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Guidance: Quite a bit actually. Most of the angles and visuals are designed to push you in a direction, or incline you to interacting with something (examples; The lantern on the shelf, or the candles covering so much of the shrine)
2. MSQ: Puzzles in general. The initial puzzle (also the only MSQ puzzle technically lol), the crystals to progress to the second area (except that damned red one), the Riddler and his riddles, and the dragon mural. Plus there’s side options to skip some of these if you’re diligent
3. Choices: More than I was expecting, which (as per good Choice gameplay) offer flavor and tone to the player to decide who and what they are playing
4. Minimap: Actually really solid. It’s hand drawn, indicates interactables in addition to terrain, and updates well
5. Visual Distinction: In general, but also with the nice glowing mouseover light

Gameplay Negatives:

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: The visuals in this game are really legitimately excellent. So we’ll start with the wonderful forests…
2. Brickwork: …the amazing beach…
3. Brickwork: …and the initial town, which all have wonderful tilesets
4. Spritework: Let’s also get this out of the way, the spritework on the principle cast is really, really good (and includes several varieties, in additions to some great little side animations)…
5. Spritework: …for an easy double
6. Spritework: Then there’s all the support cast and their also excellent (and distinct) spritework…
7. Spritework: …for another double
8. Animation: Weirdly good, especially given this is RPGMaker. Some great stuff done to help sell the scenes
9. Doodads: This is going to be one of those ‘doodads per areas’ games. So we’ll start with the initial zones, most especially the houses and town
10. Humor: So I’ll call out a few specific things as we go but the entire game has some really solid jokes…
11. Atmosphere: …and manages that wonderfully Earthboundesque quirkiness
12. Moment: The kiss on the vista is absolutely adorable
13. Background Lore: Descriptors on items
14. Background Lore: Bestiary flavor lore. Lots of great, funny, and interesting tidbits here…
15. Background Lore: …another double
16. Visual Storytelling: Lots. Claire’s work area, Allison’s house, but honestly Faith’s office alone deserves this
17. World Building: Magic commonality. It’s made clear multiple times how commonplace magic is, but they also do some good work in making the cultures centered around such a magic-glutted society make sense
18. Cutscene: Melody and Harmony. This first scene is powerful in all the right ways. I’ll talk more about this later but Harmony is so clearly written from personal experience, and the power of those words is not lost on me…
19. Cutscene: …or on Melody
20. Moment: Allison and Melody’s reactions to each other after the breakdown. Allison is VERY supportive here, calm, not hesitant, and helpful, and the whole time Melody can barely manage anything
21. Moment: Claire breaking down when we rescue Beverly, and the related guilt
22. Brickwork: Glitched areas in general. It’s good stuff, and properly wigged out
23. Brickwork: The mechanical undead desert (and subsequent cowboy town)
24. Doodads: I mean of course they have great doodad design. Who did this friggin’ spritework?
25. Music Direction: General. I was hesitant on this one for a while but there’s a lot of smart usage of song and silence both
26. Cutscene: A reasonably well built-up third act breakup that isn’t even a full break up, filled with two people who are really wigged out about things entirely out of their paygrade
27. Character: Harmony and intrusive thoughts. So what we have here is a glob of magic that got attached to someone. Naturally it takes the form of their intrusive thoughts, and this makes perfect sense. Those types of thoughts are usually filtered out or ignored, pushed to the back of the mind where the magic could cohese with them
28. Secondary: Claire’s shift is an amazing side quest. Again, this feels like it was written from experience, but the way it concluded was incredibly satisfying…
29. Moment: …and Claire and Beverly hooking up is absolutely adorable
30. MSQ: Melody and Claire and their duo segment during Zinnia’s trials. Coming clean with each other, learning more about their backstory, it’s a great down to earth moment
31. MSQ: Allison and Jodie have a great one too. It’s when we first learn they’re exes (and quite amicable, obviously) and like the previous scene it does a lot of great character lifting
32. Cutscene: Verena and her past (and Javis’ manipulations). I had a few theories about Javis which were completely torpedoed later, but either way it’s very obvious he’s just an alien asshole who actively manipulates her into being what he wants instead of what she wants. In short, it ties into the central theme…
33. Theme: …being true to yourself. This might be one of the best examples of this I’ve ever seen. It’s properly nuanced, complex, it shows that it’s not a one-note solution nor is it easy, and it shows a lot of examples thereof. Even the bigot (Paula) stays true to herself…
34. Theme: …and of course, Verena, as mentioned earlier
35. Secondary: A few side quests, all delightful in their own little ways
36. Dialogue: Very snappy, very believable, very well written…
37. Dialogue: …not only in general, but also in…
38. Banter: …the inter-party banter, which really gives you the vibe of several friends who’ve known each other for years
39. Cutscene: Allison and Melody on Mt. Sappho. They finally hash things out and have an honest, adult conversation with each other about everything that’s been happening
40. Outro: Music Direction: The entire Outro has some really solid music direction, most notably the final final dungeon, and all three final boss fights
41. Outro: Cutscene: Verena and revelations about everything. This scene has been built up for half the game, and (as mentioned earlier) plays right into that central Theme…
42. Outro: Cutscene: …for a solid double. “I just want to see my wife.”
43. Outro: Moment: “I just need to shut you up for five minutes” This line says it all but this scene is the perfect encapsulation of Melody as a character, the plot as a whole, and the theme entire. The entire focus of this being on how she doesn’t have a perfect fit all solution, how her doubts are still a part of her, and how right now none of that matters because, as the line stated…
44. Outro: Moment: …she just needs these five minutes. Because what she wants to be right NOW…
45. Outro: Moment: “I want to be a HERO.”
46. Outro: Moment: Verena’s closet is our inventory. This not only perfectly explains everything (in fact it literally kicked off the plot) but it’s just the right amount of absurdly hilarious
47. Character: Melody. The woman struggling with who she is and why she does
48. Character: Claire. The one driven to push herself at all times thanks to her horrible upbringing
49. Character: Allison. I was torn on her for a while because she starts off… kinda bad. But she has one hell of an arc, and ends up being one of the most supportive and awesome characters
50. Character: Supporting cast, Greenridge. Lots of flavor and fun in these
51. Character: Supporting cast, Mumford. Ditto here, but also I should add the sanctuary in Uncanny Valley to this too
52. Character: Villains. Javis is just alien enough to really work (which makes sense given what he is), and Verena is good for when she has screen time. And Paula is a surprisingly accurately written bigot
53. Internal Continuity: Lots, all over the place. Game keeps really tight track of itself

Story Negatives:

1. Pacing: Act 2. I’m typing up my thoughts here as of being in Act 4 (of 5) to really emphasize how weird Act 2 is. The Act is LONG, entirely too long, but also rushed, but also has almost nothing happening across huge swaths of time before suddenly plot smashes into your face

Gameplay Positives:

1. Music: Yeah there’s some solid tunes in this one
2. Interface: A few little details, but I do like how the interface is designed. Especially the indicators on equipment and the like
3. Core Combat: So I’ve seen better, but this is pretty inventive for RPGMaker. Every character has MP (of course) but different types of abilities per character allow them to Build another resource (Star Points) which they can then Spend on other, ostensibly stronger abilities. The usefulness of those abilities varies, but it creates a pretty tight core combat loop of Builder/Spender
4. Enemy Design: Enemies have weaknesses, of course, but they also have directional weaknesses for Allison’s attacks. Some enemies also change based on using them, sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker
5. Bestiary: Solid, though mostly there for flavor lore (listed up in Story)
6. Intro: Tutorial dungeon (not the glitch one) and intro boss. This isn’t the best thing ever but it is probably one of the best dungeons in the game, with great introduction to all the core conceits of the game
7. Boss: The Trash King. Summons adds which heal him, but also has ‘freebie’ turns in the form of charging a spell (that never happens) and, as is the norm, proper weakpoint design
8. Boss: Abominable Automation (aka Glyph). Extremely weak to water, high, and ice and with only a few HP, which is great because Glyph hits like an absolute truck and summons Boulders (which you can defeat in a hurry) which it then flings at you, basically guaranteeing a kill
9. Boss: Gumball Goliath. Very weak to several things, only a few HP, tons of adds… hey this sounds familiar. Still a great format though. Each add is summoned every turn AND does more and more debuffs, so you can slowmode your way safely through or you can bulldoze the boss
10. Difficulty Options: For the issues I have with it (see Negatives down below) the fact that you can swap difficulty outside of combat freely and with no real penalty is great
11. Boss: Clintson. So he’s got better than average defenses, likes to debuff and dot to waste your turns, oh and he has a hard 15 turn timer before you game over…
12. Boss: …great stuff
13. Boss: Cryptkeeper Daedalus. Two hands (one of which can immobilize Melody… specifically Melody of course, neutralize the healer), and plenty of mean abilities which are complimented by how many hands he has up at the time
14. Boss: Bigby. This is a great fight. So he summons adds, and both he and his adds do AOE elemental damage, but he also shifts the terrain around which buffs one element while nerfing another one. This can be used offensively and defensively, and adds some great nuance to the fight…
15. Boss: …easy double
16. Boss: Roy is another great fight. He can give himself multiple turns, mind control enemies, and ‘fast forward’ which essentially turns on a form of autobattle for a time, all while running the timer out on buffs and debuffs…
17. Boss: …another great battle
18. Secondary: Generally fun side quests, usually with some gimmick attached, but what really makes them pop…
19. Itemization: …is all of them give some truly nice, well designed gear for the endgame (it’s all optional too)
20. Boss: Javis. Corruption is of course a big gimmick here, but the way he twists your party and pulls copies out is great
21. Boss: Verena. This one’s kind of what you’d call a traditional boss fight, but it’s a solid one. Lots of big, sweeping attacks, and plenty of damage to mitigate
22. Kit: Allison. Attacks which have directional attacks, and every enemy in the game has a weakness to at least one direction, alongside being able to generate star power quickly with even basic attacks, and plenty of good star spenders. Also has one of the only ‘turn 1 AOEs’ in the game
23. Kit: Melody. Gaining SP for healing is already great, the free buff to your main melee DPSer is nice, and she gets a lot of good options for doing damage too (including the best DOT in the game and a nuke that also applies the same DOT). Great synergies with several books too
24. Kit: Magical Girl is one of the best books in the game, no joke. Buff someone to make them be healed more (great for Jodie or for when you’re conserving mana), a big AOE heal (one of the best in the game actually), and the ability to spend SP to restore the entire party’s MP is invaluable…
25. Kit: …easy double
26. Kit: Spellblade. Great elemental buffs to really allow you to take advantage (or double down on) the weakness system
27. Kit: Alchemist. Fantastic usage of your (by this point bloated) inventory by turning them into several surprisingly useful attacks
28. Kit: Chronomancer. This is a great one too. AOE HOT, let someone white damage twice per turn, a great desperation nuke, and a speed enemy debuff
29. Kit: Machinist. Using the extra items that drop periodically as buffs and nukes is neat
30. Kit: Reaper is a fun one. Spend HP to do damage, or spend SP to drain health. Great dynamic
31. Outro: Boss: All of them really. They’re a bit lower in quality than the amazingness that was the optional bosses with the Sons, but they’re still good fights and…
32. Outro: Hyperbeam Moment: …they lead to God King Javis’ fight. It’s not QUITE a victory lap but it’s damned close
33. Guidance: General. Lots of good indicators, both in level design, overworld layout, and NPC hints
34. Level: This is kind of an aggregate for all the levels in the game. They’re mostly fairly simple dungeons, but there’s some neat ideas here and there

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Options: Rebinding (RPG Maker problem). You can rebind a few things, technically, but it’s… wrong.
2. Pacing: This is a continuing issue; the game has a bad habit of tossing you from one dungeon directly into another, with no appreciable variance between the two. Practically speaking this means just doing a really long dungeon and that gets old, especially with no real break in between
3. Pacing: Act 2 does the aforementioned but even worse. The whole Act just… drags and drags, with lots of dungeon crawling and not a lot of anything else for a very long time (and after a VERY brief town interlude, goes right into another dungeon)
4. Encounter Rate: So I’ve been chewing on this for a bit. I don’t think it’s at the level of a full Problem, but the game has three lesser issues that all cause a cascading negative synergy. First, there are too many encounters. I know this sounds weird because there aren’t THAT many (not really) but it’s too many considering other factors, especially since they respawn in most areas
5. Encounter: Second, each enemy encounter just has too many enemies per encounter. This is doubly irritating considering how weak (and costly) AOEs are in this game
6. Enemy Design: Third and finally, enemy health is entirely too high. It should not take multiple rounds of buffing to be able to kill a single trash mob. It’s worth noting all three of these issues are mitigated by the next negative…
7. Difficulty: …the difficulty option. This is a strange one because it’s functionally lazy difficulty (though a good implementation of one, for what that’s worth) but on Normal all of the aforementioned turn into Factory Worker Syndrome
8. Music: Music restarts every single flippin’ time it plays
9. Kit: Claire. She is just… not as well designed as the others. Basically has to burn MP to generate star power, doesn’t even gain access to AOEs until at least turn 2 (and those AOEs cost MP and SP), and her mana to usefulness ratio… isn’t
10. Kit: Inner Beast is so bad it deserves its own mention. Spend an entire action Burning the entire enemy (pittance of damage and synergy attacks not worth the turn expenditure), or do a hit plus a poison (eh), or do three attacks which target randomly and cost SP AND MP… no thanks
11. Kit: The rest. There are some good books (I mention those up in positives) but several of the others are just… not
12. Controls: It’s an RPGMaker game. The controls struggle

Story Positives:

1. Intro: Moment: The cascading explosions on the highway. To be clear, something explodes, causing everything nearby to explode, causing everything nearby that to explode, repeating. This leads to what I termed an explosion tsunami slowly advancing on the player. And it is awesome, and a perfect tone setter
2. Intro: Cutscene: Everything to do with the insanity of the helicopter crash is more cheesy ridiculousness. By the way there’s going to be a lot of these ‘bad cheesy cutscene’ positives so FYI on that
3. Voice Acting: This is an aggregate positive for the main cast as a whole. Nothing really stands out (despite having some good actors), but it’s good enough to be mentioned
4. Animation: While there’s some unrelated issues, the animation is still worthy of note in cutscenes
5. MSQ: Decent showcasing of the beginnings of a zombie apocalypse. Enjoy this, it’s one of the only non cheesy/bad positives to story. Several times the game does a good job with ground floor of these types of horrible situations
6. Moment: Helena’s clear and obvious trauma at losing her sister to Simmons is, weirdly, another well done scene
7. MSQ: Fighting a shark monster as you’re sliding down a sewer drain in reverse? Check
8. Cutscene: The Excuse Fight ridiculous melodrama of Chris and Leon fighting each other and demanding the other stand down was trying SO HARD to be serious and I love it
9. Cutscene: The Simmons train fight is absolutely over the top nonsense. I can’t even do it justice in words…
10. Cutscene: …just enjoy that double
11. Cutscene: Pretty much everything to do with the final Simmons fight. Building sized fly being shocked by lightning? Check
12. Cutscene: Chris’ opening cutscene is every 80s action flick opening ever. The down on his luck, traumatized old soldier who nearly starts a brawl, is found by an old ally, and brought back into the fight for one last mission…
13. Cutscene: …love it
14. MSQ: Chris’ extremely over the top melodrama with Piers and Jake. My only regret is we don’t see more of this in Chris’ campaign
15. Cutscene: Pier’s sacrifice and Chris losing it. It’s almost a good scene without cheese, but it’s also cheesy as hell
16. Cutscene: Okay it’s fine just leap from this helicopter into another helicopter while being chased by Notmesis
17. Cutscene: So then they attack the giant, cult-infested hotel with a tank… aaand then chase us through the hallways with it!
18. Cutscene: The Notmesis setup and payoff fight is fantastically stupid. Lava and steel mill combined with Sherry cheering him on and it’s all finished with a falcon punch
19. Character: Sherry and Jake together form a weirdly good duo, and are enjoyable enough (partially due to the voice acting) for a positive
20. Storytelling Mechanic: Timeline and replayable cutscenes in the menu
21. Internal Continuity: Surprisingly, yeah. The game keeps track of its own timeline and how the campaigns interweave pretty well
22. Brickwork: General aesthetics. The varying HUDs and relevant tone, among other things

Story Negatives:

1. Camera: The shakey cam is back…
2. Camera: …along with…
3. Camera: …excessive Hollywood Editing
4. Brickwork: This game honestly looks legitimately bad. There’s some exceptions but there is a LOT of just generic ruins, and it also runs into an issue with…
5. Lighting: …making it legitimately hard to even see what you’re looking at
6. Character: Leon. I hate to sound harsh but this super grim, edgy, Batman-esque vibe does not work for Leon at all, even in this game, nevermind the Leon we’ve known in previous games
7. Character: Chris is worse. There’s ways to do this kind of arc after the events of 1 and 5… this is not it. He honestly detracts from the narrative by how he’s mis-used
8. Doodads: Low-rez and improperly scaled doodads
9. Intro: Tone: Intense and slow without balancing the two. Feels very disjointed
10. Intro: Lack of catch. There’s no hook and things just… happen with no rhyme or reason. It’s a form of a flash forward (I think) and utterly fails at its stated goal
11. Intro: Stupidity. I could type up details but honestly I don’t feel like it’s worth my time
12. Intro: Moment: omg a zombie
13. MSQ: Just Spit It Out. Helena will NOT say what she wants to reveal, which is fine once, maybe twice, but like six times? Across 3 HOURS of cutscenes…
14. MSQ: …and it never really gets better either
15. MSQ: Also there is absolutely no reason to sexify up Deborah (in audio AND visuals, woman was moaning and gasping while gyrating and lots of big close-ups of her naked assets)…
16. Tone: …while we’re having this big dramatic (well acted, even) moment of trauma about her death
17. Plot: Six months later! In a fade to black, like it was yesterday
18. Cutscene Incompetence: Us being captured. Yes I know it had to happen but the way it did was legitimately terrible. They just ‘swarm’ us with like 5 dudes and carry us off

Gameplay Positives:

1. Music: Honestly I really like the music in this one. It lends itself towards the more actiony, bombastic vibe, but it’s still good stuff regardless…
2. Music: …easy double
3. Difficulty Options: Professional and No Hope have legit difficulty design
4. Mid Mission Checkpoints: Really solid stuff here, frequent and usually right around any major transition (including several in mid event or boss)…
5. Mid Mission Checkpoints: …easy double
6. Core Combat: Meleeing. The game does a bad job of conveying it but there’s a decent amount of depth to the meleeing system and you can basically melee most of the game
7. Kit: Guns are somewhat lackluster but the (very small) variance between characters helps
8. Minigame: Mercenaries mode as per the usual
9. Enemy Design: Targeted mutations and several enemies with their own unique abilities…
10. Enemy Variety: …and a decent range of enemy attacks and varieties
11. Co-Op: Exists at all
12. Co-Op: Full campaign co-op
13. Co-Op: Online and local co-op
14. Co-Op: And, like in 5, good design centered around said co-op campaign
15. NG+: More or less the same quality of 5’s. You can keep stuff going forwards but…
16. NG+: …there’s also a nice chapter select which also keeps your progress and you can swap difficulty at will while also keeping track of your stats…
17. NG+: …earning the double
18. Party AI: I think it might actually be the same one from 5 but it’s still decent (when it’s decent)
19. Core Mechanic: Healing pips is actually a pretty solid gradient healing mechanic. You can combine herbs to get more pips, and then use pips individually or in bundles to heal as much as you want or don’t want to
20. Viscerality: Audio design. I’ve heard better, but it’s still good stuff
21. MSQ: Leon Chapter 2. It’s probably the most fun level in the game to-date, being a weird combination of L4D2 and House Of The Dead
22. Pacing: Not-Chris. Basically every campaign other than Chris’ actually has some pretty solid pacing to it, weaving between exploration, combat, and puzzles
23. Level: Ada 2 and some honest to goodness puzzles, including some actually clever ones (making a corpse fall on a switch, pinning dudes to the wall, etc.)

