Recent reviews by Valmit

This game is pretty damned good. An open world RPG, very similar to the old Gothic as many have pointed out. The kind of RPG where the main focus is combat and exploration. From the very beginning, this process sucked me right in - I wanted to explore the map and exterminate all the wildlife, endlessly pulled into rabbit hole after rabbit hole.

The enemies do not respawn here - another way the game is similar to Gothic, and this is great. Triggers my lawn mowing instincts. Every time I saw a monster, I just wanted to go in that direction and exterminate everything, and the game kept throwing new areas at me, caves, little hidden nooks, and so on. The first 10-15 hours, when I was just exploring the map, were probably the best part.

The exploration and character progression tie into each other neatly - I would find an area protected by powerful monsters that I couldn't kill, creating a motivation to get stronger, which made level ups and finding better weapons very satisfying. Coming back and killing those powerful monsters makes exploration more interesting in turn - I felt like I was in proper high-level location, where few have visited before.

RPG system is yet another throwback to Gothic - you need to find a trainer who can actually teach the skill you want. There are skills for crafting/looting, bow, daggers, axes, swords, spears, slings. That's pretty much the build variety - you choose the weapon type to specialize in. You probably want the crafting skills regardless of what kind of character you are. An important point is, you do not need skill points to learn magic, so you do not gimp your build by investing too much into weapons.

Magic itself is another thing I liked a lot. It took a very long time before I was allowed to learn magic (rather than casting from scrolls), but when that finally happened, magic felt properly powerful and impressive.

The story is fine. Some moments - specifically the capture of the Boar spirit - hit quite hard and are well made. Characters are flavorful, but not particularly deep. What's more important, though, is that you can pet cats in this game, and they make wonderful purring sounds. This is great. Cats have different personalities, too. Some are happy to be petted from the start, others you need to approach a bit carefully and make the correct choices in the dialogue tree. You can also interact dogs and sheep, but cats are clearly the main attraction.

Music is pretty good as well, though I can't say much more about it.

Combat is simple, but satisfying. I'm not sure about the stamina management balance - there are strong attacks that require stamina, and basic attacks that do not. Stamina is also required for dodging and blocking. Thing is, dodging is so valuable, that I basically never wanted to waste stamina on strong attacks, I had little enough of it as it was. And I played with a shield, so I had another way of defending myself besides dodging. I'm not sure how fights would go without ability to block.

For the outright bad things about this game, there are two references to other material that are fairly cringe. The first one was almost good - a Bloodborne reference. A guy has dreams about specific locations, as a result of investigating those locations you get a powerful magical item from another world. Cool. Even the description of the item saying "Fear the Old Blood" can be excused. But then the dreamer guy says that only a true Hunter can get the thing, then you see a Bloodborne lantern surrounded by Messengers. As a result - cringe.

The second and worse moment is Tobi's mask from Naruto. It's just there in a hidden area, behind a hard fight (hardest fight in the game by far, at least that I found). Why? Horrible cringe.

A bit of questionable balance that I didn't like is how the best in slot weapons and shield are purchased from a shop. Yes, it's a shop you only unlock if you find the 7 pieces of Bygone Relics, but still. It was a bummer that I found this legendary sword that I pulled from a stone, and then a better sword was just in a shop sold for money. I feel like the legendary weapons findable out in the world should be better than the ones sold in a shop for money.

The combat is boring, and the game wants you to do a lot of it

The combat is pretty good, and so is the exploration, though there are flaws.

The story is boring, the art style is ugly (in terms of character models) and the music is completely forgettable.

The game reminded me of Hyper Light Drifter in the very beginning because I believe the small breakable box asset looks exactly like those boxes looked in HLD. Also, there is an explicit reference to HLD in an item. For this reason, I was constantly reminded that HLD had much better music, more engrossing visuals (though, to be fair, this game has a nice looking dark rainy city, but every other area is forgettable) and better presented story.

This game is on a time limit. If you take too long, all NPCs will die and then so will you. You can prolong life for yourself or NPCs with items, but those are rare and only give about 24 minutes (I'm not sure if the in-game hour is exactly equal to a minute, but it's somewhere close). So if you want to save people, hurry the ♥♥♥♥ up. This is actually interesting, and it gave me motivation to avoid tedious backtracking. In another game, I might have tried to find all the secrets and grown bored doing it. Here, I had a good reason to move on and go fight bosses. Cool.

However, almost none of the NPCs are behaving appropriately given that All Their Days Are Numbered. All their hours, really. Only in the last 24 hours of their lives do they grow depressed. Before that, everyone is way too cheerful and has weird priorities, nobody is desperate to get a fix of moon dust (the item that gives you 24 more in-game hours of life), nobody kills each other to extract life (not sure if it's an option for most robots, but a spooky creature with a scythe offers this option to the player character).

