Recent reviews by Dirdle

I played this without first having played Cultist Simulator, which seems to be less common. The worldbuilding is enchanting and the writing firmly and deeply scratches the itch for the occult, the esoteric, and the rule-of-threes-bound; the game looks beautiful and for the first half at least the joy of puzzling out its unique mechanics is real. The soundtrack is perhaps a little sparse, but by no means bad, and you can find good additional music easily enough (I suggest "The Wooden Wheel" by Robes of Snow). After about halfway I went back and tried CultSim and yeah there's really no comparison, Book of Hours sweeps the floor. Not just in being more flavourful and immersive, but also in the gameplay and especially the start of the game being enticing. It's great to see how far the devs have come!

The latter half of the game becomes a bit long and repetitive. I kind of wish that, for example, each skill you leveled up "saved" the memories used to do so into itself, so that the focus is on the fun part (figuring out what options you have remaining to get another distinct memory for it) rather than the chore (re-acquiring the same ones over and over). Comfy-games enjoyers might prefer it the way it is, though. The game also seems to want to be replayed to get various "endings" but, ah, hmm, you're gonna need a bit more *ending* to the ending than that, if you catch my drift, I get that we can't all be Spiritfarer but c'mon. That's a lot of re-doing. Having replayability just for the sake of spending more time soaking in the vibes is good, though, can't argue with that.

Overall it's a gem and well worth trying - but also, though the phrase sounds sadder than I mean it, well worth putting down.

It's okay. Some cool art and great music complementing a reasonable enough story. Ultimately it's hard to feel like your choices matter much, but on the plus side, I don't think you can get locked out of anything by making 'mistakes' early on. That might appeal to some people. The tone often seemed comedic more than horrifying.

If DDLC suffered for being a mile long and an inch wide, this one has the more classic problem of being a mile wide and an inch deep. Very few of the routes are that interesting and while some work to fulfil the promise of mirroring your own actions back to you, others feel extremely arbitrary, more like they're there to fill out the numbers than anything.

The philosophy feels very half-baked, to be honest. I'm especially not a fan of it so often taking cover behind "words can't express the idea" - like, go on, have a go anyway? Can't hurt to try? And if it fails, well, this is a multimedia format, you can try some other way? I can almost convince myself that it's trying to do just that, but I think it only achieves that in other areas, where it's not biting off drastically more than it can chew. As a hedgehog dilemma interactive experience, sure, some good parts. As a metanarrative on the meaning of life? Not bad but not good.

In short, this game has a lot of depth and scope for even more to be added, whether by expansions or mods. Recommended with caveats that it's a very different kind of grand strategy game and if you're looking for something that it's not, you're sure to be disappointed. But what is that something that you might be looking for? This was my first try with any of Paradox's historical grand strategy games, so I'll go over my experience with it and try to explain.

After buying the game shortly after release and then sitting on it out of intimidation, I finally got around to trying it out. The intimidation factor is pretty justified! The game's economic simulation is absurdly deep, and while the tutorial does its best to show you what you can do, figuring out what you should do is much harder. I started with Persia, playing the "learn the game" objective. The game starts out by telling you to build some structures, then to carry on playing the game while you wait for them to be done. Not a great start when I don't really know what playing the game entails yet, but a good opportunity to look through the absurd number of screens - this being where the intimidation comes in.

But soon enough things picked up, and I rapidly... fell into a civil war over land reform. Well, that's to be expected I guess, and nothing a plea to Afghanistan for help couldn't fix. This is where the political-reformation-navigation aspect of the game really started to get its hooks in me, in retrospect. I could have avoided that, I thought, but how? Well, I'm still not sure what the best way was, but what I came up with, while muddling through more and increasingly comical tutorial objectives (improve relations with Brazil? Sure but why would I?), was this: just wait for the hopelessly backwards old Shah to die and his comparatively progressive (religious fundamentalist) son to take power, then enact sweeping reforms to everything. And that's probably where I fell in love with the game a bit - it's such a classic history-as-story beat, right? And it doesn't just present you with it, but makes you actively plan around it, playing it out.

A similar story played out with the economy - perhaps somewhat more unfairly, but part of the fun of these games is knowing the future, right? - as I could beeline oil tech and become a late-game mass exporter of the stuff, making bank, funding colonies in Africa to meet more tutorial objectives, etc. Well, I say "I" could, because I had joined the British customs union, thereby making the economics aspect of the game much easier on my poor brain. Too easy, arguably, though it really helped to break up the learning process. Eventually a failed communist revolution in the UK would hamstring my economy, as the shipping lanes never really recovered. By that point I was too far in, though. If I left the customs union, I'd lose access to too many resources - even if I could afford the imports in money, I'd never be able to administer them. I'd overcommitted to my petrostate ambitions, and was paying the price. My commitment to the church as a counterbalance to reactionary landlords had me on a similar crux, unable to get late-game progressive reforms passed. In the end I limped into the 20th century and finished the game having improved Persia's place, but not as much as I might have hoped.