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Interface: Options menu on the phone is unintuitive, hard to read, and hard to navigate
2. Difficulty Options: Lazy difficulty for everything other than the top difficulties
3. Camera: So… the camera in this game isn’t terrible like 5 right? Well, the thing is the game LOVES to remove control of the camera periodically which is incredibly frustrating…
4. Camera: …but it also screws with your controls while it’s doing so
5. Lighting: Good lord these graphics. There’s entire swaths of the game where I have trouble seeing anything at all, at least in part because…
6. Graphics: …of the awful, awful bloom. The lights are too bright, and the darks are too dark
7. Core Combat: Feedback, lack thereof. With a few exceptions, it’s hard to tell if you’re even hitting an enemy, nevermind doing something
8. Controls: Oh yeah, the controls suck too. The easiest way to explain this is to single out using the menu. Okay so first hit F to bring it up at all, then mousewheel to your target, hit space, mousewheel an option, space, again, mousewheel again, space again. Not bad enough for you? How about trying to wield a grenade, which involves starting off aiming, hitting shift and mousewheel, going BACK to aiming, and flinging
9. Intro: A length of QTEs with nothing really going on
10. Intro: Then there’s a second segment of forced walking and QTEs
11. Intro: Followed by a hold the line in a narrow hallway with nothing to use and then ANOTHER QTE segment
12. Boss: Pretty much everything to do with the final Simmons fight is dull at best, not something you want from a boss encounter in general, nevermind a ‘final’ boss
13. Gotcha: Several instances of this across multiple campaigns. Most notable with having a car thrown at you, no way of knowing it’s coming, and if you’re not already out of the way no time to avoid
14. Padding: Chris’s campaign is… dull. There’s too many enemies and too many samey encounters across too many ruins
15. Pacing: Chris’s campaign is nonstop action! Aaand that’s the problem. This is the lesson later Call of Duties failed so miserably at; You need gameplay pacing (variety in activity and intensity) to keep the gameplay interesting…
16. Pacing: …which this does not
17. Outro: MSQ: Chris’ final boss is so bad I need to really explain this in full detail so please bare with me. So first we start with an intense escape sequence up a spiral area as the giant blob monster follows you. Cool. Let’s start with the obvious; there is VERY little room for error here (in fact I died the first time not even being fully aware of what happened). This is made worse because…
18. Outro: Mid Mission Checkpointing: …there are no chadeckpoints here. Any failure means rewinding to the beginning. Which is the usual levels of frustrating…
19. Outro: Camera: …when you consider the camera. Yes the CAMERA of all things. It’s manually crafted, which could work if it was static, but it is not. It jerks around constantly to change angles to either follow the monster or the exploding room (and very rarely shows you where you’re going so you can prepare what to do or, y’know, play the game). This combines with…
20. Outro: Controls: …the fact that the controls shift each camera shift. Meaning you’ll often run the wrong way for a bit or have trouble re-orienting yourself at each camera jump (which feeds back into the Checkpointing issue)
21. Outro: Then you have to do it again, but somehow they screwed this one up too! They force the player into ‘crouch’ status permanently for several of these, which depending on what you were hitting before can have you angled completely wrong, and of course the too-tight timer is still here…
22. Outro: Camera: …and the camera is STILL against you
23. Outro: Boss: Then there’s the ACTUAL fight at the end. This fight is stupid. The boss has two weakpoints on his sides; When he’s hit by them, he goes into a cocoon, at which point Piers needs to lightning him, at which point Chris punches him (I wish… it’s actually just a knife stab). Do this three times, win. The problem is the boss loves to roam up on top of areas where you can’t reach and there’s very few ammo refills in the room, making this more irritating than anything…
24. Outro: Boss: …especially when he likes to pause up on top of one of those crates you can’t reach, meaning he’ll go into his vuln phase and you just have to stare at him gormlessly because you can’t friggin’ hit him
25. Level: Sherry 2 and the mountain. It’s a long boring slog with too many enemies and way, way too much backtracking even if you know where you’re going
26. MSQ: Sherry 2 again and the snowmobile. This is just drab at best, but actively irritating in how easy it is to die at worst
27. Level: Sherry and the QTEs of the Mountains. In this chapter, Sherry has a series of QTEs followed by a turret section and a ‘hold forward’ section
28. Level: Sherry and the Ten Coins. In this chapter Sherry has to go find ten coins that drop off spawning enemies
29. Padding: Boss refights. THREE of them, in fact
30. Inventory: Very limited, in addition to the previously mentioned irritations with navigation
31. Boss: Not-Ada’s face. Damage the eyes, then cut through, then hit the blue parts… but it’s entirely the worst combination of boring and unclear

Story Positives:

1. Humor: The animations in this game are legitimately hilarious
2. Humor: I’m sorry, the main character’s not-acting is just fantastic. It’s just the right flavor of awful
3. NPC Set Dressing: Schedules, Old Camp. Several years before Oblivion (though after Majora’s Mask) we have individual schedules for individual people, changing what they’re doing and where they are, which adds to the overall vibe of town
4. NPC Set Dressing: Interactions. Many characters just kind of… have their own scripts for interacting with each other and monsters, and it adds some nice flavor
5. Intro: Tone: The intro cinematic actually does a lot to really establish the tone of the work. We start off with some colossal war against an oncoming horde, and then cut right down from all that higher end stuff to us. We are ‘some dude’, and we are being shoved into a worker’s prison. The intro sequence then involves us only surviving thanks to the aid of a kind stranger, and being in danger from dying to basic chickens. Yep, we are way, way down at the ground level here…
6. Tone: …which is something the entirety of Chapter 1 handles quite well as well…
7. MSQ: …as a lot of the Chapter 1 quests, while not super memorable in their own right, all contribute to this overall tone. They also do one other thing which really, really emphasizes just how awful things are in this prison…
8. Theme: …and that’s the systemic oppression. Those on top oppress those below them, who oppress those below them, and so on until you reach the bottom. The people at the bottom are encouraged to fight and bicker amongst each other. And everyone is miserable, all the time, forever
9. World Building: There’s a decent amount of thought put into exactly what this colony should look like, given its uniquely isolated situation and how unsustainable it really is
10. Moment: The insane priest going mad and trying to kill us. Oh no, don’t mistake me, it’s awful. Awfully hilarious. His wild ranting, the bonkers voice acting, our blase reaction to it all
11. Moment: EEHHHH
12. Character: Honestly, yeah. There’s not a lot individually but there’s a lot throughout that really helps keep people distinct and memorable
13. Music Direction: For what it’s worth, yeah. I wasn’t super impressed with the music, but it did help sell the scene…
14. Atmosphere: …and the overall atmosphere of the muck pile that’s barely holding together

Story Negatives:

1. Voice Direction: GothicGuy. I know it’s hilarious listening to him, but honestly this is some truly awful voice acting. Wrong cadence, wrong pacing, wrong emphasis, no intonation, just a dude reading lines
2. Plot: WHAT plot? I like a lot of elements of the story, I do, but the main plot thread is nonsensical at best. There’s also some other issues with it, such as…
3. Pacing: …how badly paced it is. You bounce around like a ping pong ball in a dryer between completely disconnected, irrelevant plot beats (all of which are mandatory by the way) and then all of the sudden there’s this massive lurch of significant events, followed by…
4. Padding: …two, count ‘em, TWO huge sections of the plot which are just ‘go get some quest items’. Two!
5. Story Sequencing: Also the plot literally feels like it had pages ripped out of the script periodically. There are multiple examples where you talk to someone, go to the next NPC in the chain, and then report to them about things that did not happen, which now everything takes as red. I honestly thought we were straight up lying the first time this happened, but then it happened again later in the same manner
6. Plot: So the plot kind of starts… sucking at around Chapter 4ish. As we talked about on stream I think this could have worked if a little more work or polish was put into the transition from ‘nobody’ to ‘arch demon threat’ but instead it’s just a jarring shift. Furthermore…
7. Tone: …it violates the tone of the entire work. The GOOD tone, I feel like adding. We’re literally the chosen one (stated outright, we have prophecies about us and everything)
8. Outro: So there’s the evil Sleeper, and his evil cultists, and they’re evil and ranty…
9. Outro: …aaand then he’s sucked away, you shock him with lightning, the end…
10. Outro: …what??
11. Localization: Very… very bad. Dialogue is stilted, awkward, and doesn’t flow from character to character even in the same conversation…
12. Localization: …so, uh, yeah. Terrible stuff

Gameplay Positives:

1. Core Mechanic: Interact with everything, everywhere, everywhen. This is one of the closest games to straight up D&D I’ve seen in a while. While your actual interactions are limited (loot, talk, kill) there’s no real limits on who or what you can do that to, just what you can get away with
2. Core Combat: So I can’t believe I’m saying this considering how much I hate the combat, but it’s actually pretty well designed… once you train up an actual skill. The timing (very rhythm based), the reacting to enemy attacks, the movement of it, the whole thing feels like a dance which is actually pretty solid…
3. Core Combat: …for a double
4. All Roads Lead To Rome: Tied in with the Core Mechanic up above. Several of the quests in the Old Camp have quite a few ways you can complete them (or even deliberately not complete them, depending on what you’re after)
5. All Roads Lead To Rome: New Camp. Same general deal here. In fact honestly this just applies to Chapter 1 in general, so let’s also mention…
6. All Roads Lead To Rome: …Drug Camp, while we’re here
7. Overworld: The overworld design isn’t terrible. Most of it is pretty navigable at a glance, some of the slopes and paths lead the eye to exploration areas, and the whole area isn’t super big to minimize travel time
8. Power Progression Curve: Staircase leveling is definitely in effect here, though I’ve noticed armor is the most impacting stat by far everything means something. So any upgrade is noticeable
9. Itemization: I’ll give the game this. A lot of effort is put into making items, loot, and upgrades are well distributed across the world space
10. Level: I will actually give it this. There are some interesting ideas, puzzles, and shortcuts in the Temple of the Sleeper
11. Save System: Actually pretty solid for what it is. Quick and easy to save and load
12. Visual Navigation: Surprisingly decent. After only a couple of trips around the overworld I was able to navigate by sight alone except for, obviously, the places I hadn’t been
13. Visual Distinction: Again, weirdly good for a 2001 3D game. There’s only a couple of times I had trouble seeing something, everything’s nice and distinct

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Crash: Okay so this is actually worse than VTMB1 was back in the day. First, trying to launch the game at all just instantly crashes. Cool
2. Crash: Then, trying to use fan patches (which are mandatory to play) results in the entire computer crashing…
3. Crash: …cool
4. Controls: Alright so… there’s ‘a’ logic to the controls and once you get used to it it’s merely constantly frustrating. Everything seems to hinge on the ‘action’ button (which, thank God, is rebindable), but it’s not always particularly logical how it’s employed. In some cases it’s actively easier to cancel out of, say, a looting menu rather than try to navigate it if you do anything wrong at all because the entire game is context sensitive around said action button. In other words the moment the situation has changed at all (your facing, what you have selected, which side of the screen you’re on) what the action button does changes. I’ve seen worse…
5. Controls: …but not…
6. Controls: …by much
7. Interface: Hokay. So this isn’t so much ‘bad’ as… ‘not’. There’s the inventory (very consoley, though I do like how it has no weight cap), there’s the character screen, and there’s the journal, and that’s kind of… it. Each one feels amateur in implementation; Functional, but without a lot of design to them
8. Interface: Feedback and lack thereof is pretty bad in combat. Multiple different enemy types would attack me and outside of seeing my health go down I couldn’t tell you that they did or how they did. This is important given combat but we’ll discuss that in more detail later
9. Core Combat: There’s a lot the core combat does well. No, I’m serious, stop laughing. But the amount it does wrong really screws with that. First you can only target one thing and thus damage one thing at a time. The entire engine is made for one on one fights, and it is incredibly easy to have multiple enemies on you at once
10. Core Combat: Second, the entire process is incredibly janky. Jank, as anybody knows, is not inherently bad, but when it’s tied to something so central as combat and the consequences of failure are so aggravating? It’s just not a good feeling to lose through no real fault of your own thanks to targeting issues, animation locking, or the fact that the enemy was slightly higher than you and therefore has better range than you in melee
11. Core Combat: Third, at least early on, it’s incredibly rocket tag. You kill your enemy quickly, or you die quickly, and that’s kind of it. Any mistake is penalized (see the above negative) and any success rolls over the enemy
12. Intro: Early Game: Alright. So you start off at level 0 where even a basic mob can kill you in seconds, let’s start with that
13. Intro: Then there’s the fact that the game’s ‘early game’ seems to be running around talking to people which is… a pain, to put it lightly, especially since…
14. Intro: …you’re penalized for it by Mud. Let me be clear; I get that Mud is supposed to be a joke character, and I know you can kill him without consequence, but put yourself into the shoes of a new player who does NOT know this game inside and out, nor has a walkthrough handy. What Mud does, gameplay wise, is teach the player two things; Don’t talk to everybody (actively bad advice in this game), and NPCs are unhelpful (also actively bad advice). This is on top of the fact that he’s just straight up irritating (when he interacts with you, something you can’t avoid except by being in a dialogue, your character stops dead, slooowly pivots, and then lets him talk before you can proceed)…
15. Intro: Tutorialization: …so enjoy that double negative, Mud
16. Intro: Guidance: Actually inaccurate directions in the early game. I’ll pull out just one example; You’re flat out told to go left from the entrance, towards the arena, to find an NPC. That NPC is actually to the RIGHT in the outer ring, near the front gate. And to be very clear, since ‘right and left’ are subjective, it’s in the opposite direction of the arena
17. Tutorialization: Mining! You can do it, and it does… NOTHING. It just wastes time. Sucks to be you
18. Walkthroughitis: Old Camp. Good luck figuring out… ANYthing here. Just, absolutely anything. I know part of the point is to be open ended but this is nonsense
19. Walkthroughitis: The Mine. Yes this is another example of an area that boils down to ‘go look up a walkthrough’
20. Walkthroughitis: New Camp. You uh… you know what I’m going to say here
21. Walkthroughitis: The Swamp Camp. I… you get the idea
22. Seconds In Minutes: Looting primarily but, honestly, everything in the game kind of falls into this. Oh hey this is a good time to talk about…
23. Traversal: …getting around. I have a term I call ‘Walk walk walk’ to describe this, and by God it fits here. There is a lot of walking around (more on that in a sec) and for a fairly large swath of the game your only options are to walk there, or burn a short potion to walk there slightly faster for up to 5 minutes. This dovetails with…
24. Controls: …there being no autorun button. I’ve dinged several games for this problem over the years and it absolutely qualifies here. If I’m just walking in a line for minutes at a time doing absolutely nothing, let me relax my finger please and not have to hold down ‘W’ the entire time. This wouldn’t be as egregious if not for…
25. Backtracking: …the backtracking. I’m actually going to part and parcel this out because the game is built around backtracking, in a bad way, but the specifics vary. For example in Chapter 1 most quests don’t involve TOO much mandatory backtracking, so that’s just a single negative…
26. Backtracking: …but then you get to the late Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 stuff which mandates crossing the entire map a bare minimum of twice (depending on which camp you joined)
27. Terrain: Trees. The trees have collision boxes, even where there’s no graphic on the branches and (this is important) tree branches stretch over roads. Y’know, the things you’re most likely to be walking on
28. MSQ: The spider pit. First, walkthroughitis, of course, but let’s skip past that. There’s this pit which has two buggy ladders in front of it and some very janky cliff terrain which is irritating to navigate down, enemies that aggro you while you’re up (meaning you start in combat, and they’re harder to hit with a bow due to being at your feet), and the ladder down takes so long AND is unskippable that they’ll murder you before you dismount. The solution here is to actually leap down, at an angle, over at one side of the cave, to find a spot where you can land and draw your weapon before they kill your face off
29. Difficulty Curve: This is as good a time as any to mention that this game is exceptionally stat-walled. Thanks to how armor works there really is no avoiding intended difficulty cliffs. You have the necessary gear, or you don’t
30. Bug: Many. Small and large, there are quite a few. Twice we were softlocked and needed console commands to escape
31. Level: Do you like small, repeating corridors with swarms of enemies in a game built around one on one combat?! Cuz I sure do!
32. Audio Spam: Harpies. Good lord, harpies. Louder than usual AND unpleasantly shrieky
33. MSQ: So the main quest really takes off after Chapter 2 and it’s… fine? I guess? I mean it has issues, but it’s linear and that causes its own issues, but what this negative is really for is for a giant swath of irritating backtracking and dungeon crawling
34. MSQ: Then there’s multiple dungeons in a row where there’s a ton of enemy spam. Like, WAY too much enemy spam, across a huge swath of terrain
35. Bug: Enemies getting into your hitbox. So, enemies like to try and get as close to you as they can as part of their attacks. Especially for monsters that have a ‘long’ part, like raptors or birds, they’ll then get their faces wedged ‘inside’ your hitbox. This means their animations get stuck and they just rapid fire attack you, much faster than they should. Further this also means YOU can’t do any of YOUR actions, except for back up. And it happens so fast it’s hard to react quickly enough, and usually still involves losing some health you shouldn’t have
36. Backtracking: So, Chapter 3 is the king of backtracking. Traipsing across the entire map (arguably for the first time) to get all the pieces. At least they give us a map
37. Difficulty Curve: Hey y’know what’d be a great idea? By Chapter 4 the player’s starting to figure things out so let’s throw an absolutely insane quantity of extremely hard hitting, high armor enemies at them in a mandatory quest area
38. MSQ: Hope you brought the right specific types of weapons to damage these stupid golems otherwise screw you. Also they can stunlock the piss out of you because screw you
39. Bug: Winches and gates regularly bug out and require reloads or console commands to bypass
40. Encounter: *rubs eyes* Okay so this is just for encounter design in general. Who in God’s green earth thought it’d be a great idea to not only swarm the player with enemies, but mix and match ranged and melee enemies? I remind you in this game that armor tends to have increased arrow defense OR melee, not both
41. Enemy Design: Enemy design… is awful. I mentioned a bug earlier which ties into this, but almost every enemy in the game follows the exact same structure, and that structure sucks
42. Enemy Variety: Also every enemy in the game is functionally identical. That’s an exaggeration, but there’s only actually TWO enemy types, and both still approach you the same way (charge, back off, circle, repeat)
43. Gotcha: So the game likes to pull this bullcrap where you walk near someone, and it’s always a person, and they initiate conversation. So you’re locked into convo, and then they say “Rawr I’m going to kill you”, and then initiate aggro against you. While you’re nearby, without your weapon out. There’s NO real way to know this is coming either. So in practical application this is a ‘gotcha!’ because each time it happens it just means reloading and then charging in weapons blazing instead of talking
44. Build: Yeah by the way the game actively punishes building in certain ways. Want to be a ranger? Sure, but magic and two handed are mandatory. Want to be a melee? Sure, but have fun with the mandatory magic and ranged enemies and quests. Want to be a mage? Sure but, again, two handed. Y’know, speaking of mages…
45. Kit: Magic sucks in this game. No that’s not true, CASTING sucks in this game. Spells (AND scrolls) both take Mana, Mana is very limited, and there’s only two ways to get it back; neither of which is doable in combat. And while I’m at it…
46. Core Combat: Mana in general and health in general. You have items you can use to bring both back, but you functionally cannot use an item in combat. Oh you CAN but it involves putting your weapon away (while the enemies are beating on you), opening menu (which doesn’t pause the game), navigating to the right thing, using the item (animation), closing the menu, then trying to draw your weapon again (which can be interrupted by enemy attacks)
47. Pathfinding: This isn’t related to the above just… pathfinding in this game is legitimately awful. At first it was funny but the amount of quests that got borked because someone got stuck on a ledge, corner, or doorway stopped being funny…
48. Pathfinding: …and just started being irritating
49. Enemy Design: Minecrawlers and their armor. This is kind of related to a later issue, but these enemies are absolute trash for the point at which you fight them. You have to have a REALLY cranked damage output (in one manner or another), rely on your ally (good luck on that, see the above pathfinding issues), or crit-farm. If you have the basic ability TO crit of course
50. Terrain: So let’s talk about the New Mine, and how it’s the worst Goddamned part of the entire game. I spent 5 hours of my life in this hellblasted place so forgive me as I get a bit verbose here. First and foremost, the terrain design inside and out is actively awful. It’s SO bad that your mandatory escort NPC has extra scripts to teleport him to you at key points…
51. Terrain: …and it’s distressingly easy for him, the enemies, or YOU to get stuck in the terrain
52. Bug: By the way it’s possible to permanently lose loot in the walls thanks to this
53. Encounter: Then we have the encounter design in this place, which is absolutely freaking awful. The enemy is across a long bridge, with two archers on either side, and two melee guys in the middle. I get it, it’s sound strategy, but in a game like this it’s just irritating and awful to deal with because there are so few options (further limited by your current build). Then there’s the NEXT room which has two more archers, then the NEXT room which has THREE archers now. This whole place took an eternity of trial and error reloading…
54. Encounter: …and I want to remind you, I had very good gear, two handed skill maxed, a very nice two handed axe, and was decent level and I was getting murdered in seconds
55. Difficulty Curve: Speaking of. The way the game scales damage output and varies damage types would be great if it gave you a way to mitigate or deal with it. Which it either doesn’t or the method is so obtuse as to be non-existent
56. Guidance: By the way good luck figuring out where to go in this stupid place. Hell, the game’s not even very clear about when you actually finish the quest in here
57. Visual Distinction: Also good luck finding the orc, or the potion, or anything else
58. MSQ: Then it’s fetch quest time! AGAIN, freaking AGAIN we’re doing another cross the entire world fetch quest. Hokay. So first step, kill a troll. Problems? Well, if you don’t talk to Gorn on the way out (an easy thing to do) there IS no troll. I remind you killing the only two trolls in the game was mandatory prior to this point so there’s no ‘leave one alive for later’. Oh also there’s no shrink scroll this time so you have to buy some from Xardus, hope you both knew that and don’t screw up considering how few he has for sale…
59. MSQ: …so just… screw all of that
60. Padding: Okay so this is a weird one but hear me out. The game has a system in place where you can only see certain types of loot off certain mobs by having the training for it. Well, talking to the orc gives you the training to see the quest items off these four enemy types. Which means there is absolutely no way to have gotten them in advance, you HAVE to go find new types to kill for this quest. I sure hope you haven’t been thorough in ‘sweeping’ entire areas of enemies as you travel, like the game both encourages and rewards, or else you might have a much harder time finding these
61. MSQ: By the way the quest turn in is back in the New Mine. At the very… very end of the New Mine. So you have to go ALL THE WAY BACK THROUGH THE SAME GOD DAMNED MINE FOR THE FIFTIETH TIME TO TURN IN THE QUEST
62. Backtracking: Oh, and then you have to leave manually! Because the teleport runes, which you DO have at this point (mandatory quest rewards and all that) do not work in a mine! So just go back through it! Again! Again again!
63. Enemy Design: Anyone with a bow. Their damage bypasses most armor and their attack speed is bonkers
64. MSQ: God where do I even begin with all of Chapter 5? Just… the whole thing. Let’s start by talking about how the traps in here will just straight up kill you instantly if you stumble into them. And I do mean stumble, it’s very easy to do so accidentally even if you see them coming and know what you’re doing
65. Encounter: I’m going to give a special negative for the hallway of spikes. You HAVE to go through this hallway (twice!). Any touch of the spikes instantly kills you. Their hurtbox extends past the graphic so you have to wait until a tiny bit after they’re fully submerged. Also each individual spike plate is ‘offset’ in its animation, meaning not only is there no set pattern to follow but you can end up ‘trapped’ by the RNG of the cycle
66. Terrain: Then there’s the jumping puzzles. There’s only two, but I mean… there’s jumping puzzles. In THIS game. I honestly think this speaks for itself, but having to save on every single platform for every single successful jump says it all
67. Seconds In Minutes: Did I mention we spent about four hours going through this hellscape? The whole game is like this really; Everything just takes too damned long. Walking, looting, fighting, even the puzzles activating just takes too damned long…
68. Seconds In Minutes: …and I’m going to triple down…
69. Seconds In Minutes: …on this colossal waste of my time
70. Padding: Oh I’m not done yet. Because the sheer size of the dungeon, even ignoring SiM above, is still too damned large. This is especially true because…
71. Backtracking: …you have to go all the way back out once you’ve gotten to the end, to power up the sword! Oh and of course once we’ve done that…
72. Backtracking: …we get to come all the way BACK in! This is the same problem we had in the New Mine and honestly it’s even worse here
73. Early Game: So, this might be the actual worst Early Game Hell I’ve ever seen. I’m sure that’s up for debate but…
74. Early Game: …let’s just double down on that
75. Kit: Archery. So first of all, melee is just the best (we talked about that earlier) but at least magic CAN be useful… buuut then there’s archery. Bows fall behind hard, and you actively cannot beat the last few fights without a two handed weapon (or a spell)
76. MSQ: So there’s an asshole moment I forgot to mention earlier. After doing the entire New Mine quest and then the fetch quest and then doing the New Mine again you are given something to make orcs friendly. You are THEN sent to the orc camp and told flat out that the only way in is to use magic which will aggro the orcs, with or without the totem you just got. Because SCREW you
77. Info In Game: So the game gives you the best weapon in the game (you spend multiple entire quests just getting this thing) aaand… it… does magic damage. Exclusively. By the way most of the enemies you’re fighting from this point onwards have extreme resistance to magic damage. Because of course they do
78. Outro: Boss: The final boss is a combination of awful (here’s like fifteen guys to fight who do insane damage) and boring (go stab these statues five times). And that’s…
79. Outro: Boss: …awful. Y’know what, no I’m being too kind, those two negatives are for the first final boss
80. Outro: Boss: THESE two negatives are for the statue thing. The former is awful…
81. Outro: Boss: …this one is boring
82. Replayability: Nnnope. There’s too many parts of the game that are actively antagonistic towards replaying
83. Sound Design: Audio balancing is all over the place