In general, this game reminds me of Cave Story in terms of the story and characters, but Cave Story was better, I think.

To comment a little more on the story, In the end, the final boss, after I came and beat him with a sword, said something like "So the answer you offer is Love..."

This is nonsense. The answer I offered was "Cough up the Anima or I will keep hitting you with my sword". This is what just happened. Why are you talking about Love? Yes, part of the reason I came here is to save my girlfriend Raquel, but... I've already said it, the story is weak. By the way, am I the only one who thinks that Raquel is a steriotypical transwoman name, up there with Lilith and what-not?

The combat is parry-centric. After a parry (or several if the enemy is tough), the enemy is stunned and you deal massively more damage. This is how I killed most enemies - a lot of them have too much HP to kill without parrying. Getting out of the way of attacks is hard - almost all enemies dash across half the screen with every attack, you have to actively dodge, it is almost impossible to simply position yourself out of range. This would constantly catch me of guard while I played - their animation doesn't really communicate the intent to dash forward rather than simply swing.

In fact, there is not much of animation in general - the enemy readies the attack, flashes red, then the attack itself is just a couple of frames. To parry or dodge, you react to the flashing red color. A bit oldschool like that.

This means that the hardest fights are the ones against multiple opponents, and in fact I died the most times fighting two big robots with hammers in a room rather than any of the bosses.

The combat encounters feel difficult, but at the same time they rarely killed me. In terms of puzzles, on the other hand, the game is sometimes awfully condescending. There is a level where the main gimmick is turning platforms transparent or solid by hitting switches, and the tutorial fairy would remind me of this fact every single time I saw an inactive platform. "Hey, do you remember this thing you've been doing the whole time on this level?"

Literally, every single time it would remind me. Almost decided to let the fairy die and not feed it any moon dust at that point.

The exploration is fun, except for the part that certain traversal tools occupy the same slot as your gun, meaning you have to constantly switch between loadouts. Very annoying. Especially if you jump into a fight right after a traversal segment, so you have to scramble to switch to the loadout that actually has your gun.

Another point about how the story is presented - the cutscenes have classic RPG-maker style dialogue boxes that you have to click through. This is awful, especially for this game. The timers encouraged me to be in semi-speedrun mode, "Go-go-go", but then there are this slow, annoying to click through dialogue boxes. This doesn't work as a relaxing break, because I actually need to manually click through dialogue, instead of appreciating a silent cutscene, and the timer mentality encourages me to click through the boxes as fast as I could. As a result - annoyance.

The game also has 'Invisible Maze" type puzzles after every boss kill. What happens is, you get into a Bastion-like place where platforms ignite under your feet as you walk on them. Problem is, 1) you need to be at the very edge of the platform at the right place for the next platform to ignite, and 2) there are branching paths and dead ends, so this is a light puzzle rather than an RP-walk type of deal.

What this means is, I had to rub against every edge of every hexagonal platform to make sure that I notice a branching path if there is one here, then, If I hit a dead end, backtrack to the branching point. And the timer is ticking while I am doing all of that. It's awful. Yes, you need to rub against the very edge of the hexagon for the next one to ignite. Why would they do it?

Overall, I enjoyed the game enough to beat it, but it's a cautious recommendation.

So I thought I liked the game. Then I tried to replay it. And let me tell you, the first 2 hours are unbearably awful. I don't think it's worth it. Play something that respects your time.

Parry people to death, best sekiro outside of sekiro that I've seen.

Granted, there are problems - you have to skip way too many dialogues on subsequent playthroughs.

The progression of the Bow arrow types is nonsensical - the first arrow you get deals great damage, travels instantly, pierces through enemies and stuns bosses out of their attacks. Wonderful!

Then you get a new arrow type, an exploding arrow that stops at the first enemy it hits and does three explosions. Why would I even want to use it? And then you get another upgrade, a homing arrow that has long travel time and doesn't stun anyone. Again, why would anyone want to use it? The progression should have been the other way around, start with the useless homing arrow, get the great and wonderful Cloud Piercer last because it is the best one.

Not that great of a game. Interesting story, but the dull gameplay isn't worth it. Lots of walking, survival mechanics, inventory management. The combat is rewarding in terms of loot and reasonably fun to do, but the death punishment system disincentivizes players from fighting tough battles, it's better to reload once you find yourself facing many opponents. You can only save at checkpoints which means more walking - you need to walk somewhere whenever you want to save, walk from the save to where you want to be whenever you want to reload. Do not recommend.

Censorship, taking your content away. Bad.

This game is actually pretty fun and easy to pick up so far, not what I expected from something that focuses on being a simulation so much.

beautiful game in almost all aspects.
Headless menibosses that can only be killed with special item buffs (more or less) are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ though.

nice mods exist for this game. Most of my time I spent in A Dance With Rogues.