Recent reviews by Berskjaldathur

Totally overrated.

I admit, it has good aesthetics, design and sound. On the other hand, it contains terrible plot and storytelling, repetitive gameplay, incoherent level-design, questionable inventory management, irrelevant anime-cutscenes (that don't match the pixelated low poly graphics) and characters drama that nobody cares of.

It had a very promising atmospheric start with interesting visual art-style, sound design and some sort of a mystery. But as soon as the enemies appear, atmosphere turns into endless coridor wandering with the constant key items searching. Due to the goofy limited inventory capacity, you have to visit the same rooms 3 more times to carry all the leftover loot to the storage. The worst thing is, occasional trip to the safe room may resurrect the mobs forcing you to dodge as many fights as you can and save up ammo for the upcoming boss encounters.

The audio frequency mechanic is used only in two scenarios - when solving the puzzles and when you need to kill stationary noisy enemies. An interesting gimmick, but super underutilized in the end of the day.

There is no storytelling of the plot at all, there's only reading of the totally meaningless notes about gestalt and replikas, and some artistic anime-cutscenes that give no plot explanation. Well, but maybe those gestalts or replikas will be clearly shown in the game? Forget about it, just roam around between repetitive rooms, collect items, solve puzzles and kill 3 types of enemies for entire game. Only some notes are useful, the ones that give you hints on how to solve the puzzles (and the puzzles are okay, by the way).

The anime-cutscenes are okay, but they are unnecessary if you are implementing them into the game with such pixelated low poly mediocre graphics. It just looks out of place entirely. Either you are making everything in the anime style, or you are making everything in the low-poly style.

Speaking about the third chapter - with the bloody and gory rooms - what the heck was that? It had a totally illogical room transition, where left equals right, up equals down, and vice versa, and it doesn't give a single clue what the heck is going on in terms of the plot.

Then you finish the game for the first time and it alludes to the fact that the ending was a 'fake' one. Would you mind restarting the game and suffering a couple more times, fella? A player would then assume that a consecutive run actually elaborates on the surrealistic plot, right? Nah, we don't do that in this joint.

Definitely it's a downgrade comparing to the Endoparasitic 1.

Interaction with your on-body equipment became less clunky comparing to the first game, even one new gun has been added (I would say tool), couple new enemies (some of them has questionable design), but simultaneously the flare gun and the crossbow has been taken off, added some questionable mechanics, puzzles, crafting, unbalanced amount of crafting materials and millions of levels (30!), artificially prolonging the gameplay by making it long, repetitive and irritating.

Puzzles looked fun during the first 2 hours, then they become repetitive. Crafting gives mixed feelings about necessity of implementing such feature, especially when you notice the excess quantity of pens that spread all over the THIRTY floors. And what's the point of complicating loot-system by adding crafting, if at the end of the game there are things that make all your extended looting useless?(there are dispensers with unlimited resources before boss encounter, and all the craftable tools can be placed inside the boss-room even before triggering the fight.)

Some of new monsters are questionably bad. "Arm/leg" monster - are you serious? Why such ridiculous design? It's because our character have only one arm? "Hedgehog"-monster, that can be killed only when the lights are off (that makes your vision more obstructed). Why? Cynte (our crippled hero) already has screwed-up vision, and you decided to make it even more worse? "Invisible" monster - that is just okay, I can't say anything good or bad about it. But why there are no stationary monsters (from the Endoparasitic 1) that forced you to move slowly? It had such an interesting concept with movement mechanics, but developer decided to remove it from the second game.

There are tons of levels that almost look the same: you are doing the same pulling the levers, solving the puzzles and killings over and over again - it's getting very repetitive, so you don't really care about gameplay, you just want to finish the game.

Speaking about the boss itself -it's just a bullet sponge with long arms and 3 room-triggers, nothing extraordinary here, though I was expecting it to be more complexed or thoughtful battle.

Summing up - Endoparasitic 1 is way more better, despite its clunkiness.

I don't understand why this game has overwhelmingly positive reviews.

From the very beginning I felt that this game is worse than Darkest Dungeon or Tainted Grail because of the lack of the home hub and TOTAL dependence on the outcome of the randomised events that you encounter. In DD or TG you could directly affect every run you will be having by available amount of upgrades that you invested in your hub or investing it in your starting characteristics, hence it straightly did raise the probability of winning (or at least easing the pain during your run for sure). Here you can't directly affect it, the whale in the start of every run offers you very limited choices that I can't say really helpful most of time. You can't change your starting deck (except limited whale offerings), you may hope that some useful cards will be dropped in the nearest starting mob fights (or in the shop), but that's all: no controllable fun for you. No direct tangible intervention into RNG at all. Some of the relics that you may encounter are completely useless, so game doesn't really help you, but effectively messing with little there's left of what the player has any control over

Unplayable (too buggy) and unenjoyable.

I got softlocked 3 times after finishing:

• The 'prison' mission - I got stuck inside the building, and there were no interactions with the entrance door.
  