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: Kur. I’m especially fond of the spore ‘ceiling’ on the surface of the planet
2. Brickwork: Edin. The ruins, the lush fields, probably the only place that actually looks outdoors
3. Spritework: Bosses, the main character, and general eldritch horror
4. Visual Storytelling: Plenty, as per usual for this type of game. My personal favorite is the prison with increasingly large piles of corpses
5. Background Lore: Notes. These are completely out of order (of course) but offer interesting snippets into what’s going on
6. MSQ: The ‘vision’ sequence as we become ill. This is honestly brilliantly done, between the slowly changing landscape as we progress and the, shall we say ‘unique’ dialogue
7. Moment: The revelation of our past and history, with no real connection to the present, presents a fascinating puzzle piece

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Minigame: Speedrun mode. Fairly basic, but still well done and it’s nice to have the baked in timers
2. Minigame: Randomizer mode. Good progression logic options, good QoL and HUD options…
3. Minigame: …overall…
4. Minigame: …very solid
5. Controls: There are a few issues with specifics, but it needs to be emphasized that outside of that the game controls very tightly…
6. Controls: …and offers some solid rebinding options
7. Minimap: Really good minimap. Distinct and helpful
8. Map: The map is… fine. The fact that you can mark it is nice, the fact that you can only mark two spaces is not. It still does the…
9. Guidance: …thing where it helps indicate where to go based on map design, which is nice
10. Visual Distinction: With a few exceptions, it’s very clear and distinct what you can interact with and where
11. Save: Saves are… I mean they’re Metroid, but progress keeps regardless
12. Music: There’s some… issues here and there, but overall the soundtrack’s still solid
13. Kit: This is going to sound weird considering the sheer quantity of guns you have but I think it’s only one positive worthy because there’s not as much variety as it looks and a HUGE number of the guns (like… half of them) just aren’t useful. What’s there is still good and still fun but it should have been better
14. Kit: Aside from weapons there is some good utility stuff here. The drone, by itself, deserves mention for being crazy good. It’s an extra HP bar, more navigation, and later on a straight up teleport
15. Intro: Tutorialization: Initial steps (gun for gluck, spread gun for remote switches, drill for SOME blocks)
16. Tutorialization: Periodic but consistent. Almost every new mechanic has the same pattern; Here’s something you clearly can’t do, here’s the item, the only way out is to use the item, now you can go do the thing you just passed. This is simple yet solid; It’s a great way to immediately showcase to the player exactly how to use their new kit
17. Level: Absu 1. Our first trip through involves a whole lot of ‘come back to this later’ but the flow of it is very well laid out. No bumps on the road, literally or metaphorically
18. Level: Zi 1 is when the game starts opening up in terms of puzzle design and backtracking. New kit really helps unlock this area which… is good since we’re stuck here, hah
19. Level: Kur 1. This dovetails more or less directly into Zi 1, with both areas having a lot of shared progress, puzzles, and navigation through them
20. Guidance: Early game has… weird guidance. When it’s good it’s really good
21. Level: There’s a second ‘loop’ where you backtrack for a bit and get items. There’s a few issues with it (noted later) but there’s still a lot of good level design here. In fact this is a good time to bring up…
22. Terrain: …somewhere where I think the game truly shines. There’s clear and careful thought put into the placement of basically everything, allowing for proper challenge the first time you go through an area as well as speeding things up considerably upon getting new kit…
23. Terrain: …easy double by itself
24. Boss: Uruku. Lots of moving pieces, most of which are optional, and nice clear indicators of where to glitch to gain platforms
25. Itemization: Spread of items, upgrades, weapons…
26. Itemization: …lots, and all over the place, and well spaced. Only exceptions are a few specific weapons (noted later under Kit negatives)
27. Replayability: Generally replayable, especially with routing

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Boss: Gir-Tab, the ‘underside’ boss. This guy is just… kind of boring. There’s one very small area under him which is his weak spot, and only two of his attacks can hit you while crouched. And the gun that hits down there does low damage and he has a lot of health
2. Visual Navigation: There’s… a weird lack of proper navigation in zone design and general visuals. I find myself having to cross check the map and my location pretty often (or just relying on memory) to figure out where I am
3. Visual Distinction: It’s infrequent, but there are a few times where it’s honestly hard to see what’s a navigable space and what isn’t. Honestly this is probably on purpose because…
4. Walkthroughitis: …of secrets. This game has a bit of the ‘scan everywhere’ problem Super Metroid does, but even more obtuse in the specifics…
5. Walkthroughitis: …earning it…
6. Walkthroughitis: …a full triple
7. Guidance: At a certain point, basically past the early game I’d say, the game opens up… in terms of what you can do. But it does NOT offer kit to really expedite that process, so it comes into this weird situation where it’s a bit ‘too’ open in what you can do now. To explain this differently; If the game guided you on a path of progression, OR if it allowed for better kit and traversal options, this wouldn’t be an issue. But in the absence of both it’s a bit irritating
8. Overworld: Getting from Point A to Point B is just entirely too arduous. This is related to the above point, but it really needs to be mentioned how needlessly time consuming and irritating it is
9. Backtracking: Even if you just follow the critical path there’s a fair bit of this and it’s not super great for the above reasons
10. Raspberry Jam: Low health beedleeps. At first I figured they weren’t that bad, but no they’re bad
11. MSQ: Consider this a general negative for the quality of the game dipping noticeably the moment we hit Edin…
12. Enemy Design: …especially in what they do with enemies here. Very small, very irritating to hit (they love to path into your hitbox), and doing way too much damage
13. Boss: Ukhu is probably the worst boss thusfar. Very few attacks, weird ‘tracking’ which adds some weird RNG to the fight, aggravating adds which charge you and do way too much damage, and a tiny vuln point
14. Kit: There’s entirely too many weapons that… aren’t designed for the game at hand. They either have too niche a usefulness or are actively downgrades, or you find them entirely too late in the game
15. Outro: Level: Maru-Uru. This is just miserable. Tight corridors to interrupt movement, enemy spam with entirely too much health and entirely too much damage, all while spreading out save points
16. Sound: Some audio spam, some ear piercing effects which play often
17. Controls: So there’s a glitch with dashing. Or rather it’s working exactly as intended. Any double tap dashes… ANY double tap, even accidental, like while maneuvering or doing precise jumps. And worse, there is NO rebinding of the dash, so you’re stuck with that

Story Positives:

1. Voice Acting: There’s a few blips, but we have a pretty solid cast overall here
2. Spritework: I absolutely love the visuals of the cast themselves. While I have a related animation issue (mentioned later), the visuals themselves are fantastic. The outfits, the style of their anthropomorphization, the colors, the guesswork of which dinosaur is which…
3. Spritework: …it’s…
4. Spritework: …fantastic stuff
5. Brickwork: The background paintings are solid throughout
6. Dialogue: A lot of this dialogue is well written for what it’s going for. In fact it’s a bit too well written, to the point where it might be a negative (still debating as of this writing), but…
7. Writing: …there’s no denying that the writers did a good job incapsulating how awkward not-speak kids are when talking to each other (and to anyone, really)
8. Writing: I love how low tier the stakes are. And I love each time there’s a ‘big deal’ about something like getting a MIDI controller fixed, or finding a pet slug
9. Storytelling Mechanic: Text usage, specifically on the dialogue options. Emotion is immediately and clearly indicated, both by the outline of the choices themselves and the ‘hard’ choices you can make at some points
10. Moment: Naomi’s incredibly real presentation in Assembly
11. Humor: I’ll admit it, game made me laugh pretty hard more than once
12. Plot: Fang’s musical career. The significance of it to them, how much it sucks them in versus everyone else, the connections it provokes, and how it impacts Trish and her life
13. Spritework: Bonus points for the extra sprites and poses drawn up for L&L
14. MSQ: The first L&L session is adorable
15. Cutscene: “We don’t owe them ‘normal’”
16. Voice Acting: Naomi deserves a special mention for absolutely nailing the voice acting
17. Music Direction: I mean, yeah. Good songs used well, what do you want from me
18. MSQ: The follow through L&L sessions are weirdly good
19. MSQ: There’s some stumbling (which is why this is only a single, aggregate positive) but there’s still some good stuff at the beach scene. The escalation of the panic attack, the confrontation, reaching out to Reed and Stella, concluding Naomi’s arc, etc.
20. Moment: For all the issues leading up to it, Naomi and Fang’s beach date is very cute
21. Character: Stella. Legit, vulnerable, well acted, and supportive throughout
22. Character: Naomi is fantastically adorable in her presentation, voice acting (mentioned earlier), and layers
23. Character: Fang, of course. We get to see inside their head a lot which probably helps, but regardless of that there’s a lot going on with them that the game does a lot with
24. Character: Reed. Already one foot into adulthood, already and far more organized and on top of things than he seems
25. Character: Jeff. Obviously having issues dealing with his life and punching back the entire time. Also totally adorable
26. Character: Naser. The brother who, ironically, is one hell of bro archetype
27. Character: Trish. Initially irritating but honestly she grew on me pretty hard, and she has a lot of good stuff going on in the background
28. Moment: Their last phone call with their parents. Mom even called them Fang

Story Negatives:

1. Animation: The animation is… bad. Actively bad. Weird, awkward poses, bad mouth flaps, and odd stuttering movements that feel stiff and (worst of all) unnecessary. If I can derail for a second; Hitman 2 (the recent one) was running into budget issues and so decided to do this fantastic idea of having posed 3D scenes for its cutscenes which they could then pan the camera through. It was a great stylistic choice and worked very well thanks almost entirely to excellent direction. I feel like, given the fully 3D Unity models used here, a similar approach could have worked wonders
2. Dialogue: So I mentioned this earlier. The dialogue is well written and the perspective is accurate… but it still makes for cringey, awkward dialogue
3. MSQ: So the entire sequence after the Battle of the Bands kind of sucks. There’s the obvious Third Act Breakup (mentioned down in gameplay negatives) but this is then instantly followed with us being a rude dick to our biggest supporters for no reason AND then, after finally connecting with Naomi, telling her to piss off (with no choice on the matter)
4. Plot: Naomi’s ‘romance’ has some problematic build up. Like a lot, honestly. I think this might be related to…
5. Story Sequencing: …the rewrite issues that happened in mid production. This is speculative of course but there are repeated and multiple moments where the story clearly just… skips a beat, or two, or three. Major moments are pushed off camera, or are referenced only once. It’s very strange, and contributes to a related problem…
6. Internal Continuity: …the game has a hard time keeping track of itself. For… basically every reason I just mentioned
7. Outro: The ending kind of just… stops. It’s a bit of a cop out and doesn’t resolve anything, thematically or literally…
8. Outro: …and honestly the heavy hinting of it being the end of everything doesn’t help anything, especially given how central it is to the entire work. If I might add something more here to further explain; I honestly think there was no way to make the ending work. One way or another this would have been a negative. The central plot was too bleak, and the central theme and plot too uplifting and hopeful, for the two to gel well together. If they survive, it’s a negative for lack of payoff. If they all die, it’s nine negatives for awfulness. And in this case, it’s two, for being a nothingburger and being a cop out

Gameplay Positives:

1. Choices: Difficult choices and internalized choices are a great way to indicate what types of choices the player is making, and force them to ‘earn it’ a bit more. Honestly if the choices were honored more than a Telltale game this would’ve been more positives
2. Music: I mean it’s a central mechanic

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Intro: Literally false tutorialization for the rhythm sequences
2. Save: So… there’s no real saves to speak of. There’s your latest checkpoint, and that’s it. In a game all about Choice gameplay this is the type of thing that I’d consider almost mandatory for at least three reasons (allowing players to experience multiple options, allows for re-experiencing specific parts of the story, and allows for seemingly major choices to be stored for later)
3. Save: It gets worse than that though because the game is entirely checkpoint based AND when you go to start a new game the previous run is totally erased. It’s forced ironman mode. And that’s pretty much never a good thing
4. Sound Design: Quite a few weird, little, but persistent glitches in the sound editing. Reverb being applied incorrectly, lines being chopped early, unusual post processing periodically, etc.
5. Penalty For Failure: Or rather, lack thereof
6. Choice: Lack of acknowledgement of rep or choices in the mandatory Third Act Breakup scene. To be more clear; The game has had plenty of choices up until now for how to handle dealing with the characters, including Trish. And after doing everything in my power to be understanding of her decisions and needs, which even led to her flat out stating that she was taking a break from the band, this is treated like it’s a bombshell dropped on people. This throws not just one choice, but dozens of choices across multiple hours completely out the window
7. Unskippable Cutscenes: So this is… weird. This is more of a problem due to the above mentioned lack of saves but it’s a problem regardless. Dialogue options are skippable as per the usual for this format, but then there’s everything else (usually animations, or slow pans). And those are not skippable. And they are numerous
8. Replayability: Between unskippables, lack of consequences mattering, and no proper checkpoints or saves… yeah