This was utterly brilliant gameplay-as-narrative. Was it just like real history? Not at all! But it captures both the broad strokes and the important forces in a way that involves the player very cleverly, having you feel compelled to make short-term choices for survival that create long-term problems, compelling further difficult choices.

There are some parts that definitely feel incomplete. The AI is a bit impersonal; this worked fine in Stellaris (they're aliens, after all), but my feeling is that 19th-century statespeople ought to be stupid in a different way to how the game AI can be stupid. More reckless, even when not being pushed by scripted event chains; both more willing to push the line, and more willing to back down. Diplomatic plays are a cool system, but they tend to lock in to war a bit too easily. War itself feels satisfyingly tense and uncontrollable beyond very broad strokes, but I'd really like more of a shift from maneuver-focused warfare at the start, to trench-stalemate at the end, in a more detectable way (I think there are combat bonuses and maluses based around generalship, and these do get less important as tech progresses, but you don't really notice because it's all just number go up or number go down on a line). Maybe fronts should start off province-sized, and grow in a way that would get you into "race to the sea" situations. Sounds difficult to implement, so I understand this system as a very reasonable compromise.

All this to answer the question from the beginning: what do you need to be looking for to make this the game for you? I think you need to like a specific balance of control and its absence. Games like Dwarf Fortress, sure, are most similar - but also deckbuilder-roguelikes, in a strange way - the same sense of iterative decisions from among the cards you're dealt. If you like that, and have any interest in the history at all, this is for you.

Overall I have to say it's okay, but not really worth the time or money. Some moments, sure, but trying to go all meta needs a firm foundation, and it's lacking. How can I describe it... it's a deckbuilder where building a good deck is too easy, once you get past some very artificial barriers. Then it just feels like a chore to complete, for so-so creepypasta payoff. Don't get me wrong, I loved some parts of it, some moments of wit and a general sense that we're discussing the history of digital TCGs in a limited way, but there's just too much that feels like it's "oh it doesn't matter if this is dull, because it's really *about* how dull this is, see, there's a cheeky bit of metanarrative poking fun at itself, ha ha."

Overall weakly recommended, but recommended. This is something of a scrapbook-game, pulling together as many different elements as it does different tales. You'll go from rhythm-gaming to platforming to trying to work out a mystery one after another. That said, each element is quite shallow because of this. And sometimes the multiple elements get caught in conflict. For example, the gorgeous backgrounds rapidly diminish as you approach the sea - makes sense, but it makes the game feel emptier as you approach what's ostensibly the objective, a strange kind of pseudo-punishment for progress.

What the game is best at is capturing the feeling of walking somewhere unfamiliar, trying to get your map and what you see to cohere into an understanding of the landscape. If this is a feeling you know and miss, give it a shot!

Alright, first the good stuff and the reasons to recommend it: the sound design is superb, I loved the striking visuals and mostly thought they actually made details clearer and easier to find. The ability to consistently create a sense of motion and action in static scenes is particularly impressive. The method of presenting a narrative is both clever and at times fairly engaging. Some of the mystery solutions feel moderately clever, but I didn't achieve any of the difficult ones, so if there are any truly big-brained moments, I can't say. The premise is high-concept yet manages to find a way of making it actually difficult to use what in any other detective story would be a brokenly strong method of investigation. So far as I can tell the historicity of the ship and crew is on-point, though I'll note the word "electrocuted" wouldn't be invented for a good while yet.

But now the bad. The narrative being engaging is in direct conflict with the gameplay, which requires pausing to fill in your sheets and forms, which it becomes tempting to just start ignoring. And the gameplay is in direct conflict with the narrative, since many events will leave you with an "ah, I see, ???? was the one who did that to poor ????" - it's hard to feel the narrative stakes when not only are characters nameless, but also hard to follow from scene to scene except by deliberate work. The pacing varies wildly; sometimes the central conceit of the story leads to some superb "what the..." moments, but a lot of the time you're just tapping your foot waiting on the monochrome game designer's best friend the enigmatic smoke being to get where it's going. You can't skip around to scenes you've previously seen; you have to go find them in the 4D space of a ship throughout its existence. And the biggest flaw: Obra Dinn is fundamentally a sudoku puzzle with no intrinsic ability to record guesses, restrictions or eliminations. It honestly feels a little insulting to be given an in-game book with such limited usage! Like, sure, the great puzzle games of yore wanted you to get out a pen and paper. But the world's moved on. And on top of that, unless there are an awful lot of those big-brain moments that I completely missed, there is going to have to be a good deal of pure brute-force guesswork involved,

Nevertheless, I think it's one that's worth trying for a lot of people, by virtue of being unique and interesting and having about as much good as bad.