• The 'cat' mission - I got stuck in the 'special' animal form, even though I was supposed to go back to my default one.
  
• The 'emigrants' mission - it was unchecked in the mission list after completing it.

So I had to start the day over (because autosaves got rewritten, but I will mention it later). And yet I have encountered more bugs that made my playing less and less satisfying:

• You are always getting stuck in houses with tiny doorways and beds blocking it.
  
• You are getting stuck in a middle of the stairs (and you have to jump to keep moving).
  
• Some of the scooters are stuck into geometry of the world, like flowerbed and trashcans.
  
• The navigation doesn't work on your map screen, sometimes tapping the 'arrow' keyboard buttons helps, but not all the time.
  
• If you are bumping into something during your scooter driving, enjoy listening to 1000x bass-boosted sound of the collision.
  
• Unoptimized amount of subtitles (if you decided to turn such setting on) - your screen will be entirely overwhelmed by the symbols.
  
• Unoptimized performance - during some frequent events (like the mafia fight near wooden huts, or during the last day) you encounter huge fps drop, though I have fine pc specs.
  
• The checkpoint system (if you turned it on) will rewrite any normal autosave that you have, so be ready to manually save before entering any mission - I am warning you, you will get frequently softlocked in this game, don't repeat my rookie mistake.

I don't mind corny poop- or dickjokes, but problem is, they are happening all the time, so they become really annoying and repetitive. What is more, the difficulty is unbalanced - you won't have any problems with enemies for almost 4 days, but when the last day with 'red clouds' starts - expect huge pain in the ass, you will be needed lots of ammo and first aidkits (even on low difficulties).

The plot and narrative are dumb and trivial, it seems only the first day was made with some efforts. I wasn't even going for any collectables, since I didn't feel motivated enough to keep exploring the game world (hence, I didn't buy any inventory upgrades)
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Summing up - buggy, unoptimized and unpleasant. This game tests your patience every time you log back in, truly a chore to complete.

Visual artstyle is interesting, but you are getting used to it after 30 minutes of playing, and then the game starts getting repetitive, boring and clunky.

Enemies are running into you like headless dummies, eagles can't be seen in the skies, and bosses are just bullet-sponges for your shotgun. When you are getting the minigun, you just don't need it in the late part of the mission. Interaction with the explosives is clunky, you can't be sure that it will detonate on an impact (instead of unfortunate bouncing).

Locations are okay, music is average, system of saving on checkpoints is strange - if you decide to go back, all enemies will be spawned again (though you killed them during your previous life), but the weapon drops are already obtained, so you can't simply go back without loosing all ammo. And you have to release all the hostages one more time (who said it's a good idea?)

Poor optimisation on some locations, though I have fine specs. Animations for enemies are done poorly. The same goes about sound - some enemies will be louder than the explosion in front of you, though they are miles away.

Gameplay gets repetitive so freaking quickly, you won't even finish first half of the game when you start noticing how monotonous your game actions are: accept the mission, check archives, go A, kill some monsters, search clues, do "retrocognition", connect clues in a "mind palace", go B and repeat everything above 20 times.

Monsters are shown from the very beginning, world feels empty and not motivating for any further exploration - you only need to collect fast travel points , it's the only meaningful purpose of wandering around. There are three difficulties in game, but combat mechanics are so clunky, that you automatically choose easy difficulty, because you don't want any more problems game is already giving you. Characters aren't recognisable and not very convincing. Deep-dive sections are boring, slow-paced and needless.

All these shenanigans with the predestination of the main character didn't persuade me in responsible choosing of the game ending - I didn't actually care about the world itself, anyway your choices throughout the game didn't mean anything, three unchangeable cutscene-endings exist no matter what actions you do. Cutscenes are awful - any time I was seeing it, I have been always wondering - why I was shown this scene? It didn't affect the immersion into the story, it was badly implemented into what's currently happening in the game, and didn't answer any of the story questions. The only cutscenes that matter are at the finals.

The checkpoint system is locationally attached to the place of the nearest fast-travel spot, so any time you exit the game, kindly remember the heck you was doing last time, and where you stopped at. Save system stores only couple last autosaves, so if you screwed up with some achievements/choices from the previous chapters and didn't save, replay whole game from the very beginning, you loser.

Some faces are well-done, but general textures of it are copypasted with the only difference - having moustache or a beard. The same goes about level design - apartments and the streets that you visit are always looking identical.

The only thing that keeps you from quitting is the main story (and achievements), but the narration isn't good and transition from the middle game into an ending feels rather abruptly. If only I knew that the specialty of repeating gameplay exists from the very start till the very end, I would simply skip doing all side-quests and stick straight to the main story without any distractions whatsoever.

Surreal 'art-house'-game with abstract but good humour and its own unique style. Moreover, it has tons of different cinema references and a pretty catchy soundtrack fitting the atmosphere. Unfotunately, it's too damn short. Give it a try, it's worth its money.