Story Positives:

1. Intro: Character Creation. No, hear me out, there’s some nice flavor and roleplay involved, and it helps establish our connection to the character we’re playing
2. Intro: The opening movie is simple but solid. Well acted, and does a good job of establishing our setup
3. Music Direction: Dungeon music. No, seriously, it adds to the atmosphere pretty nicely. And I sure hope so given how much time you spend down there, hah
4. Background Lore: NPCs in general. It’s not much but there’s enough work put into their different dialogues and how they react to you
5. Atmosphere: I was torn on this one. There’s a bit of a vibe to the whole game, helped by how incredibly grounded so much of it really is. The entire plot…
6. Plot: …is focused on the political machinations of the local nobility, primarily focused on the three nearby major kingdoms (Sentinel, Daggerfall, and Wayrest) and how their games play out. It’s bizarrely engaging…
7. MSQ: …and kept me interested…
8. MSQ: …the entire primary chain up to the Totem
9. MSQ: The tragedy of Caiv and the Sentinel royalty
10. Internal Continuity: Lots, weirdly. Lots of named characters, most of whom intersect or interact directly one with another…
11. Internal Continuity: …for an easy double
12. Dialogue: I’ve read better, but I do quite enjoy the writing of the characters in this one
13. MSQ: Another excellent quest is the Blackmail one (probably the best quest in the game overall). Lots of possible options for how to play it out of course, but the way the blackmail itself is being delivered is delicious, and the characters’ reactions to it are great
14. Prime Opt: I actually changed my mind on this a few times, but I do like the little tidbits of flavor in the Guild quests. There’s no plot or characters to speak of, just flavor. The Mage’s Guild helping to open a magically locked box, the Knights chasing down a criminal, the Fighter’s Guild dealing with an undead husband, stuff like that
15. Characters: Several. Most only get one or two quests to themselves, but the nobility and the related personalities and political intrigue still makes them interesting
16. World Building: Not as much as later games, but we do get a pretty good feel for the immediate history of the Iliac Bay

Story Negatives:

1. Brickwork: Dungeons. I’m so sick of the same three tilesets in every dungeon in the entire game, of which there are literal dozens. Just in this playthrough we hit 30 or so. Just… picture that for a second. 30 dungeons of awful textures…
2. Brickwork: …over…
3. Brickwork: …and over
4. Architecture: So… this is something we’ve actually already discussed in Starfield (despite being a game that came out 27 years later) but both games do the exact inverse of good Architecture design. Towns ARE large but FEEL small. Daggerfall towns, for their part, are just gigantic sprawling empty fields with occasional buildings, most of which are pointless and unlabeled, and so you end up just roaming around trying to find a building worth a damn
5. Outro: The entire Aetherius is… weird. Not in a good way. Also of course Sheogorath is here (in fact this makes him the ONLY Daedric Prince with MSQ presence in the game, go figure)
6. Outro: Also the ending is just a complete nothingburger
7. Voice Acting: Every cutscene in the game has someone talking inside of a well and barely audible… and a terrible actor regardless
8. Spritework: I’m going to not be mean and merely give one negative for the awful, awful character sprites in this game. (I mean at least monsters and named characters are fine)

Gameplay Positives:

1. Mod Support: So this is a good time to remind people we were specifically reviewing the Unity version. And that means plenty of mod support. So! First up is Ease Of Use. There’s some options to open up your mod folder in game, and enable or disable is right there too
2. Mod Support: Depth. I’ve seen mods that add entire mechanisms for sailing, a functioning trade economy, new console commands…
3. Mod Support: …well…
4. Mod Support: …you get the point
5. Options: Specific to the Unity version (of course) but there’s good menu options here
6. Starting Options: I mean we spent an hour on character creation, but this is honestly pretty legit. Decent options, decent methods of picking those options, and lots of ways to set yourself up. Some builds suck of course but still…
7. Starting Options: …solid stuff
8. Builds: There’s several builds which are objectively worse, but there’s still a lot of Build potential here. Lots of skills, lots of synergies, lots of advantages and disadvantages…
9. Builds: …easy double
10. Kit: Spell crafting is a little irritating to interact with the interface but otherwise still has fantastic options and malleability…
11. Kit: …and still deserves…
12. Kit: …an easy triple
13. Kit: Spells in general. Decent spread of buffs, debuffs, and utility
14. Kit: Vampirism and lycanthropy. These are nice little cost benefit side things you can contract, with plenty of warning and time to cure (and a cure afterwards if you change your mind), that can change your playstyle pretty substantially
15. Crafting: Enchanting. This is cool stuff, allowing you to add advantages and disadvantages to even out what you make and how good it is. It also means you can make totally different types of items to help out with different situations…
16. Crafting: …solid double
17. Crafting: Alchemy is… fine. It’s not nearly as fantastic as enchanting or spellcrafting, but it’s still cool. Its main issue is how high rank you have to be to even access the feature. Can still make some neat stuff though
18. QoL: Horses and Wagons, both of which are quite accessible and affordable and REALLY help out with stamina usage and loot hauling
19. Fast Travel: I mean, yeah. This kind of dovetails into the next two points
20. Map: For what it’s worth I actually do like the maps. I don’t think they’re good enough for individual positives but I do rather like the town one, and its labeling feature
21. Traversal: Okay so this is a weird one because there’s no real… gameplay here technically, but there IS a smart search feature on the map along with multiple options for how exactly you want to traverse, as well as features in the game to make it smoother (horse, rank with the Knights, etc.)
22. Traversal: Climbing and Levitation. Minor things, and the dungeons are designed around it, but it opens things up more than you’d think
23. Intro: Level: So call me weird but I actually like the intro dungeon. It’s nothing fancy but there is a nice gradient of difficulty, interactions, and multiple paths forward
24. Tutorialization: Unity specifically adds a really nice, very helpful, and optional tutorial which honestly was a Godsend
25. MSQ: My God, an actually good quest. The quest Blackmail is very simple (deliver a letter, then another one) but you can open one (or the other), turn them in normally with or without opening, and also betray the quest giver! All of these change the dialogues, rewards, and reps
26. Flow: MSQ. No, hear me out, once you get on the MSQ chains proper they kind of dovetail nicely into each other. It helps that multiple of them hit the same three cities for the three major kingdoms, and their internal timers tend to line up nicely. (There are however some bug related issues too)
27. Cheats: The Unity version, specifically, not only has the built in console (like usual) but a really well designed and dedicated HELP menu (which it prompts you for) whiiiich means the cheats functionally exist for a normal player. And this means…
28. Cheats: …good…
29. Cheats: …console commands
30. Replayability: I feel weird giving this but… yeah. By its nature it gets the second Replay positive
31. Save: Quick and easy saves…
32. Save: …and solid quicksave and quickload

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Guidance: Town quests. Goooood friggin’ luck with town quests if your rep is low, because you’ll be told to either find a person or a person’s house, and that involves asking around town. And if they don’t like you, sucks to be you. This can get absolutely aggravating as there really is no viable alternative to this other than just checking every single house manually and I’m sorry but did you see how many houses there are?
2. Controls: Casting is needlessly obtuse. Select then cast, maybe, hope you’re ready for it or are prepared to mash ‘previous, click, previous, click’ over and over
3. Build: It’s not as bad as some games I could mention, but it’s still possible to Build yourself completely into a corner. This is especially true with…
4. Early Game Hell: …the early game. Unless you’ve set up an exploit Build or other similar setup there’s a very high chance you’ll find yourself saving and reloading… a lot… in the beginning of the game. Sure hope you brought that Ebony Dagger from character creation…
5. Early Game Hell: …cuz if you didn’t, screw you
6. Walkthroughitis: Good luck figuring out how to even start half the MSQ, nevermind who specifically to talk to
7. Padding: Towns. Towns are too numerous, too empty, and too pointless…
8. Padding: …for…
9. Padding: …a triple
10. Overworld: Or lack thereof. There IS no overworld. It’s a step up from Arena (remember that nonsense?) but that’s not saying much. There is zero reason to actually walk to your destination except in very rare circumstance, and even if you do there is NOTHING here…
11. Overworld: …just endless fields…
12. Overworld: …of repeated textures
13. QoL: Enchanted weapons freeing. I wasn’t sure if this was a bug or not but apparently once an item enchanted with a monster’s soul runs out the monster pops out on the spot so… hope you’re ready for that
14. Grind: By the way, two major mechanics are locked behind being pretty high rep with guilds (Alchemy and Enchanting) and that is one hell of a slog to get to those ranks
15. Level: Okay so let’s talk about this for a second. Dungeons are procedurally generated. But unlike some games we’ve covered before they’re all kind of… the same. Same pieces, same style, same design philosophy. Sure the individual pieces are adjusted slightly but it’s just ‘the dungeon’ when doing the side stuff. Now we’re playing the Unity version so these aren’t terribad, but they’re… not good. They’re irritating to navigate, the samey textures makes getting around a colossal pain, and the fact that the tileset is near identical across all of them actually contributes to having issues remembering where you’ve gone and where you’re going. All of this means that, after some considerable thought, I’m going to give each dungeon we end up doing for quests (as in everything but MSQ) earns its own negative. If a particular combination is noteworthy I’ll mention it but otherwise this is just going to be piled on. So first we have the first Knight quest dungeon
16. Level: Then was another Knight dungeon (a fort this time… with friggin’ Zombies)
17. Level: The Fighter’s Guild had another one after that. Giants this time
18. Level: And another. Giants again
19. Level: Here’s a Knight quest dungeon
20. Level: So then I did a Mage’s Guild quest. I hope you enjoy fighting a bajillion lycanthropes
21. Level: Castle Shedungent can go straight to hell. As an MSQ dungeon it’s much larger and more irritating than your typical dungeon, and at the end is a ‘puzzle’ with no real visible solution (so thank God for walkthroughs)…
22. Level: …and enjoy this double negative
23. Level: The random dungeon for The Beast MSQ
24. Level: Hey, another gigantic MSQ dungeon! This one is for Mynisera’s Letters…
25. Level: …and it is enormous. In fact I know this dungeon, it’s where I quit the game last time
26. Walkthroughitis: By the way GOOD luck knowing you can interact with frickin’ skulls!
27. MSQ: Guards aggro upon talking to the lady who is part of the actually-mandatory MSQ chain
28. MSQ: Another random dungeon for the Missing Prince quest
29. Gotcha: Diseases. You don’t know you get them at first, which seems fine, but sure hope you’ve been raising your medical skill to figure it out because otherwise it’s amazingly easy to get a disease, not KNOW it, fast travel, and instantly die. Worse, nothing indicates WHY you died, so you just… die, confused. Further, fast travel SPECIFICALLY triggers the death by disease, y’know… the thing you do constantly in this game because there might as well be no overworld. This is already pretty bad…
30. Interface: …but the lack of feedback is even worse because it’s very possible (due to the aforementioned lack of Medical skill and/or just basic timing thanks to the incubation period) to not know you have a disease, start fast travel, get disease, reach destination, die instantly… and have no idea why
31. Walkthroughitis: Good friggin’ luck finding that unicorn horn for Medora. Which is, I remind you, MSQ! (to be clear this involves navigating an already irritating main dungeon, finding a hidden switch, AND finding a hidden door in a seemingly empty room)
32. Level: Wayrest Castle is a manual dungeon…
33. Level: …and it’s a supersized suckitude dungeon
34. Level: Scourg Barrow is also manual…
35. Level: …there’s only so many ways I can describe how these suck
36. Level: Castle Llugwych is another manual dungeon…
37. Level: …there was a point in time during the playthrough when I was showing off another city sized dungeon and it had just lost its impact. It was, individually, one of the worst dungeons in gaming and it was like yep, another one. Just another awful dungeon
38. Level: Castle Sentinel has the worst puzzle in the entire game. Let’s first cover the awful, awful dungeon, which has a lot of elevators and switches…
39. Level: …and it’s just… it’s worse than most entire games…
40. Level: …in terms of level design, but then…
41. Walkthroughitis: …there’s its lever puzzle. This thing is awful. You have to hit certain switches in order. There’s NO indicator which switches do what or the order. Even knowing what they effect is a guessing game (it’s the force field placement) and even knowing that means a trek every single interaction to check. This is insane. I legitimately cannot imagine someone figuring this out through trial and error without spending literal hours here…
42. Walkthroughitis: …screw…
43. Walkthroughitis: …this puzzle
44. Backtracking: You have to go back through the friggin’ Direnni Tower a bare minimum of 3 times. It is for this purpose alone I place my Mark here and basically exploit it to avoid doing this friggin’ dungeon over and over. I literally have the route memorized from doing it so often. Thing is this isn’t exclusive to just this dungeon, it happens semi frequently in SEVERAL dungeons (even the manually crafted ones… another example is Orsinium)…
45. Backtracking: …so I hope you enjoy…
46. Backtracking: …redoing these stupid dungeons. Oh also they respawn every time you leave too
47. Level: Then there’s the dungeons we have to do for the Dark Brotherhood. Seven of them…
48. Level: …so…
49. Level: …that’s…
50. Level: …seven…
51. Level: …more…
52. Level: …terrible…
53. Level: …dungeons
54. Level: There’s 4 more Fighter’s Guild dungeons…
55. Level: …so…
56. Level: …enjoy…
57. Level: …those awful procedural dungeons
58. Level: Then the Knightly stuff. We’ve got a solid ten more of these…
59. Level: …I want you to realize I’m not being facetious when I say these are the worst dungeons I have encountered as of this point in time in gaming. Procedural is already problematic, the samey textures are bad, then you toss in the hidden doors and hidden levers (the levers are the worst, because doors you can SOMEtimes see, absolutely NOTHING indicates what a hidden lever is) and it just becomes even worse…
60. Level: …but what really grinds my gears is something I talked about on stream. See, if you’re good with navigation and visual memory you might be able to navigate one dungeon. But that one dungeon LOOKS the same as EVERY OTHER DUNGEON IN THE GAME. And so then you hit the second dungeon. And then the third. And then the thirtieth. At some point or another you run into the problem of not being capable of keeping them distinct in your mind because they all blend. Anyways…
61. Level: …for all of these reasons…
62. Level: …screw these dungeons…
63. Level: …we’re still on Knight dungeons by the way…
64. Level: …a few more…
65. Level: …almost there…
66. Level: …almost…
67. Level: …there
68. Level: And then there’s the Mage’s Guild stuff…
69. Level: …for a couple of more dungeons…
70. Level: …and by a couple…
71. Level: …I actually mean seven…
72. Level: …so let’s just…
73. Level: …jot all of these…
74. Level: …down
75. Level: Naturally Temples have tons of dungeons. Fortunately all Temples are functionally identical except for a few boosts (and Kyraneth not having frickin’ alchemy)…
76. Level: …okay this is it right? Yes, for real, these are the last negatives for the procedurals. Don’t worry I’m not giving 4,229 negatives to the game (yes that’s literally how many distinct dungeon entrances there are). I mean there’s also 4,400 ‘homes’…
77. Level: …1,532 ‘temples’…
78. Level: …and 5,090 ‘towns’…
79. Level: …and the sad part is Bethesda is probably proud of that colossal waste of everything…
80. Level: …okay, almost done with these negatives…
81. Level: …stay on target…
82. Level: …stay on target…
83. Level: …just a few more…
84. Level: …aaand there
85. Level: So! Lysandus’ Tomb. Oh my GOD. This place might actually be the largest dungeon so far, and while it doesn’t have the bullcrap puzzles like Castle Sentinel it’s still this colossally huge, incredibly easy to get lost in labyrinth of doom…
86. Level: …so enjoy…
87. Level: …that triple
88. Gotcha: Poison is even worse than Disease in every way. Poison is harder to cure (need a spell or item/potion) and very rapidly ticks down one of your primary attributes, and when I say rapidly I mean once every few seconds. Once that attribute hits zero you are dead. There is NO way you’ll survive fast travel, and you’re unlikely to survive manual travel. If you don’t have a way to cure it on you guess what, you’re going back a previous save…
89. Gotcha: …but wait, that’s just diseases, I hear you say. And yeah. The way it’s worse is even if you save or cure it, the attribute damage stays…
90. Gotcha: …until that’s healed separately, which is a whole thing
91. Gotcha: Also I forgot to mention Paralysis earlier. It’s actually pretty easy to bypass paralysis… IF you’re ready for it. If you’re not, SCREW you, you’re dead. There’s no way you’ll survive while standing there immobile
92. Bug: Quest triggers and overrides preventing progress without workarounds or console commands
93. Level: Orsinium. I ended up having to do this several times thanks to bugs and that doesn’t make it any better…
94. Level: …it’s still a colossal manual dungeon like all the rest
95. Gotcha: Magic door pit. Hope you brought either Open or Levitate! Cuz if not, you’re reloading a previous save
96. Bug: Totem turn in bugs giving you absolutely nothing for both Gortwog and Mannimarco
97. Outro: Level: The Floating Islands and the levitate levers
98. Outro: Level: The Great Pyramid and hitting just the right levers to open the way through the pyramid (good luck figuring THAT one out)
99. Outro: Level: The Upturned Shrine and… levers. Yes, really
100. Outro: Gotcha: There’s a trap which is designed to be inescapable in the final dungeon (the Blind God part specifically). Yes really. You can glitch out or warp out but that’s it
101. Outro: Level: Blind God and irritating platforming…
102. Outro: Walkthroughitis: …and yes, it’s another ‘guess the sequence with no feedback and irritating to check’ puzzle
103. Outro: Level: Sheogorath’s Crossbow is… it’s just obtuse nonsense. There’s bizarre puzzles and no hints about anything and it’s just the same as every other dungeon in the game but somehow worse…
104. Outro: Level: …and deserves the final…
105. Outro: Level: …triple
106. Core Combat: I mean Bethesda games aren’t known for their good combat but this one in particular has a near total lack of feedback that makes it worse than usual. That’s before we consider how awful archery is and how magic is just… bad…
107. Core Combat: …so…
108. Core Combat: …that’s a triple
109. Music: Awful, repetitive, and ear piercing (especially ‘town’ and ‘overworld’
110. Unintentional Skipping: So this is a weird one. If you fail a timer or say ‘no’ to a particular quest (notably the MSQ quests) sucks to be you because they do NOT come back. Not without console commands. So you can brick your entire save and have to reload or restart as a result…
111. Unintentional Skipping: …so that…
112. Unintentional Skipping: …sucks
113. Viscerality: Junk viscerality. I don’t want to be too unkind but it fails on every level, even the one thing the game could have managed (impact)…
114. Viscerality: …so enjoy that double

Story Positives:

1. Camera: Periodically they do this thing where the Nomad and Fabien talk and we see half of each’s face looking away from each other as their expressions follow
2. Brickwork: The city itself is, credit where it’s due, really well designed and gets across the vibe of the city streets really well…
3. Brickwork: …and deserves a double
4. Doodads: Also some fantastic doodad design throughout said city
5. Brickwork: Interiors are also kind of crazy well designed, which is doubly sad considering how little they’re utilized…
6. Brickwork: …easy double, especially with…
7. Doodads: …the interior doodads. I’ll zoom in on one example; the pawnshop. There’s clear design and thought put into the rows and what types of things should be on which shelves to make it actually look like a pawnshop…
8. Doodads: …it’s great stuff
9. Character: Tolly. He’s got several issues (like entirely too edgy dialogue) but I do like him in general and his actor is worth a damn so it helps
10. Character: Safia is a fascinating usage of the mad scientist archetype. She’s just sufficiently detached (as befitting a vampire), very enthusiastic about the things that interest her, and clearly hiding something
11. Storytelling Mechanic: Fabien’s usage of the Malkavian bane/quirk is great
12. MSQ: Fabien’s segments are some of the more interesting sequences in the game. The overall detective and pseudo-noir vibe works, plus it also does something else…
13. Atmosphere: …it’s the first bit of the game that does anything with its overall atmosphere. Fabien is pleasant, friendly, and borderline sociopathic in how little actual empathy he has for anybody. There’s a minor tidbit early on where he actually screws with someone’s brain rather than pay him 30 bucks that he owes him… and it’s mentioned multiple times that he’s done this repeatedly in the past. This all really sells the overall vibe; That no matter how a vampire appears they are, ultimately, lacking in their Humanity score
14. MSQ: Fabien’s first Court party does a weirdly large amount of things right. Isaac and his near perfect portrayal of Nosferatu, the twin Princes and their varying demeanor, it’s good stuff
15. MSQ: I admit it, I liked the Atrium segment. The Sabbat reveal was pretty ‘duh’ but despite the, uh, very amateurish execution (low resolution textures, gummi animation) there’s still something wonderfully horrifying about the mass cult control happening here
16. MSQ: The Willem bossfight’s visuals, escalation, and showcasing of Willem’s mind and memory…
17. MSQ: …and nice little inferences about the incidents in his life that he’s already lead as we see them from his perspective
18. MSQ: The third Fabien segment is, as usual, better designed than anything else in the game
19. Character: Willem is one of the more weirdly engaging characters. The first thing we see of him is wonderful tidbits of his past, followed by his death, followed by him immediately after his embrace, and he comes across as pretty legit the entire time
20. MSQ: As usual Fabien’s segments are good, but the fact that he ended up siring the woman he was searching for is a hell of a moment. And the fact that the player has the choice of deciding why he did it is a nice touch
21. Character: Ryong had a really bad introduction but grew weirdly better almost every scene she was in. A pragmatic, intelligent, cautious woman who’s in WAY over her head
22. Voice Actor: Fabien. He varies in quality (I swear there’s something going on here… different times in the booth or change in direction maybe) but he still manages to be decent AND he does all the voices for each of his inanimate objects he, uh, ‘interrogates’…
23. Storytelling Mechanic: …and honestly it’s a great idea and fantastic showcasing of how someone could do psychometry. Especially a malkavian
24. Moment: Okay. You got me game. Fabien putting together that Lou is the killer, approaching Campbell, aaand then Campbell dropping the bombshell; We’ve solved this case before. We don’t even know how many times we’ve solved the case, but it’s implied that it’s more than a few (we see that Fabien even solved the case back in the friggin’ 20s). And we get an awful first person perspective of Campbell using Dominate on us and our own feeble attempts to push back. Even better; We are able to remember being Dominated and the memory erasures because Phyre and their increased generation bypasses the memory block
25. Writing: The shockingly good dialogue of Safia’s confrontation with us. As we’re fully talking to Fabien, out loud even, the dialogue coincides with it sounding like we’re responding to Safia…
26. Moment: …and our choice at the last bit there (I went with “I trust you Fabien”) and us kicking off Safia at the last moment to fling ourselves out the window, followed by us barely surviving in direct sunlight long enough to crawl into the sewers, was just fantastic
27. Character: Good time to mention Fabien himself. While there’s some serious issues with his character (he honestly feels like at least two different characters crammed together) but he leans towards positive more than negative
28. MSQ: There is a wonderful symmetry to how Campbell, right before he’s going to kill us, forces us to check the chest… and then we successfully trick him, getting ourselves killed in the process. But ultimately we won, and that’s brilliant
29. Moment: I also have to give special mention to Campbell’s death. There is a wonderful moment where he starts to try to Dominate us, doesn’t even finish the words before he realizes how screwed he is, and then dies. Horribly
30. Outro: The finale is appropriately gruesome, and I even like how they show Safia as going full Caine

Story Negatives:

1. Intro: Dull exposition, lack of an interesting hook, and the whole thing feels thrown together. Little did I know this would prove prophetic
2. Character: Several characters… aren’t. Even Fabien, generally one of the more interesting characters, is clearly multiple characters slammed into one
3. Banter: That awful overly witty quipping. It’s only periodic but good lord it got old fast
4. Dialogue: Crude exposition in general
5. Moment: The introduction of Benny the Sheriff. The dialogue here is weird, stilted, and awkward, and the animation is bad
6. External Continuity: This one’s debatable but one way or another the game spends entirely too much time being eyebrow raising towards the setting
7. Writing: This is something that also is expressed in the Dialogue negatives further down but there is an extraordinarily large amount of crude storytelling in the writing. “As you know”, unnecessary repetition, and this weird tonal disconnect (as if the dialogues weren’t strung together as one sequence but as different recordings done at different times)…
8. Writing: …and it’s awful
9. MSQ: Lou Graham’s scene with us is… crude. A lot of weird half-hearted attempts at cleverness, posturing, and… well. Let me just say that I get what they’re going for but they fail miserably because…
10. Dialogue: …this is a good time to mention that the dialogue REALLY needed a second, third, or fourth editing and polishing pass. I’m sorry but the dialogue in this game is very, very bad. Bad sentence structure, bad word usage, bad flow of dialogue…
11. Dialogue: …it’s…
12. Dialogue: …awful
13. Architecture: So yeah, y’know how you can see this whole city as you move around? You notice how there’s only like five interactable areas, mostly meaningless NPCs roaming, and no real effort done to connect it to the city in the background? This feels like a bad PS2 game in terms of Architecture, more like a weird set or prop than a city…
14. Architecture: …and deserves a double negative for its trouble
15. Atmosphere: People will NOT stop licking our boots and it’s actively irritating
16. Moment: Ryong’s establishing scene is bad three times. First is pacing (it RACES by and doesn’t know how to pace itself). Second is animation (it literally looks wrong, she just twists her hand and the person’s head pops off). Third is the voice acting (she sounds bored, and like someone who’s discussing yesterday’s meeting). And these three points need to be emphasized because they’re problems with the entire game
17. Pacing: The pacing of every dialogue in the game (which I remind you, is almost all of the game) is off. Too fast, too slow, and both at the same time
18. Animation: All of the animation sucks. All of it. The least bad is when people are just standing there but even then the faces and mouthflaps are wrong. And any time someone is actually doing anything it looks embarrassingly keyframed…
19. Storyboarding: …and this is a good time to mention that the general storyboarding of any scene that isn’t just ‘stand there and talk’ is honestly amateur at best
20. Voice Acting: Issues, but ultimately I think it really boils down to…
21. Voice Direction: …lack of direction. It’s very, very obvious that most of these actors were just shoved in the booth and handed a script. This causes constant problems in almost every single scene in the game (there are a few individual scenes where the acting is spot on)…
22. Voice Direction: …and deserves a solid double
23. Humor: The radio show should be funny. It isn’t. And I think almost all of it boils down to the acting (as mentioned above)
24. Moment: The first confrontation with Kasumi is off in the usual ways but what weirds me out most is the conversation goes ‘You will never take him’ followed by ‘I am taking him now’ followed by ‘Okay then’. What?
25. Atmosphere: Good time to mention the masquerade itself is horribly handled on the story axis in addition to the gameplay
26. Secondary: The side quest Tasks (more on that in the gameplay axis) are pointless waste of time drivel
27. Padding: The post-chapter talk throughs. In a better game with better writing this would be a good way to develop characters, shine a light on certain facts in the previous events, or just give perspective. Here it’s just two people repeating things we already know, and chapters are short enough that it’s unlikely to have forgotten anything
28. Cutscene Incompetence: There’s a persistent issue which isn’t much of a problem early on but becomes more grating the more we run into it. Even de-powered we’re the strongest vampire running around Seattle and the game makes that very clear in both story and gameplay. Several people, especially the smart ones, know this and are careful around us because of this. Yet despite this we kowtow entirely too much to entirely too many, most especially Lou. No I don’t mean like we’re given the option to do so as part of playing the game, I mean the game forces this state upon us even if we disagree with her…
29. Writing: …and this boils down to basic railroading. Which is especially aggravating in a game where it makes no sense. This is not the first nor only example of railroading in this game either
30. MSQ: Okay so… the big reveal Safia is ridiculous and, worse, pointless. It’s also a super quick last minute misdirection and, if I can be honest…
31. Moment: …the scene itself is really badly constructed. The non-animation on burning Ryone in the sun, the casual acceptance of it being daytime, the fact that she bodies us effortlessly WHILE we’re awake and aware… I don’t buy it
32. Pacing: So. There’s this moment where we have an awesome sequence which is immediately followed by… a boring Fabien side quest sequence. This is even MORE irritating because it leads immediately to a cool scene, so this just throws all of the pacing of this sequence…
33. Padding: …and involves legitimately empty padding
34. Writing: I have to mention that Safia somehow maintaining her cover despite being EXTREMELY low humanity and full on cucco for coco puffs is eyebrow raising at best
35. Outro: Okay so the copy paste endings aren’t great, but the IAO wins ending has its own problems
36. Plot: This is a weird one but there’s several… issues with the plot. Or I guess I should say plots. It’s very meandery and not in a good way, takes entirely too long to get going, and barely acknowledges its own significance once it finally gets there

Gameplay Positives:

1. Difficulty Options: Changeable on the fly
2. Tutorialization: Little videos describing the moves in the talent tree which are always a nice way to demonstrate abilities and how they work
3. Saves: Multiple autosaves slots…
4. Saves: …and good autosaves in general
5. Kit: The talents are esoteric but fun, and I have to give credit to Telekinesis. It’s basically the Gravity Gun, but that doesn’t make it bad
6. Boss: Willem is the first decent fight in the entire game. It doesn’t do MUCH different than a normal fight but it does enough to make it interesting
7. Music: There’s inconsistent music in the game but, outside of one particular song the music is decently solid

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Crash: Multiple crashes, right at the beginning too
2. Graphics: No post processing options of note. So you’re stuck with depth of field, motion blur, AND bloom (unless you manually go edit the INI file) (or depth of field OR bloom)
3. Graphics: FOV on combat. So when you enter combat the FOV changes and it goes back when you leave. And combat is already disorienting enough without this extra hassle
4. Graphics: Lighting issues. These were pretty bad in the very first room of the game, and the issues never went away
5. Difficulty: Lazy difficulty options as per usual
6. Options: Optional Telemetry which is defaulted to on. Thanks Paradox
7. Options: FAKE graphics options. Seriously, we fiddled with the graphics options and even did our due diligence and restarted each major change and there were very few visible differences when changing things
8. Core Combat: So there’s a few nice little extra things you can do with the Kit, but the combat itself is absolutely awful. The controls are jerky, the combat is floaty, each time you attack you get dragged forwards, you don’t get i-frames for animations (unless you buy an optional perk), and all of that makes the core combat awful…
9. Core Combat: …but the final damning statement is that it’s boring. If you crank the diff down you just smash things effortlessly, and if you pull it up to normal you spend forever beating a giant pile of meat for every single enemy…
10. Core Combat: …there’s no winning here
11. Controls: By the way I mentioned this in Core Combat but the controls are NOT good. There’s the obvious console to PC port issues, but then there’s some really awful feedback issues combined with input buffering which makes it all awkward and unpleasant to play…
12. Controls: …for a solid double. Only a double? Yeah no I’ve played worse (recently, even!)
13. Camera: The camera in general is way, way too attached to our head. I know that sounds weird but let me explain for a second. Most FPS games do little tricks to prevent the player from being disoriented and not being able to tell what’s happening. This is also why a lot of games do third person cameras, so the player can always tell what’s happening. But locking the camera to the character’s head means every single movement, lurch, attack, or recoil means the camera bounces all over the place disorientingly. This also gets across just how rushed and lazy this game really is because (speaking from experience!) the easiest possible way to do camera in Unreal 5 is to just attach it to an object… which they did. No thought into the design, no extra scripts or blueprints to help, just click done…
14. Camera: …so that…
15. Camera: …sucks
16. Saves: Lack thereof but also…
17. Saves: …only one save slot
18. Core Mechanic: The masquerade mechanic itself is token, broken, and either too weak and easy to bypass or results in instantaneous death. It’s more or less mandatory to ‘break’ periodically because the mechanics for luring NPCs to feed on them are barebones or actually nonexistent (depending on the NPC) and the ONLY actual tool in your kit to deal with it is to find a ledge or corner to hide in and just wait. On top of this…
19. Alternate Leveling: …the side abilities flat require doing these masquerade breaks to gain the blood necessary to even train these abilities to begin with…
20. Padding: …making the whole thing a colossal waste of time
21. Overworld: There’s almost no overworld design to speak of in general, but what really drags it down…
22. Overworld: …is the almost lack of anything to actually do in the overworld
23. Level: Almost every stage,
24. Core Mechanic: Choices with binary failstate and no penalty for failure
25. MSQ: Lack of gameplay across the Fabien section. You talk to someone, then use an ability on them, then talk to them. And that’s it. You’re hitting a button to progress, there’s no gameplay. This is a cutscene that’s pretending and it’d be better if it was JUST a cutscene
26. Raspberry Jam: I’ve seen worse but it isn’t great here
27. Secondary: The ‘side quests’ are honestly absolutely awful. Run to a spot, do a pittance of an interaction, quest complete. These are just the tiniest sliver above being Tasks. I honestly suspect these either were supposed to be radiant quests or were generated like radiant quests, but either way they persist…
28. Secondary: …in being meaningless drivel
29. MSQ: All of the quests up to the Atrium are… bad. Again, basically Tasks
30. Traversal: Going from Point A to Point B is just… walking. Or running. Or drop kicking! The only reason this isn’t more negatives is the overworld is blessedly small
31. Walkthroughitis: Infrequent, but sometimes the ‘puzzles’ are sufficiently esoteric that mandate looking it up
32. MSQ: The police station mandatory no-detection no-kill stealth segment. I’ve seen worse but this is not super great, especially with the absence of stealth kit we have in this game
33. Boss: Basically every boss in the game is dull at best. Most are just normal mooks but with more health and the mandatory feeding to progress their phase mechanic
34. Level: So… you know those wonderful sewer levels from VTMB1? Well they’re back, and almost identical. It’s an extended corridor of surprisingly samey rooms making it easy to get turned around in with swarms of enemies you cannot feed off of. This means no healing and no magic recovery throughout the entire sequence. Hope you brought a full stock of potions…
35. Level: …to help you with that second negative
36. Bug: Hope you enjoy falling through the world if you walk over the wrong spot!
37. Level: The IAO base is not great. Not very good stealth options, not very good layout, actively misleading guides, lots and lots of enemies with lots and lots of frustrating weapons to deal with
38. Encounter: The final unavoidable encounter of the IAO is not great. A small enclosed room with unavoidable flashbangs (thanks for that game) and homing grenades which do an absolutely insane amount of damage
39. Song: There’s a song that plays during the Fabien and Phyre conversations and I… hate it. And I’m not alone (woo). It’s meandering, piercing, and dissonant, and it gets old fast
40. MSQ: Fabien’s segments should either have had actual gameplay or… none. As is this fake ‘press button to continue’ stuff only gets worse as it keeps repeating, especially since they mandate you wander off to drink blood (only from your designated donors of course) to progress
41. Encounter: Enemy spam plus repeated encounters with…
42. Enemy Design: …the perfect dodge jackasses
43. Padding: There’s this awful part where there’s this awesome moment which is then followed by three boring fetch quests. Which reminds me…
44. Padding: …ALL of Fabien’s side quests are boring fetch quests
45. Outro: The final dungeon was… the same as any other dungeon in the game
46. Outro: Also there’s a choice MUCH earlier which flat locks you into an ending (embracing Mother Hen or not) and there’s NO warning of this and all other choices are instantly invalidated by this one

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: The sheer attention to detail and brilliant visual scene setting of the backgrounds are top notch. The empty, cold facility, the brutalist concrete of the old apartments, the awful flesh goop of whatever Nowhere is…
2. Brickwork: …easy…
3. Brickwork: …triple
4. Doodads: Also tons of details and placements to help sell the various scenes…
5. Doodads: …particularly fond of the Rotfront memories
6. Spritework: The stylized and modernized PS1 style graphics work really well for conveying a lot of emotion and making the characters distinct
7. Sound Design: Great sound design. Obviously the usual atmospheric stuff but I mean… for example, safe areas use a different pitch of background noise so you know it’s safe, but also some areas have more mechanical thrumming when near machinery, or just a bit of wind howling…
8. Sound Design: …great stuff
9. Background Lore: Lots. As mentioned later there’s a lot of background lore in the Nation, the Empire, the Replikas, Adler’s story, all the stuff happening off in the background. Most of which has to do with…
10. World Building: …the horrible, horrible, horrible setting. This unironically might be the single most horrible setting I’ve ever witnessed. Humankind flattened down into culturally dead husks enduring because that’s what you do…
11. Atmosphere: …which really adds to the excellently done atmosphere of gloom and pointlessness of the whole game
12. Storytelling Mechanic: Notes. This is pretty standard for a game like this but as usual they do some good stuff here. Like the casual mention in one note of how they’re going to fling wave after wave of helpless supply runners into a blockade ‘because’
13. Visual Storytelling: Lots (isolation room, sleeping quarters, storage facilities, etc.)
14. MSQ: The slow revelation of the awful, awful setting and the groundhog day loop
15. Cutscene: The walk across the wastes and the visual representation of incorrect information transferrence
16. Atmosphere: There’s a lot of horrible, horrible stuff in the background. And I want to not only positive it for doing a good job of emphasizing just how horrible this setting us, but I want to share a single line from one of these notes. “The girl, without a doubt, is remarkably odd, certainly due to her being raised solely by her mother, rather than by a community of good people overseen by a block warden as is normal these days.” Good God
17. Outro: Okay I will give you this and nothing else, game. That ending (Promise, specifically) really ripped the heart strings out. Us finally mercy killing Ariane and then dying right next to her is exactly as horrible as it sounds
18. Internal Continuity: If it’s not obvious, the game keeps track of itself pretty solidly. I may not enjoy the story (at all) but the game is well cohesed internally

Story Negatives:

1. Outro: These are some seriously Dark Souls endings, my goodness. Good luck figuring out what any of this nonsense actually means

Gameplay Positives:

1. Map: While I’ve seen better (and it’s honestly irritating to use… and you can’t rebind it…) the map ITSELF is legit. It tracks points of interest you’ve done, points of interest you haven’t, which doors can be accessed how, and labels each room
2. QoL: Several. Key items are used up immediately, ammo can go directly into weapons, healing items can stack to a point (and so can one-off consumables), etc.
3. Level: The first few levels are probably the best stages in the game overall. Smart puzzle design, good layout, good design choices of how you loop in and out of the areas…
4. Level: Flow: …and great overall flow
5. Level: The second major area (basically floors 6, 7, and 8) has a few issues overall but is still solidly designed and still fun to go through
6. Enemy Variety: Actually pretty solid variety. Most enemies require different approaches (shields, lungers, hiders, and the big boys)
7. Itemization: Pretty solid placement of items throughout the game
8. Visual Distinction: Thanks to some clever tricks the game is actually pretty parseable, rarely did I have trouble seeing something even with the stylized graphics