Short but very sweet, Stray's worth the whole damn chandelier if you ask me. It promised atmosphere, robots and a cat, and delivered all three in spades. When the biggest criticism of the game you see is that there wan't enough of it, you know it's doing something right.

No matter how I look at it, it's miserable to actually play. The vaguely-Newtonian controls make everything feel like wrestling while covered in oil, in a ring full of oil, against an opponent made of oil. This is patched by giving you an autopilot and a match-velocity button, which make things boring when they work and just add a layer of frustration when they don't. Five years after Kerbal Space Program, a projected-trajectory wouldn't seem like too much to ask. The Little Prince style planets present very short horizons and very densely-compacted interior levels with a lot of blind turns. This is patched by giving you a 'scout', which is fiddly to use, provides at best an unclear idea of what to do, and seems to have encouraged the addition of a bunch of "can't go through here! haha, enjoy your photos and spending ten minutes fighting the controls to get back here later" puzzles, though the word is being used generously. The platforming is awkward, fiddly, and provides various mechanics that cannot, for reasons of nonlinearity, be in any way tutorialised. Are you supposed to be jumping between the glowing transport beams, for example? How many times trying that am I supposed to fall into the abyss, reset and enjoy the painful bus-in-a-tornado ride back? Am I supposed to learn not to make the attempt, or am I supposed to learn to Git Gud (though consider that "skill issue" is hard to pinpoint when you have no consistent frame of reference - jumps you can make on one planet's gravity are impossible on another's, and will drastically overshoot on a third), or is it only possible if I'd gotten there sooner? Or would it be possible if I'd gotten there later? Or are the places you're going even accessible here, rather than at the other end of the solar system through warp points? And again, let me remind you, making the wrong choice is going to cost a lot of time.

It's a shame, because the writing is poignant, the theming cohesive. The soundtrack is beautiful, the artstyle maybe a little questionable - it's more a comedy style, in my mind, and the story is surely a tragedy - but well-executed. If I had one complaint other than the gameplay, it would be the characters - you can talk to exactly two characters about what's going on, and they have extremely limited responses. The vast majority of characters exist only in the first ten minutes of the game, and are forgotten immediately. It may be meant to heighten the feeling of loneliness, but mostly it comes across like a missed opportunity.

Overall, a disappointing game, but not without merit.

Will have to update after trying the latest update, but it seems to be back towards hydrodynamics and I'm happy to see it

"Questions about the meaning of life can never be answered by sweeping statements. “Life” does not mean something vague, but something very real and concrete, just as life’s tasks are also very real and concrete. They form man’s destiny, which is different and unique for each individual. No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny."

Creating a game halfway between farming sim and... nakige, I guess, is a reflection of this very important principle. There is a tendency to think - to hope, perhaps - that big emotions require big events, or at least big ideas, to underlie them. That the saddest losses of game characters are those with great significance to the plot, or great impact on the gameplay. Something beyond the mundane has to be there, right? There can be a fervent wish in us to believe that if only, if only we were powerful and important beyond the scope of simple daily tasks, then our lives would at last have meaning. Games express this very frequently, especially those games that one might first think of as being "about death" in the sense of featuring a great deal of it. That needn't be a bad thing, and yet.

Spiritfarer knows better: that life means something very real, something very much in the world. That life's meaning can be found in the littlest of tasks, perhaps even must be. That's what makes this combination of genres and ideas nothing short of brilliant in every regard. And the execution of that idea leaves close to nothing to be desired. It couldn't work if the tasks the game requests you to undertake were tiresome, or if the characters that request them were intolerable, or if the world to act in were anything short of lovely to exist in. But the world is colourful and soft and wide, and the characters are written with a depth of personal sentiment that speaks to the developers' sincerity in the best way, and the basic gameplay elements are all charming to engage in without any really overstaying their welcome.

There will be people that will not get along with this game, and should not play it, but if you're not already quite certain you're one of them, you owe it to yourself to try this. I expect it to be a point of comparison for years to come.