Recent reviews by TopherIsSwell

Wildly creative setting and artwork. Engaging battles that incorporate planning and strategy while also rewarding fast reflexes for parries and dodges. Character building is fun. Acting and animation are absolutely stunning. I'm enamored.

Fantastic music, fun gameplay, and a good story.

Not very technical, but still fun and nostalgic.

Like Factorio as a CCG

Surprisingly fun party games that are easy to play and organize for small groups of people. Much better than trying to decide between a dozen different board games.

The game is gorgeous, it's fantastic to look at, but look and don't touch, because the UI is awful. It is incredibly unintuitive to use items, switch weapons, navigate menus, and pretty much everything else. Part of it is the default keymapping, which I might be able to fix if I spent the time figuring out an intuitive UI.

By default the buttons for target, counter, heavy attack and strafe left can only be pressed with the left pinky (personally, my least dextrous finger). Targeting is pretty essential for a new player because the attacks are pretty cantankerous, without targeting it's an art of lining up your character with the enemy lest you slash next to your enemy.

The steam controller is unusuable because the game doesn't allow me to remap the movement controls and they aren't already mapped to anything on the steam controller. And quick use items are mapped to holding E and a direction key. So on most US keyboards, this means I have to let go of the mouse to use items.

When you have a bow equipped in the off hand and a sword in the dominate hand, the button for guard becomes the aim button, which would be fine except that the character appears to holds the sword in a two handed stance in this configuration and if you switch to "two-handed mode" the button is now a guard button again, but with no visual indication that anything has changed. furthermore, if you press Aim with a bow in the off hand, you switch to using your bow, and the only way I've figured out how to switch back to a melee weapon is to cycle through your weapons. So if you lose track of things, you might unequp your weapon by pressing the guard/block button. To make it interesting, to cycle through your weapons to get your melee weapon equipped again, you have to use the direction keys on the keyboard, so you have to take your hand off of WASD or the mouse to do it.

Additionally, it's easy to accidentally fire an arrow, and arrows are a liimited resource, you can't collect them once they're fired, and you can't even put away an arrow once you nock it.

I was going to praise the sneaking parts as it was exciting, but it might have been exciting because it's so easy to press the wrong button and get killed. Almost all of the buttons will take you out of sneaking mode I've found.

I want to like this game, but the only challenge comes from trying to control your character and I don't know if I have the energy to figure this out.

This is my favorite game of all time. Bar none. It has a story that is epic, wistful, funny, sad, and thoughtful all at once. A setting that is engaging, interesting, bizarre, and wholly different from any other. The main characters are well-conceived, thoroughly rounded, tragic, and interesting. The secondary characters are all at least one of interesting/funny/profound. The dialog is superb and witty. The only thing that suffers is the gameplay, which suffers a little from pacing and lack of challenge. Which in a _video game_ is pretty damn important. And yet, the story, characters, and setting are SO DAMN GOOD, that it can overshadow some gameplay mechanics issues to still become what I believe to be the greatest game of all time.

The setting is refreshingly atypical. There isn't a single sword in the game (well, possibly one exception, but at lease none that you can equip). You're not out to save (or destroy) the world, you're only out to save yourself (and so few games with a save-the-world plot can match the epic scope of the Nameless One finding out who he really is). Zombies are cheap labor. Rats are high-level villains. Save the undead village under threat from the living. Decide which one of your party members to betray in order to complete your quest. Die in order to solve puzzles. Euthanize Gods. Deal with devils. Outwit yourself. Fall in love with a succubus. And these are just a small few curious aspects of the universe that I can entice you with without spoiling too much. But know that this adventure is far more colorful and exotic than likely any other you've encountered. And the only goal? Get back your memory and die forever. Should be easy, right?

I loved the nostalgia of the Infinity Engine games, but in a distinctly modern format. It is a challenging and nuanced game where your party composition, class choices, and character builds matter and are used to their fullest due to the intense combat, good AI, and challenging encounters.