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Options: Lack of rebinding on a modern PC game, which dovetails into some weird control issues as well
2. Raspberry Jam: Pretty bad, especially considering…
3. Graphics: …the graphics in general. Thankfully there are options to reduce issues but I still had a headache the entire time I played the game. This wasn’t helped by the continual usage of…
4. Sound: …the radio, who’s high pitched frequencies was making it worse. I had to mute it a couple of times for the stream due to complaints
5. Tutorialization: So when you Inspect an item the description of the item changes to help with what you’re supposed to use it as. The problem is NOTHING conveys this. In fact the earlier things you can Inspect don’t actually change the description. That’s why I’m putting this under a tutorialization negative; If the game had conveyed this to me I’d have been using Inspect the entire time and gaining helpful info for puzzle solving
6. Level: So then there’s Nowhere, or Liminality, or whatever you want to call it. This is the first level layout I’d call actually bad because there’s two ‘halves’ of the region and a one-way passage (the hole) connecting them. Make any mistake, or need to hit the storage, or die? You’re redoing a LOT of the level (most of it, actually) just to get back to where you were. Keep in mind this place is also flooded with enemies and almost no flare shots and/or thermite, so respawns are an issue too
7. MSQ: Puzzles. This is a weird one but some of these puzzles are just a wee bit obtuse. In some cases I wasn’t sure what I was solving. In others I was given so much information I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to keep track of. In yet others it expected knowledge outside of game. While this is technically walkthroughitis I felt like putting it just under ‘MSQ’ thanks to how much of the core meat of the game was spent on these things
8. Outro: Boss: Good God this is a truly terrible, miserable boss. The first and most obvious problem is an issue the entire game has (lack of feedback) so I was accidentally progressing the boss without realizing what I was doing. This gets worse, though, when you realize what you ARE supposed to do…
9. Outro: Boss: …which is dodge increasingly hard to dodge attacks in an increasingly small space while visual and audible noise assault your senses making the experience of actually fighting the boss itself miserable…
10. Outro: Boss: …then you consider that the mechanics of the game run contrary to the boss fight itself (you need lots of ammo, but you also need inventory space for healing and the mandatory spears… oh and by the way you can’t toss guns once their ammo goes dry). The game TRIES to mitigate this by having pickups in some of the boss phases but those go away once you progress a phase so it’s not hard to have a situation where you don’t have space until you’ve progressed a phase, by which point you can no longer procure the items. And if you run dry on ammo in a no-drops phase, sucks to suck, game over
11. Backtracking: Quite a bit, and almost always to the detriment of enjoyment. As in not ‘oh hey I better go back whoops this area changed’, more like ‘well I need to go across this area three times to juggle inventory

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: Doggy Bowl. Green, dirt, sand, and sun. This whole area screams ‘safe zone’ which, given this is where the dog sanctuary is, makes sense
2. Doodads: Lots of nice doodading and details here too
3. Brickwork: Peaceful Pastures. This might actually be my overall favorite looking area in the game. The autumn look, the farmland, the cliffs…
4. Doodads: …and of course all the people working the farm! And lots and lots of giant vegetables
5. Brickwork: Rainforest Retreat. Lush jungle with vines, branches, and a canopy…
6. Doodads: …and don’t forget the tons of foliage around, as well as the coffee making accouterments throughout (gathering on the floor, drying on the canopy, serving in the cafe)
7. Spritework: Generally solid spritework. I’m particularly fond of the Corgi themself of course, but everyone is worth a mention
8. Animation: Love the simple animations too. Especially belly rubbing
9. Dialogue: Surprisingly smart dialogue. Most, if not all, of the characters actually sound like… y’know, people, who are actually talking
10. Tone: The game is absolutely adorable. One of the first things most people said upon seeing just the first few minutes was something to the effect of ‘awww’
11. Theme: Positivity. If there is one central theme here it’s that things can and will get better if we help each other and work things out. It’s not saccharine or fake (there’s some real stuff here which really helps ground it) but it’s definitely positively inclined fiction
12. Brickwork: Holiday Haven and the Summit. Lovely snow (which deforms as you move through it!) and…
13. Doodads: …plenty of holiday stuff in the Christmas town
14. Intro: We’re here as a tourist but we immediately volunteer to help, and that sets the tone for the entire work
15. Moment: Maw-Maw. The elderly mouse is wonderful in general but if you go back to talk to her again she asks you to escort her to the graveyard to visit the grave of her dead husband, whom she talks about as she walks. This whole thing is absolutely heart-wrenching and way too well done for the type of game this is
16. Outro: Grandma. She’s… well she’s gone. And we find out that we did this entire trip for her. And, once again, this just tugs at those heartstrings

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Music: I’m really impressed with each zone’s songs in this one. Only rarely did I actually get tired of hearing any given beat
2. Controls: Jank aside (more on that in a bit) the game controls very fluidly
3. Core Mechanic: Jank! So, jank (as we’ve discussed many times) is not a good or bad thing inherently, it just means the game doesn’t do what you expect it to do. In this game that lends towards being a good thing as it adds to the generally silly vibe of things and can lead to some great, janky moments
4. Core Mechanic: Various cute interactions throughout the island. Making snow angels, playing in the lights, resting in an inner tube, there’s lots of these
5. Cosmetics: Pretty impressive selection for how short the game is
6. Kit: Gliding, climbing, stamina. So the glide is obvious, and climbing is obvious, and stamina brings it all together by giving the player a limited availability of movement which they’re continuously upgrading, which in turn increases the navigable area of the game (and considering so much of the later stages involve climbing increasingly tall areas, this works)
7. Intro: Level: Tutorialization: Doggy Bowl quickly and efficiently conveys everything you need to know about playing the game
8. Guidance: General. There’s routes, angles, shinies, some things are visible from beyond normal render radius, lots of little tidbits that help find collectibles
9. Level: Peaceful Pastures. This is actually probably the weakest overall stage, but there’s still some fun minigames (opening up the tractor route, herding the sheep) and some good platforming
10. Level: Rainforest Retreat is the best stage in the game mechanically. Good usage of verticality, lots of shortcutting to allow for a slowly increasing ease of navigation, and tons of stuff basically everywhere to pick up and interact with…
11. Level: …easy double
12. Level: The last two areas (Holiday Haven and the Summit) start doing some smart things with cold (which temporarily caps your stamina bar, limiting you and making heat a resource as well as an unlock)
13. Overworld: General, again. The connective tissue between puzzles and platforming is solid

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Bug: Many! But one that really sucks, I can’t actually grab sticks to burn things, which locks off a whole aspect of interaction. I was eventually able to jank my way into being able to use the stick but I still don’t know how exactly. Editor’s Note; Later on restarting the game seemed to fix the bug, so if you have the same issue that worked for me
2. Graphics: Some of the bloom and color overlays get distracting and detract from being able to see what you’re doing

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: The entire first segment of the game looks legit, most especially the Courtyard
2. Architecture: Similar to several other Metroidvanias, there’s a lot of good work done to make this place feel like a massive and sprawling castle
3. Spritework: Enemies. Solid, varied, good stuff in general
4. Storytelling Mechanic: The bestiary! Tons of little bits of flavor lore here for the enemies and bosses…
5. Storytelling Mechanic: …worthy of a double
6. Brickwork: Caves, catacombs, and tombs
7. Brickwork: Everything about the upper walls and parapets
8. Brickwork: The interior town segment is especially lovely
9. Brickwork: Special mention to the finale areas in general. The clockwork tower, of course, the marble gallery, and the final ascent to Dracula
10. Visual Continuity: The overall layout of the castle has good continuity with itself. You can really feel the entrance, courtyard, walls, catacombs and substructure, and the adjacent town just in the exploration of the castle

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Controls: Controls tightly and smartly. Helped by it basically being a Megaman game now…
2. Controls: …plus with the new kit, that’s an easy double
3. Penalty For Failure: So if you die you lose half your money, which sucks, though there are ways to mitigate this and if you have the card you can go get it back Shovel Knight style. For bonus points, your familiar can help get it back too
4. Map: A surprisingly decent map which, while it doesn’t label much, does a good job of indicating where you should head next and where you’ve been
5. Guidance: Also! The map will show where pickups are, AND will remove them once collected
6. Kit: Subweapons are pretty legit in this one. You have the usual stuff of course, the stuff we’ve had in the various Castlevania games, but in addition we have a healing item, and the upgrades which change their functionality…
7. Kit: …for a solid double
8. Build: Cards. You can equip three at a time and there’s lots of fun combos here depending on your playstyle
9. Enemy Design: Plenty of solid enemies which have clear attack patterns, vuln windows, and danger areas. Except those damned medusa heads
10. Enemy Variety: Good variety too in how you have to deal with them
11. Pacing: Exploration, fighting, platforming, boss, repeat
12. Music: Really great music in this one. Mostly remixes, but really solid mixes…
13. Music: …easy double
14. Power Progression Curve: So in my limited experience with romhacks and fan games, most players don’t understand what a power progression curve is or why it should work in certain ways. This often boils down to ‘stop playing the game and go grind for a while’. Color me surprised that for the second time in a row this has a solid curve. We actually start off pretty weak, but that curves up pretty hard and fast, and the best part is it’s mostly horizontal leveling. Our damage barely goes up, but we gain more range, more kit, more health, and more ‘ammo’ (hearts)
15. Difficulty Curve: Related to the above, the difficulty curve is solid. Starts off pretty mean, but a smooth curve upwards, and if you bother to get everything it curves downward as you start to be rewarded for out stating everything
16. Itemization: Good drops. Health items drop semi regularly, money drops enough to buy what you want, and of course nice heart drop rate
17. Visual Continuity: Related to the layout of the entire castle, but you can navigate quickly and easily simply by the visuals and design
18. Visual Distinction: Great visual distinction. Everything is distinct, both in outlining and in color usage, and this is important given the sheer quantity of stuff that can be on the screen at once…
19. Visual Distinction: …easy double
20. Backtracking: The warp spots really help with navigation, especially given how fast and easy they are to use
21. Intro: The Entrance to the castle is more or less the same as the original and serves the same solid introduction to the game concepts. Candles, subweapons, enemy types, and a simple but solid boss
22. Level: The Caves lower segment seems a bit rough at first but that’s because the enemies here all attack in totally different patterns than the tutorial stuff. Once you’ve mentally adjusted the rest of it flows pretty seamlessly. There’s also some good highlighting and indicators of secrets and progression
23. Level: The Torture Lab tries the same gimmick (different enemy attack patterns) while making the platforming much meaner overall. Still fun, and nice to have a primarily platforming segment compared to the earlier and later combat heavy areas
24. Flow: Entrance to caves to lab to caves to lab. The initial loop of the game is actually really smooth, though I’ll admit it took me a second to realize it. See the game wants you to start going down one path until you run into difficulties, then hit another path to get stuff to help progress, then bounce back. Once you realize this loop you see there’s some really smooth flow to it
25. Boss: Medusa is easily the best of the early bosses. Lots of attack variety, good lunging attacks with warnings that they’re coming, and plenty of vuln segments
26. Level: Castle Ruins. Lots of enemy spam, but weirdly fair about the combos and encounter design. Also lots of power ups, yeesh
27. Boss: I do like the Mummy for what it’s worth. They are still vulnerable while teleporting (in fact it’s their biggest vuln phase), the fight escalates nicely as they progress (1, then 2, then possibly 3 BUT if you’re good enough you can kill the second before the third spawns), and a ‘don’t move’ vs a ‘move away’ attack pattern
28. Level: Catacombs has some fun platforming sections and I really liked the placement of optional items
29. Level: Bridge. So, this is some enemy spam, but in a weirdly good way. Good encounter design and good avoidance corridors to help you bypass or deal with the swarms
30. Level: Dungeon. This is probably the best level area in the game. Great usage of enemy placement relative to terrain to make sure they can both take advantage of it while also giving us options to dealing with them, and some excellent platforming sequences…
31. Level: …easy double
32. Boss: The Creature (another simple but solid fight against a very mobile-with-reach Dark Souls boss), the Mirror Monster (glitchable, but still good variety in attacks), and the mess that is Granfalloon (tons of enemies everywhere all the time, but they die instantly and do little damage)
33. Boss: Cthuhlu! Yes, really. LOTS of variety of attacks and lots of good viscerality to the whole fight
34. Level: Marble Gallery is a nice, if brief, final exam area
35. Boss: Death is another fun boss fight. His vuln windows are brief but significant, his attacks can all be hit which can let the player create their own vuln windows, his attacks have big indicators that they’re coming and are appropriately punishing, and… that’s it. But it’s still fun
36. Level: Clocktower is as brutal as it always is but with less bullcrap thanks to expanded kit
37. Outro: Boss: Dracula was turned into an actual boss fight, holy crap. Mostly phase 1 of course. He has different colors of fire (which he indicates based on what color he flashes as he’s teleporting in) which all act completely differently. Homing fire, spam fire, arc’d fire, et cetera
38. Replayability: Easy candidate for the first replay positive. Especially with how short it is
39. Tutorialization: I forgot to mention this earlier but the game does that great Metroid thing where anytime you get a new piece of kit the level design is such that you have to use it to escape. This is a great, non-text way to immediately force a player to demonstrate understanding of their new tools

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Enemy Design: Medusa heads still suck. In any game they’re in, really, but they’re as awful as I remember in this one
2. Enemy AI: The enemy REALLY wants to be inside your hitbox. This is problematic because you cannot attack inside your hitbox

Story Positives:

1. Cutscene: So the opening cutscene commits several sins (death of a character who’s close to another character but not us, torture porn, etc.) but I will admit the execution of the scene itself is spot on
2. Visual Storytelling: Weird alien landscape tilting towards a giant in the distance standing by a monolith with the number engraved on it that you can see from basically everywhere in the game
3. Cutscene: The initial fail-state of landing is a competently done representation of shock
4. Spritework: Main cast. The variety in their distinct designs and the uniforms clinches it I think
5. Spritework: Enemies. Lots of visual variety here, especially as so many of them are themed after the areas they’re found it
6. Brickwork: Flying Waters is visually gorgeous. The coral, the bubbles, the water surface above us
7. Cutscene: The first camp cutscene is quite well acted. The fact that she’s fixating on the mission as her coping mechanism, the fact that he is sufficiently lost (and honest about it) that he doesn’t know what he’s feeling
8. Doodads: The mansion. Probably the best doodad’d location in the game, with each room having its own touches and effort put into it
9. Cutscene: So Maelle sees herself in a mask and we see someone who clearly isn’t the old man from earlier but looks similar who says it’s her fault and she needs to bail. What really works about this scene is twofold; First, Maelle’s rather well done depiction of a panic attack which is pushed by, Second, how much Serkis’ character absolutely towers over the scene literally and metaphorically. His voice isn’t harsh or grating but it’s unyielding, and it’s clear he’s not kidding around
10. Cutscene: Though I saw it coming (explicitly, as proven on camera) I have to admit the final scene of Act 1 was well executed. It is especially…
11. MSQ: …a nice bookend for the game as a whole so far. The man in over his head, shocked beyond basic reasoning, who has made a decision and now willingly and knowingly stands
12. Pacing: The pacing of Act 1 is good stuff. Start off with tragedy, then shock, then pull it down for what is mostly a lighter adventure, escalating more or less continuously until we hit the potato heads for a bit of levity, and then smash back to the higher intensity for the climax
13. Cutscene: The scene beneath the tree does a fantastic job at what multiple other scenes have tried for thus far; Really dragging the emotional impact as down to the ground and as personally as possible. We see each of their different reactions; Lune is laser focused on making it worth something, Sciel is trying to think about what’s next, and Maelle is just lost in her grief. Good direction, good music direction, fantastic voice acting…
14. Cutscene: …an easy…
15. Cutscene: …triple
16. Cutscene: Lune and Sciel bonding under the stars. Characterization for their differing mindsets, developing Lune’s past and why she is so mission focused, but also some quiet drops of world building as we see a bit of a personal take on what it was like growing up in Lumiere
17. Moment: Maelle and Lune talking about their shared losses, and how Lune manages to keep going. It’s a nice scene, but what really pulls it up for me is Lune’s admission to why she does things (because, though she doesn’t say it, she believes in the possibility of success) and that no one really knows what they’re doing
18. Brickwork: Monoco Station. The trains frozen literally and metaphorically in a dilapidated station
19. Moment: “Absolutely out of the question” “There will be a lot of fights though” “I’m in”
20. Storytelling Mechanic: Expedition logs. A standard but good codex system that does some nice bits of characterization, world building, and flavor lore
21. Brickwork: The flowing ribbons and cloth of Sirene. A bit headache inducing (they really like their bloom don’t they) but it really gets across the surreal nature of the siren’s den
22. Music Direction: Also the horrific music coming from her (which also fades the further away you get)
23. Cutscene: The initial showcasing of the Siren’s power (and the fact that it didn’t affect Verso) works well with the later showcasing (where, again, it doesn’t hit Verso) is very well done
24. Animation: The bespoke animations for cutscenes are quite good. Obviously some motion capture but some good physical acting
25. Moment: Verso playing the piano for his sister at camp
26. MSQ: Not sure what to put this under but I really like how both Axxons are defeated. Lune is un-tempted by the illusion, and Sciel is unaffected by the mask
27. Brickwork: As much as I absolutely hate it, the horrifying and grotesque visuals of Visage do a great job of conveying emotional trauma just by sightlines and presentation
28. Moment: Verso, his sister, his father. There’s a lot of implication in this scene and a lot of horror in it as well. This is probably the exact moment when I became convinced there was no possibility of things working out
29. MSQ: The entire trip through the Monolith is a great mish mash sequence. Visuals of each area but slightly garbled, like they’re smashed together and only half remembered, alongside chunks of terrain which can only be described as ‘thrown together’ but in a really designed way. It’s a treat
30. Cutscene: The spectacle of the Renoir 2 fight. It’s amusing how amazing they made this look considering it’s a dude in a suit
31. Moment: Renoir 2’s final moments. Some interesting implications here, which immediately leads to…
32. Cutscene: …the confrontation with the Paintress. Once again a lot is said here in the dialogue (in fact I would go so far as to say this is the best written scene in this game as of this moment), and it really conveys how mentally far gone the Paintress is at this point in time. Considering how little she’s apparently been doing you get the feeling she’s just… sitting here, not processing, not doing anything, for what look to her as years
33. Cutscene: And the Paintress fight has some fantastic spectacle of course. I’m partial to the giant rip in reality which then attacks us
34. Moment: While I want to friggin’ slug Verso, the scene where the protection falls, everyone fades, and the main character is shoved out of the painting is exactly as impacting as it needs to be
35. MSQ: So. We’re in the manor. I usually like to type up these notes with at least a mind towards spoilers, which is also why I try to do them ‘in order’ (obviously I don’t list stuff about the ending at the top of the document). But it’s getting harder and harder to type up any concrete notes about what’s happening by being vague, so if you’re reading this sequentially (hi!) consider this a formal spoiler warning. Anyways, this entire sequence of being in the manor is something that (frankly) the ENTIRE game was lacking; Grounding. For the first time I feel like any of these events are actually happening and aren’t just some fever dream. This is accented by Alicia walking through and commenting on some strategically placed items designed to convey a lot of information in a short period of time (the portrait, the damage, the dogs). This leads to my second major point for this sequence…
36. Writing: …the writing. This is, bar none, the best written sequence in the entire game. Ignore the grounding for a second, we are conveyed a huge amount of information that coheses not only the entire game but brings the actual setting into frame for the first time, all inside of a single conversation with a badly coping sister. Oh speaking of which, really quick…
37. Character: …plus for Clea. She is a very well written example of someone who is absolutely not dealing with her grief well at all and, in the absence of her parents, has just closed the doors emotionally and is trying to deal with the immediacy of issues. Which of course she has to because…
38. Writing: …there’s apparently a lot going on. A whole Council of Painters? Writers who are at war with them? Time dilation inside the painting? Specific timing here is debatable but it’s implied that it’s been, at absolute most, a few months since the fire and the loss of Verso 1. Later story beats fulfill this too, as it’s clear that from HIS perspective Renoir 1 hasn’t seen Alicia in decades. Either way this is fantastically written…
39. Writing: …so enjoy that triple
40. Moment: Verso teaching Sciel about swimming is a nice little moment. Even the pep talk, as well as the approach
41. Babylon 5 Effect: Quite a bit, though mostly smaller things that line up differently the second time through
42. Character: Maelle. The actual main character, the lost and hurt child who is victimized by basically everyone around her. Aline, Renoir, Clea, and Verso 2 all manipulate and hurt her. And she has a hell of an arc throughout the game, developing from the kid who just wants to get out and see the world to the traumatized teen to the kid who just wants to escape it all…
43. Character: …it is properly tragic
44. Character: Gustave. Honestly he’s my favorite character in the entire game. He is the perfect support character, not the take charge leader nor the central protag with regards to plot or character focus, but he is a great thematic core to everything. The main reason most of the party can be who they are and do what they do is because of him. This is doubly interesting since he was always a bit uncertain and lacking, and came incredibly close to straight suicide in his shock. But after being totally unprepared for everything and barely recovering, finding individuals and caring about them gives him all he needs to keep going. So when he meets his end he does so without stumbling or faltering, and without hesitation…
45. Character: …a fantastic character…
46. Character: …easily a triple
47. Character: Lune. The business-minded, mission-oriented person who copes with her trauma by focusing on what’s right in front of her feet
48. Character: Sciel. The woman who seems mostly together because she’s mostly pushed away from everything, coping with her trauma by living in the moment and spending little time on the past
49. Character: Esquie. Anyone familiar with the game doesn’t need this positive explained but for those unaware, he’s just a continuous ball of positivity, support, and joy the whole game
50. Character: Monoco. The goodest of boys, who is also legitimately one of the funniest characters in the game. Loyal, playful, and constantly trying to appear far cooler than he is
51. Character: This isn’t so much a character positive in the traditional sense as it is a positive for chemistry. The connecting threads between Gustave and literally everyone he interacts with are great. He really is the heart of the party, the proper support…
52. Character: …and the way he reflects and bounces off everyone really adds to their characters
53. Character: Verso’s… interesting. I would say he’s carried (hard) by his voice actor, but his consistent lying in pursuit of the goal he is adamantly seeking and the clear signs of that from the literal first time we meet him are well constructed
54. Voice Acting: I mean of course I have to mention Ben Starr who is Ben Starring it up, as he is wont to do
55. Voice Acting: Maelle. Of course Jennifer English absolutely nails it, and manages to do something better than most of the actors…
56. Voice Acting: …those quiet little nuances. Little things, tiny details that really add to her performance
57. Voice Acting: Gustave’s voice actor is also legit and, again, manages to do great things with his somewhat limited role
58. Voice Acting: Lune and Sciel’s actresses do a great job with their respective tones and perspectives
59. Voice Acting: Esquie, Francois, and the Gestrals
60. Voice Acting: Monoco’s voice actor manages the perfect straight-man to contrast his otherwise silly dialogue
61. Voice Acting: General voice acting positives for the supporting cast
62. Prime Opt: Monoco’s companion quest. Deciding to bring Noco back and the loyalty on display, and the humor right alongside it. This is some fantastic Yakuza Effect and hits a lot better than, honestly, several other similar quests
63. Prime Opt: Of course I like Esquie’s quest. Poor Francois, and of course that absolutely adorable rock with the frowny Francois (and the smiley Clea!) but the best part is it all underlines how horribly GREEK all these asshole Painters really are
64. World Building: The one bit of world building I really like in this game is what I just mentioned. The Painters are SO neglectful of their creations. In most cases they display a total lack of not just consideration but even acknowledgement of them. And we see this from the perspective of the painted
65. Brickwork: So of course Verso’s Drafts has amazing brickwork. I would actually posit this is overall the best looking zone in the game, not subjectively, but in terms of overall design…
66. Doodads: …and doodad placement. But further…
67. Visual Storytelling: …there’s a lot of information being conveyed here simply by looking around and taking it all in. About how the canvas works, about how it perpetuates, about what kind of person Verso 1 used to be
68. Moment: Expedition 60. ‘Nuff said
69. Outro: The final charge through Lumiere is an appropriately badass section, as the two necromancers fling their troops at each other and we race through the city as a badass mix plays
70. Outro: Boss: Renoir 1’s comments and showcasing during the second to last fight
71. Character: I’ve been mulling over this for a minute. I honestly think most of this is down to the voice acting but Renoir 1 is still a properly tragic character. Not exactly a great person but trying to do the best he can with a terrible situation, all while he’s suffering horribly
72. Outro: Moment: Ben Starr acting the HELL out of absolutely begging for death is heart wrenching and fantastically acted
73. Outro: The quiet mourning of the family at Verso’s grave is a great moment
74. Outro: The absolute horror of Maelle forcing Verso 2 to play against his will, surrounded by empty stares and lifeless dolls in the shapes of people

