Recent reviews by Contrary

Every time I try to play this game, I spend 10 hours troubleshooting bugs and give up

Hades 1:
- Story: 10/10
- Gameplay: 8.5/10

Hades 2:
- Story: 8.5/10
- Gameplay: 10/10

What a phenomenally executed rug pull. I will never so much as consider purchasing another EA title.

Buggy garbage and somehow still the only good option

If you're looking for the magic of the original, this ain't it chief.

My key takeaway from Silksong is that Team Cherry fails to understand what made the original special - the whimsical nature of exploration, the exponential power curve and masterful pacing, and most importantly, the coherent and fulfilling world building, lore and ending are all.. relatively absent.

Silksong is a competent action game when it wants to be. It has some of the best boss fights in any game I've ever played (eclipsing Hollow Knight in that regard), a plethora of interesting player/combat mechanics and more content than it has any right to include in a $20 game.

Spoilers:



All that said, Team Cherry made so many decisions that I just.. do not understand.

I understand that Silksong wanted to be a story of a pilgrims journey, to drive home the evil nature of the cult that makes up Pharloom. What I don’t understand is why the game needed to suffer to tell this story - I wouldn’t go as far as to say the first act of the game was too hard, but I would say it felt meaningless, start to finish. Why, as the player, are we expected to slog through 1/3rd of the game with no currency, no rewards and no scaling?

Even when we do finally start to scale, it's not the same - it's.. a weird combination of too balanced and too unbalanced. Every piece of equipment either beats the game for you, or does effectively nothing. There's a severe lack of fun synergies that were present within the original charm system, and all of the equipment feels like it shows up too late to be meaningful (and I even found the wreath early).

Why do we spend the entire game building rapport with the residents of Pharloom, only to be fooled into destroying their entire society, enter a heroic redemption arc, save the world and… nothing? Cool, we get a floating gif of the knight - I just don’t get it.

I genuinely felt disrespected as a player - not because of long boss runs or general difficulty, but because the entire third act of the game should not have shipped.

The additional combat mechanics aren’t interesting, all they do is needlessly slow down the game. they provide no real difficulty, because everything gets the same new abilities and a gigantic health buff. It takes the meaningful combat of the first two acts and replaces it with a never-ending onslaught of enemies that you have no choice but to kite.

The additional bosses aren’t interesting, and needing to perform back to back full-spam mob rushes to reach some of them is simply not fun.

What the actual ♥♥♥♥ even is Lost Lace? Team Cherry, y’all are better than this - normal Lace was an S-tier boss, what were you thinking? Why did you decide to make the boss damn near invisible against the background, constantly hide in gigantic black blobs that are also invisible against the background, give her a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ vacuum so you can’t avoid her attacks the way you would any other enemy in the game, with the added bonus of being pulled into arena traps?

Why were we not even rewarded for making it through this mess? Could you really not be asked to just.. turn the world back? Maybe add like 25 lines of dialog? Give the player some meaningful outcome for the hell you’ve put them through? Why even go through the effort of rebuilding most of the world for the third act, just to have no resolution? The entire third act felt tacked on, poorly thought out and unfinished, and honestly deeply hurts the overall experience.

But the absolute worst part? The best content in the game, Lost Verdania, the one piece of content that consistently felt like Hollow Knight, is optional and buried in this ♥♥♥♥ mess that makes up 1/3rd of the game. I know you’ve already stated you don’t know that you want to make another Hollow Knight game, but if you do, please: revisit Verdania, or at least make an attempt at understanding what made it so good.

Update: Latest Nvidia driver helped somewhat, but still crashing

Currently unplayable - can't make it more than a few minutes without triggering an Unreal "GPU Crash dump Triggered" crash

Read everything. Understand nothing. You'll get there, just play it.

👍

it's ok

edit: still ok