Story Negatives:

1. Animation: Canned animations in non-scripted cutscenes. These are, at best, bad, but I won’t ding them too hard just… it’s jarring, especially alongside the actually animated cutscenes. And this is a VERY minor complaint but I should mention that the lip flaps aren’t great either. That’s not part of the negative I just wanted to mention it somewhere
2. MSQ: The entire sequence from Monoco being weird (thinking he killed the party) to the confrontation with Renoir is… weird. Weirdly paced (rushed AND slow), the confrontation itself was weirdly stilted, the storyboarding was off, the whole thing felt weird
3. Pacing: The fulcrum moment of the game occurs over 30 hours into it. I don’t know what to add to that honestly
4. Character: Verso. No, hear me out for a second. This dude is… not a good person, and that’s fine (it’s even interesting) but the problem is everyone lets him get away with EVERYthing without consequence, and barely any commentary, and as if he did nothing bad at all

Gameplay Positives:

1. Core Combat: I think I’m far enough into the game now to rate this as fairly as I can. I’m going to be honest, I can think of one game slightly better in raw core combat that’s the same system, but otherwise this is fantastic stuff. Quick, smart animations, zooms and sounds to indicate parry/dodge timing, the parrying and dodging itself (along with jumping and gradient parrying), rewarding the player for lining things up and doing mechanics…
2. Core Combat: …an easy…
3. Core Combat: …triple
4. Difficulty: Being able to change difficulty on the fly is always a nice feature
5. Enemy Variety: Good overall variety. There’s three basic types of enemies (heavy, regular, flying) but there’s a good amount of little details changing up how different ones operate in different zones
6. Enemy Design: Good design in general too. Good attacks, good spread of parry/dodge windows, good weakpoints, etc.
7. Encounter Rate: It’s not as good as a few other games I’ve seen, but I do like the way the game handles encounters (visible on the world and mostly dodgeable)
8. Minigame: Photo mode is pretty solid for what it is. Good spread of options, good additions like being able to place a light source or change colors or filters, and lots of camera movement range…
9. Minigame: …easy double. The only thing that hampers it from a triple is the controls are seriously wonky and take some getting used to
10. Music: Zis music…
11. Music: …it is so tight…
12. Music: …absolute cinema
13. Build: So there’s a few things hampering its true potential (mentioned down in the negatives) but the core Builds themselves are crazy good. You can do so many different combinations of abilities and there’s so much inherent synergy that…
14. Build: …the whole thing is an easy double, because…
15. Kit: …the Pictos themselves are almost universally well designed. You have a great spread here, from things that are straightforward buffs, to things that only work in certain circumstances, to things that turn detriments into benefits, to risk/reward things…
16. Kit: …it’s great. And it’s helped even further because…
17. Respec: …you can respec basically at will. I ultimately decided to only give this particular point a singular positive because there’s just too many tiny irritants getting in the way of the whole system, but lemme tell you, the inclusion of that lumina preset was a much needed quality of life feature
18. Save: Autosaves. The game saves often (in fact everytime you change a cosmetic!) but also on screen transition and even every fight…
19. Save: …so that’s awesome, but hang on it gets better…
20. Penalty For Failure: …if you die in a fight you can send in the back row. AND there’s a ‘restart fight’ option to just redo the fight from the beginning
21. Kit: Gustave. Probably the most vanilla of the characters (go figure) but still has a solid spread of abilities, notably easy and early access to buffs and marks
22. Kit: Lune. This is a fascinating setup; She can generate Stains by casting, and convert or consume Stains into other Stains. There’s also a universal color (Light) which can be used for anything. This automatically adds a lot of thought into what to do when for her, and lots of ways to build, sidestep, or spend…
23. Kit: …great class
24. Kit: Maelle and her stances. She has four stances (counting Stanceless) and each ability has side effects based on current stance, and many have the ability to alter your stance. This is already interesting but then you have to consider staggering stance transitions at the right time, since you don’t want to be in Offensive (take more damage) right before the boss goes. Similarly you generally don’t want to shift to Defensive right before a damage phase. And of course maintaining Virtuose is exceptionally useful…
25. Kit: …another great class
26. Kit: Sciel and her cards. This might be the most complex overall setup but I feel like it might be a bit too much for what it does. She’s, at her core, a builder / spender where she sets up cards on enemies then consumes those cards to do various effects. There’s a lot of variety here, in how she can buff and heal and do repeated damage, and of course she has her Twilight phase which has to be considered as well
27. Kit: Verso’s Kit is fascinating. He gets plenty of abilities that compliment the idea of being risky and being rewarded for it, boosting his damage and/or actions per turn, as well as being able to just absolutely go ham on something when the right combination is set up. This of course rewards the player for thinking about his build and going for whatever style they want to
28. Kit: Monoco and the wheel. There’s attacks that adjust the position on the wheel of course but mostly it’s there to add augments to his large retinue of attacks. Speaking of which…
29. Kit: …Monoco’s blue magic stuff. As with most blue mages across games there’s some solid variety in what abilities he has and what they can do
30. Animation: Enemy animations vary in overall quality in helping you to dodge and parry them but there’s still some solidly good stuff. But the animations can be deceiving (and they LOVE to do the delayed strike thing) so…
31. Sound Design: …what really nails it is the sound design. There are multiple aspects of this, not just in combat, but they absolutely nail the sound design for the parrying window…
32. Sound Design: …with a nice gradient sound leading up to a very sharp, keen sound at the point of parry…
33. Sound Design: …and usually a nice meaty follow through to help indicate what to do next
34. Boss: Bourgeon. It eats someone (no way to avoid it) which you can knock out by breaking, and has tells in addition to the usual for parrying and dodging
35. Boss: Ultimate Sakapatate. Big swings, offset swings, the shield assault which functions as a bonus action and of course is breakable, changing its attack patternOptional Mime fights. Gimmicky with breaking and countering
36. Boss: Lampmaster is probably the best fight so far in the game. Nice big very slow attacks which are, amusingly, easier to deal with as a consequence. Nice minigame gimmick which isn’t just a way to bypass damage but also comes with bonuses. And a nice quick first phase which doesn’t drag the fight out too badly…
37. Boss: …for a solid double
38. Boss: Dualliste. This is probably our first ‘real’ boss in the entire game, a true final exam for all the mechanics we’ve seen to-date. Also a very good example, probably the best so far, of sound design in attack cues
39. Boss: Okay, Gross Tete is admittedly an interesting gimmick. A boss with entirely too much health that just has to be endured until it dies. The only thing it does wrong is it doesn’t really properly convey that. Under normal circumstances I’d presume it was just something I needed to come back to at a higher level. Still a neat gimmick
40. Boss: Renoir 1. Simple but mean attacks, heavy on the delays, adds that can heal him if not dealt with, and adds that do lots of attacks
41. Boss: Sirene. This is a classic escalation fight. Basic attack (varying delays), odd attack (pulses indicate when the hit will come), big ol’ sweeping attack (to jump over), then she starts combining abilities and escalating their pacing…
42. Boss: …great fight
43. Level: Probably the first stage that really works for me, the option of doing the little side Visage areas where the enemies behave differently depending on which emotion is being themed and of course it’s gradiently optional (meaning you can do none, 1, 2, or all 3)
44. Boss: The Visages. Lots of big, spectacle attacks, masks which do side effects and can be broken via hitting their gems, and a great and brutal second phase
45. Boss: Renoir 2. This is a hell of a fight (and does what Dualliste did, but better!). Great variety in his attacks, properly brutal without being a dick in his animations, and his second phase is fantastic, adding the dog with its own types of attacks that still follow the same STYLE of his attacks, meaning it’s a good escalation fight…
46. Boss: …and an easy double
47. Boss: The Paintress is an interesting one. I have to give her at least the single, but I actually think she was a biiit of a dick (she really… REALLY likes winding up, and varying those wind ups). That being said one thing I really like about her, and earns the positive by itself, is when she casts Doom on the party and you can have an individual shoot the balls to add a turn of life to the person who shot it, adding some great tactics to the situation
48. Level: Verso’s Drafts. Weirdly enough I think this is one of the better designed levels. The small minigames, the better designed hidden areas and treasures, the fact that they frontload the really cool new pictos to play with, it’s fun stuff
49. Minigame: The Endless Tower. Optional, reasonably fun, nice little side romp
50. Outro: Renoir 1’s big boss battle. Honestly I think the Renoir 2 fight is better but that doesn’t make this a bad fight, and I’m particularly fond of the spectacle attacks which remind me of the Paintress battle
51. NG+: Exists and carries forward most things…
52. NG+: …for a double

Gameplay Negatives:

1. LLM: Usage of LLM generated slop at any point in production is unacceptable
2. LLM: Lying about it only to confirm that was a lie once caught is not a great look either
3. Tutorialization: So it’s toggleable (which is good) but the early tutorialization is honestly pretty bad. It doesn’t convey information very well, interrupts the flow to shove text into your face, and worst of all it does the ‘you can only do one thing’ style of tutorialization (where it prevents you from doing anything but whatever it’s tutorializing at the moment)
4. Graphics: Some pretty basic Unreal issues involving pop in, lighting issues, stuttering in animations, and general graphical flaws
5. Map: The map is… barely functional. I’ve found myself not using it just to avoid having to deal with it
6. Minimap: Total lack of minimap is a varying problem. Sometimes it’s fine, sometimes it’s aggravating, but either way it’d be nice to have while exploring
7. Interface: Menu. I’m still debating as of typing this how many negatives this is. The menu is… clunky. It’s not super clear what you’re looking at for some sections, it takes a weird amount of interactions to do certain equips or changes, there’s no intuitive tunneling or drilling in its layout, and there’s actually THREE menus across two NPCs and one button press to be able to actually see everything
8. HUD: The in combat HUD isn’t the worst, but it is lacking. Lack of color distinction, lack of indicators on the turn bar for adjustments or clear distinction, lack of proper buff indicators, lack of any indication of how long a buff will last, little stuff like this
9. Hub: Gestral village. The lack of minimap has always been problematic but it’s especially bad here, given how large this area is and how much there is to interact with… and how similar it looks to itself
10. Boss: Gross Tete makes two mistakes. First, as mentioned above, nothing really indicates it’s a gimmick fight instead of a higher level encounter. Second, it just goes on too long and gets dull
11. Visual Distinction: This is related to the issue down below but there’s a lack of guidance in visual design which makes it vague to see what is where at times. Subtitles being hard to pick out, the break bar being all but invisible, the lighting effects obscuring visible paths, stuff like that. This dovetails into another problem…
12. Level: …most of the secondary levels, from a level design perspective, kind of suck. Samey areas which loop into each other making it extraordinarily easy to get turned around. And again this is made worse because of the bloom problem
13. Graphics: I’ve seen worse (a lot worse) but… the game does still hit its depth of field, fog, and bloom buttons too hard. Some areas can be legitimately painful to look at (Sirene is a good example)
14. Power Progression Curve: The Mario & Luigi problem. I’ve been chewing on this for a while. The game rewards successful parries and dodges, a lot, and penalizes failure, a lot. I don’t mean boss fights and the like, just regular trash can be a joke or near impossible depending on if you succeed at the combat or not. I know that sounds like a ‘duh’ but it carries some related problems. First, the thing this category is under; Power Progression. It can feel neat to get stronger, as it often does, but the game more or less forces you to keep engaging in its mechanics (unless you do what I did and exploit the hell out of the systems to basically bypass trash encounters) even when you’re just roaming or exploring or fighting stuff pretty far below your weight class. What this boils down to…
15. Mid Game Hell: …is something I don’t get to talk about often in game design, a weak mid game. Early game the fights are simplistic enough and the kit sufficient to keep things relatively balanced. Late game you have plenty of options and complex fights. But in the middle you start to run into the curve a bit because you always have to be on, and there is no bypassing anything, and that just creates a bit of a drag. It’s telling that the combat finally, finally clicked for me when I sat down with a spreadsheet and a wiki and figured out what I could do to really work with the systems. And that’s good, but the several hours before that honestly dragged
16. Padding: Several issues that contribute to the mid game, but what’s really awful here is that chunks of multiple areas (especially dungeons) could be trimmed down to not only help on the gameplay axis, but to help the story hit harder. The main story fulcrum occurring 30 hours into the game is primarily a flaw of gameplay padding
17. Level: Crimson Forest. The chroma removal thing, the irritating navigation, and the frustrating platforming all made this whole area miserable
18. Level: Frozen Heart. This dungeon shares the same problem most dungeons in this game do; It’s just too padded. Everything takes just a little bit too long
19. Seconds In Minutes: This is related to the earlier mentioned interface issues. Some interactions just take too long, or are spread out across too many menus, or it just takes too long to resolve combat, or to navigate overly large dungeons. It’s all pretty small but it’s also pretty constant throughout…
20. Seconds In Minutes: …for a double
21. Interface: This is another menu negative. The Picto system is so damned good, and the Build capacity is so great, and I’m constantly feeling the urge to NOT engage with it because of what a frustrating hassle it is to navigate the menus necessary to do it. Even basic stuff like consistent nomenclature for the Pictos would be nice
22. Power Progression Curve: Act 3 in its entirety has some pretty serious balance issues.
23. NG+: Mandatory difficulty spike increase (what is this, Dark Souls?) and…
24. NG+: …ERASES your existing save (which is already bad)…
25. Info In Game: …and NOT TELLING YOU THAT. The lack of info here is criminal

Story Positives:

1. Animation: Jenks. I know this is a part of acting, but the body language in question is really great on Jenks. The way he bips and bobs is fantastic
2. Animation: Paul is in a similar boat. Even though he’s just sitting there he uses his facial movement SO well
3. Acting: Let’s get this out of the way, the acting in this game isn’t super amazing… but it’s actually really solid. And it really adds to the enjoyability. So let’s mention Jenks first, because he’s fantastic
4. Acting: James also is a bit of a standout. He seems like he’s a nothingburger until something happens at which point the actor manages to shine
5. Acting: I really like Emma’s actress. She is overt in her presentation but she’s good, and you really feel for her
6. Acting: Ryan’s actor is also fantastic, especially in how he bounces between pretending he’s on top of things to blustering angrily
7. Acting: Paul’s actor is of course the star of the show. Manages the exact right amount of sleazy, forthright, in control, and rolling with it…
8. Acting: …and of course nailing it
9. Doodads: Good doodad usage which, in this case, has to do with prop and set design, but it’s still solid
10. Camera: I’ve seen better, but there’s some still solid camera usage and direction
11. Sound: Excellent sound design. Good usage of sound effects, ambient sounds, well constructed…
12. Sound: …and well executed
13. Music Direction: Excellent music direction throughout. Perfect atmospheric music, and well designed for individual scenes
14. Character: Jenks. He’s just delightfully over-the-top in such a delightful way
15. Character: Jenks has fantastic chemistry with every other character. In almost every situation he’s the Columbo; He’s very in charge of the conversations. He guides and directs them, remains more on his feet. The only three exceptions are Rebecca, and…
16. Character: …Ryan. These two have great acting off of each other and the chemistry is very fun to behold. Ryan thinks he’s Jenks’ equal and he turbo isn’t, so it looks like a kitten swatting at a tiger. And then there’s the other person…
17. Character: …Paul. Paul is completely in charge of the conversation at all layers and levels and it’s great to see the normal dynamic flipped here. Helps that Paul’s actor is fantastic
18. Character: Paul himself is so unabashedly evil it’s wonderful. He is so damned villainous and owns all of it
19. Brickwork: This is kind of a weird one because these are shots and videos of a real town but they do some very good stuff with the shots. Which buildings they showcase and where, the cobblestones, the foliage, it’s well designed
20. Cutscene: James going off about the Third Eye conspiracy was not just enjoyable to watch, it was well written AND well acted. James is already hallucinating, is clearly pattern seeking, and clearly wants to believe he changed things for the better
21. Cutscene: Paul’s introduction is great. He comes across as someone who’s shady, sketchy, probably criminal, and completely forthright. He has absolutely no patience for any of this crap and his tone is perfect
22. Visual Continuity: The town is small but well constructed. I also find it interesting they bothered to take shots of the streets from different angles to showcase where you came from
23. Cutscene: First, we push Ryan and he absolutely explodes at us over the whole issue. This is great (he even spills his drink, then puts the glass down, for the first time all night!)
24. Cutscene: Then we push Paul and he lays it all out. The whole plan, the whole dirty scheme of molding people (all cult-like) into perfect employees for morally bankrupt companies to hire, which then gets them cash in return… and it ends on a great moment…
25. Moment: …Paul insisting there is no ‘end of the rainbow’ and the only thing you can enjoy is right here, right now. Leaving Jenks to ask what Paul enjoys, which leads to a nice long pause, a total shift in Paul’s expression, and a calm dismissal. It’s brilliant
26. Writing: Well written mystery with proper hints and indicators. No cheating here
27. Outro: While it’s a bit rushed, I absolutely love the killer’s breakdown. They don’t erupt like Ryan or get cold like Paul, they’re completely unfazed by it all. They act like shoving a flailing person down in the water with a stick is just whatever, but when they realized their mistake there’s this amazing moment of realization on their face. The facial acting is on point
28. Atmosphere: The whole game has great atmosphere. Just creepy enough without being too much

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Guidance: General, but quite a few little things
2. Interface: There’s a couple of issues but I do like the usage of color and smart interactions to make the game smooth to play
3. QoL: The indicators of when you have something or don’t, the built in hint system (which is granular as well, allowing for partial or full hints), and being able to warp around on the map

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Walkthroughitis: There’s at least a few individual moments which basically mandated using a hint to progress. Some of these are barely contradictions, and in some cases it’s not obvious who to talk to about what

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: General. There’s only a few biomes, and each one is basically one room repeated, but there’s still enough here to add some flavor to the stages
2. Spritework: Consider this a positive almost exclusively for the bosses and Rona herself
3. Voice Acting: We’ll call this the pity positive. As is policy I can’t really give positives or negatives for voice acting I don’t understand, but the game is fully voiced in two languages so…

Story Negatives:

1. Empty Text: I’ve seen worse, but they really do take too long to say very little
2. Writing: General. This is… not good writing
3. Character: General, again, but special mention to Aiden for being irritatingly stupid. A pathetic or petty villain can work, this does not
4. Outro: So, plot twist, it was always the weird quiet shy guy who is apparently completely insane. This is already a bit of an inane plot twist for its own sake, but also makes all the drama and build up of Irene versus the capitalist society she’s a part of completely pointless
5. Outro: Then there’s the fact that Aiden shoots Irene, hooks her up to a life support system, and just lugs her around for (I’m not sure how long, but at least as long as the game takes… probably days at a minimum) to use her as a living key. Which would be creepy and horrifying if done well but as with so many other aspects of this it’s just something that wasn’t thought about
6. Outro: Then she dies. This whole scene is fake drama but the worst part is the localization stumbles pretty hard here and so it just comes across as comical. By the way…
7. Outro: …IMMEDIATELY after she dies begging Rona to live, Rona goes to sacrifice herself…
8. Outro: …which is also IMMEDIATELY undone in the stupidest way possible (oh hey, this necklace is a power core!) also happens like just one minute after the supposed death
9. Outro: Internal Continuity: By the way, what happened to… ANYthing else on this stupid ship? The people we rescued? The other researchers? The other bots? I sincerely doubt the writer even thought about it
10. Outro: By the way this all ends on a pretty bad To Be Continued on top of everything else

Gameplay Positives:

1. Controls: Exceptionally tight controls, which is important for a game like this. It’s not fully a twin stick but it has a lot going on in a very short period of time and being able to precisely maneuver, attack, fling, etc. is useful…
2. Controls: …so that’s a double
3. Music: While there’s an issue with it (mentioned later), the songs are all bangers…
4. Music: …easy double positive territory
5. Kit: Solid for what’s there. The three weapons stay basically the same the entire game, but the real difference (and the positive) is their abilities, which vary based on individual weapons
6. Build: Between cores, cosmetics, and weapons, there’s several valid setups
7. Core Combat: Fun in general to just fight, grab, and fling
8. Difficulty Options: Changes up the usual health and damage, but also how much stuff enemies drop and their attack rates. But most importantly, and the real reason for the positive, you can just change it on the fly while at the hub
9. Power Progression Curve: In-run progression is actually pretty solid. You get disks, random weapons, and random cores. Some cores come bugged which, when purged, give you bugs to get more in-run upgrades. I will say I’m not super impressed with cross-run progression (there’s the cosmetic thing which gives you ONE buff, then the stat upgrades which cost an arm and a leg, and that’s kind of… it)
10. Overworld: Rewarding exploration and sweeping while retaining optionality (and being small enough to not be a time waster to backtrack)
11. Itemization: Again, solid for what it is. Very good placement of mini cores most of all, as well as disks
12. HUD: Some good color distinction and usage of animation to draw the eye to relevant info as it happens
13. Info In Game: There’s a few question marks I have but overall most of how the game works and operates is pretty on display, especially important given how many choices you have to make in cores and weapons as you’re doing a run
14. QoL: Lots of little things. You can charge while moving, items are looted from a distance, you can interact with objects while doing other things, timer not ticking down while out of combat, etc.
15. Interface: Generally solid. Quick and efficient menuing, especially while upgrading, which is important to keep the all important…
16. Flow: I’ve seen better (Hades says hello) but this is still very solid flow. While I stand by the padding comment, the game keeps things nice and smooth throughout…
17. Flow: …an easy double
18. Secondary: Fun side quests (throw enemies into a person, don’t get hit while escorting a thing, recover objects from enemies)
19. Boss: Spyden. Nice big tells, huge hurtbox but also a huge hitbox, and his second phase has some nice mutators (each attack having an additional component added to it) all on top of the boss slowly and randomly adding area deniers to the room…
20. Boss: …very fun fight
21. Boss: Fira. Another fun boss fight. Lots of area denial, usage of the throw mechanic to vuln (which also does damage, so no time wasted), plenty of adds to deal with which also can help recover, and a great phase 2 as usual…
22. Boss: …another damned good boss battle
23. Boss: Graver. Somewhat simple compared to the others, but still very solid. Lunging attacks, big AOE spread, and a nice drill attack
24. Boss: Faceless. Another fun fight with some neat avoidance gimmicks, area denial, and bouncing attacks to keep track of
25. Boss: Icela. Lots of area denial, lots of bouncing attacks, great second phase with the addition of the shield and larger weapon swing range
26. Viscerality: Mostly on the audio side, believe it or not. Attacks don’t have much impact and they look ‘fine’ but the audio design is where things really feel great
27. Boss: Lighton! Favorite fight so far overall. Big beam swoopers (following his stage theme), nice big aoe sweeping attacks you jump over while having circular AOEs, and nice big tells…
28. Boss: …easy double
29. Minimap: Functional and helpful consistently
30. Minigames: The virtual missions and their optional turbo hard stuff for chip farming

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Visual Distinction: Bit of a noise problem
2. Audio Spam: Lot of a noise problem
3. Music: The music that plays is boppin’ but the loops are just too short for how long you spend listening to them
4. Graphics: Lens flares, over lighting, and neon glare issues
5. Boss: Gigantic is… boring, at best. Big sweeping attacks that it’s not obvious how to dodge and nothing there to help vary the fight up. No adds, no terrain, just move left or right and attack
6. Padding: Levels are just too long. Each stage actually being three stages (and you being encouraged to sweep each stage for pick ups) makes the game drag top to bottom. This is problematic by itself…
7. Padding: …and so earns a double, but then…
8. Padding: …you get enemy health, especially bosses. On two of the four difficulties bosses just have an arduous amount of health to slog through, well past the point where the fight is interesting and long after the boss has done its full rotation
9. Unskippable Cutscenes: A few… and they’re super long too
10. Outro: Level: The final stage is padded like everything else but that’s sort of the problem, isn’t it? It’s just another long padded stage, except now with those stupid red cubes

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: Generally solid. I’m particularly fond of the fog, the distant hills, and how rooms will change their wallpaper to accommodate their new configuration…
2. Brickwork: …solid double
3. Spritework: Love the visuals for the mages themselves. And the nice little touches differentiating them (and of course, changing as they upgrade)
4. Doodads: Mostly player generated, but it still counts
5. Animations: I love the animations. Almost everything is done with magic. Need to cook? Cast at the pot. Clean? Cast at the mess. Carrying stuff? Magic. But none of this is simple, and it really adds to the flavor of everything…
6. Animations: …easy double
7. Atmosphere: This is a twofer. First we have the wonderfully gloomy, cursed nature of the Fog and how it can screw with you…
8. Tone: …and second is the overall tone of the entire work. You really get the vibe of this wild, wonky, and dangerous magical school
9. Sound Design: Variable depending on ‘where’ the camera is at, but also some great atmosphere here
10. Music Direction: Wonderfully mystical and creepy in equal measures

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Music: Good stuff for what’s here
2. Difficulty Options: Tons and tons and tons and TONS of options to set every individual factor of the game to easy or hard individually…
3. Difficulty Options: …easy…
4. Difficulty Options: …triple
5. Difficulty Options: Also there’s built in presets if you’re not sure what you want
6. Difficulty Options: By the way you can adjust all of this on the fly at will
7. Starting Options: Architectural style, strategic battles, and optional Ironman mode
8. Interface: Nested tooltips! I love me some nested tooltips and these are fantastic. You mouseover an indicated line, it pops up something new, if you leave it a second it’ll pop a new static window where you can mouseover the new stuff in the new window…
9. Interface: …love this stuff
10. Info In Game: So much. I think I can come up only a handful of specific mechanics I had to actually look up or ask someone about. Mechanics, gear, people, tech, everything…
11. Info In Game: …great stuff…
12. Info In Game: …and worthy of a triple
13. QoL:Color usage, lighting on mouse, double clicks to warp to, clear all news, highlights to show empty stock, mouseover text galore, search functions everywhere which find and highlight items, research, and concepts, proper highlighting on interactables…
14. QoL: …and plenty more I’m probably forgetting about…
15. QoL: …but seriously, the whole game plays fabulously
16. Interface: Good gravy this game has an amazing interface. Let me count the ways. We have nice, collapsable, sortable, well colored immediate tabs on the right keeping track of people, resources, and including a friggin’ search bar AND with a ‘clear new’ and ‘clear all new’ button…
17. Interface: …so that’s honestly a double by itself
18. Interface: Then we have the quick and easy character overlays at the top. Quick indicator of who’s whom, their magic school, name, ways to click them to zoom in on them, and great mouseover information and color usage to show issues and status
19. Difficulty: Dynamic difficulty, similar to Rimworld. Doing well? Things will start happening. Doing badly? It’ll ease off a bit. This is also optional on top of everything else, which makes it even better
20. Core Mechanic: Schedules. Personnel can be set by category (staff, apprentices, initiates) and given specific allotments of time for sleep, food, recreation, work, and class. This is a very dynamic system and very helpful to create all kinds of layered schedules??
21. Core Mechanic: Priorities. There’s actually TWO types of priorities. First we’ll talk about the obvious one; You can set any given action to be a priority rating from X to 5, with X being ‘never do’ (aka pause) and 5 being high priority. This lets you rejigger a bunch of things in fairly obvious ways
22. Core Mechanic: But then there’s Priorities, aka the Task Priorities window. This lets you see what people can and can’t do, what they love doing, what skills are requires for which tasks, and it’s all incredibly well laid out…
23. Interface: …oh, really quick, plus to interface for the incredible layout of this page. Good color and icon distinction, good usage of the defaults for new people of a given class, and you can set it per individuals too. Anyways, back to the mechanic…
24. Core Mechanic: …so in addition to useful for just info garnering (the previous positive) and the good design of the interface, it’s great being able to decide which people do what and use this as a way to manage your colonists… er, I mean your staff. This has obvious and incredible usefulness, especially as you start to get larger and larger with more people to manage??
25. Core Mechanic: Food is an interesting one. You’d think that in a game like this it’s just maintenance, and to an extent it is, but there’s also ways to set which people eat which food (and they have preferences depending on species) to be more efficient, as well as to properly use the right things you have before wasting anything
26. HUD: The overlays. Being able to quickly and easily see bedrooms, lighting (and effects), filth issues, clutter problems and effects, pathing, and structural support. All with a good key in the corner and good color usage, filters, searchability, mouseovers…
27. HUD: …fantastic stuff…
28. HUD: …easy triple
29. HUD: Also multiple visibility modes with great, at-a-glance info…
30. HUD: …for a double
31. Core Mechanic: Building itself. It’s pretty freeform (which is good) and satisfying, and of course lets you customize (or abuse) the mechanics as much as you want, and dovetails nicely into…
32. Core Mechanic: …the Rooms concept. This is a pretty standard idea in Builder games, if you build a thing with X and Y but not Z you get a Room, which gives bonuses (or fulfills requirements). And as per usual what I like the best about this is how granular the system is. You can try to design stuff that’s more roleplay’y, or looks good cosmetically, or just mechanically fulfills the requirements, or however you want…
33. Core Mechanic: …great stuff
34. Controls: Demolish, set priority, and gather all on hotkeys in the lower left
35. Power Progression: I’m actually quite impressed with how well the game keeps unlocking further recipes and synergies in rooms and buildings to keep things progressing forward
36. Core Mechanic: Research. This is a pretty good research tree overall, but the thought put into the ‘trees’ (one per element) as well as the search function and general usefulness of each pushes it a bit above what I usually see in a tech tree…
37. Core Mechanic: …for another double
38. Sound Design: Useful. Almost every major interaction has some kind of audio indicator, like the fog moving, an event happening, stuff spawning, etc.
39. Visual Distinction: Good, which is good because this can get pretty busy
40. Tutorialization: Initial guidance tasks (optional, too) gives a decent in-the-player’s-hands way to get used to the basics of the game
41. HUD: Warnings and pop ups, all color coded and with good writing to help indicate severity
42. Penalty For Failure: The Fog itself is a wonderfully gradient penalty for failure. It slowly overtakes the school, which reduces your access to resources and can damage and destroy parts of the school while denying access to them. But on top of that it gets cheaper and easier to push back the more it’s on you, giving you more chance to push back. Further…
43. Power Progression Curve: …the further you push the Fog out, the more resources you gain access to. And so it becomes this interesting balancing act of dumping resources on gains and timing it to ensure you get the most benefit
44. Penalty For Failure: Then there’s the losses for the mages themselves. Losing health means time spent medically recovering, which basically means you’re denied a worker for a while, but if they hit zero they’re still alive but only have hours before they actually die. So you can get them to a bed and revive them (which is now costing you TWO workers, one to revive and the one being revived) but they do get up again… with a Trauma, a minor but long term penalty for having died. All of this means you are penalized, but not too much, but not too little. And I’ve already gushed about it but all of this is changeable in the difficulty settings
45. Early Game: Ghost as an early game crutch. They can’t level and their skills are very low, but they can do basic tasks, ignore terrain, and don’t have needs
46. Early Game: I think Early Game is pretty solid in general. It’s full on survivalist, just struggling to keep up, but it’s solid, fun, and engaging…
47. Early Game: …and relatively lenient to allow the player time to get into the swing of the game
48. Mid Game: Honestly I think the Mid Game sticks the landing a bit too. When you really start to get into heavier resources, have plenty of staff, and start to actually build up your school it’s more about the management of resources and automation than anything else as you’re trying to get the school the way you want it. This is also I’d argue the main bulk of the game and since it, as with most strategy Mid Games, is just Early Game but with everything unlocked…
49. Mid Game: …well, this one…
50. Mid Game: …is legit
51. Replayability: So this is the same basic pluses we gave Oxygen Not Included. One for general replayability…
52. Replayability: …and the third, for the game being designed around repeated and long term playthroughs
53. Camera: I didn’t mention this earlier but the camera in this game is actually pretty good. There are a few occasional issues (like when you want to select something small behind something else) but otherwise it moves and shows well
54. Controls: This is actually a second positive for controls because the smart thought put into hotkeys and bindings
55. Save System: Good autosaves periodically
56. Save System: Good save system in general

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Padding: Bottlenecking issues. This is sort of a cascading issue, something that’s not really a big deal early on but after a certain point you really need a specific resource for several things and that just sort of leads to another problem. See…
2. Core Mechanic: …a lot of rooms have specific requirements. I mean, duh, but some of those requirements get a bit ridiculous and, again, require very specific resources which drags. Oh before I continue talking about that though…
3. Core Mechanics: …some of the room requirements run into each other and basically mandate either building all over the place or exploiting the system. Anyways…
4. Mid Game: …going back to the resource bottlenecking. In practical application what this means is when you need a specific thing to do basically everything you still need to do you… just stand around, waiting for that one resource, so you can do things
5. Core Combat: I’m not super impressed with the combat layer. It’s not terrible, and I’ve played worse, but it’s over-tuned to hell and back (and VERY punishing the more damage you take in battle) and costly as hell anyways (you lose four full staff members, twice, while doing it, and risking them getting scars or actually dying)
6. Bug: Memory and crash issues related to Unity
7. Late Game: Okay so there’s… a lot of issues with Late Game and I’m going to try to go down these sequentially. First you have to understand that MOST strategy games, regardless of subgenre, tend to suck in the Late Game. This is because of the nature of their structure; Early Game is when you have access to tons of mechanics but can only do a few. Mid game is when you have the same access but can do all of it, in other words it’s a natural development of Early Game. The problem is once you’re past Mid Game… now what? Most strategy games’ Late Game is just Only students can work with refiners
8. Late Game: Drinks are plus 10 instead of 50
9. Late Game: Grind: Thorns and the irritation of gathering
10. Late Game: Padding: Inability to double up on orders and travel times
11. Late Game: Bottlenecking gets worse
12. Late Game: End game student grinding, relic usage, and the pointlessness thereof
13. Party AI: Periodic issues with people just straight up refusing to do automated tasks, and mandating having to manually force them to do things (for a specific example, Attunement)