I highly recommend this game. It's one of the best story-driven games I've played in a while. But even with that said, it's not perfect. So, let's get into it.



In a few words think of this game as the baby of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door and Final Fantasy 10.

It's a turn-based battler where your character's speed stat determines how quickly & frequently they take turns. So, if you crank up your speed to ludicrous numbers, you could potentially take multiple actions between an enemy's single turn. Furthermore, when the enemy finally does take their own turn, you will have the opportunity to dodge or parry attacks (just like in Paper Mario: TTYD). In theory, you could play the whole game without ever taking damage, albeit you'd have to spend a lot of time learning the timing-windows for each attack of each enemy. And judging by how strong early-game monsters feel, I'd say the game expects you to develop a vague feeling for said timing windows to simply avoid damage altogether.

To be clear, the monsters in this game can slap really hard, and they make the game feel tougher than what it ultimately winds up being. Why? Well, throughout the game you'll acquire new relics/accessories that can be placed on your character to potentially boost your characters' stats. And so once you start finding them, you'll then be able to start fine-tuning builds for your characters. But it doesn't stop there. These relics also offer tons of different passives which allow you to radically change the way your characters play. You could equip anything from auto-revives to action point recovery boosts & even status effect immunity - the choice is yours, so long as you can find the relevant relic first.

In other words, you'll likely snowball through the game once you get your characters' builds going.



This is ironically both a strength & weakness.

On one hand, the environmental lighting does such a wonderful job of giving off strong emotions & setting the stage for every moment in the game. On top of that, the world & environment gives off such a surreal feeling, as if you're actually floating through someone's imagination

On the other hand, your characters may sometimes have weird hair colors during very emotional cut-scenes, presumably due to some funky-ness with the lighting. That bug can sometimes bleed into battle, too. Dunno why, but it wasn't uncommon for some characters w/ dark hair to suddenly have gray-ish hair during cut-scenes. To be fair, my mc meets the minimum requirements to run the game, but just barely - so maybe that's a consequence of running the game on a weaker pc?



This is, by far, the best part of the game.

It's not a happy game, I mean take another look at the game's description here on steam, and then take a look at the mature content description. This game is an absolutely heavy game that explores the topics of death & overcoming grief. Mind you, I personally like that about the story. It's not afraid to get heavy.

The cutscenes deserve their own callout as well, for they're extremely cinematic & moving. You'll be able to keenly see the expressions on each character's face within these moments - and seeing their subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) expressions during touching moments really helps you connect with the characters, which is important so you can begin to empathize with their losses & better understand their pain. In fact, I'd say that's why the game works so well - it makes sure you get invested in the characters & story, so you can really appreciate the game's themes of moving on & stumbling through your grief.



I love the game's soundtrack. It uses vocals & piano throughout - which I think helped fill moments with even more emotion (as if that's really necessary with a story like this game's). Furthermore, even though you can tell that this game is inspired by classic RPGs, it manages to feel like it has its own identity thanks to the music.

The voice actors deserve their own shout-out as well. They do a wonderful job of bringing life to the characters. Never before have I heard such a convincing sounding cough of a dying man.



My biggest gripe with the game is its pacing toward the end.

The ending of the game is rough. The cutscenes between Act 2 & Act 3 made it feel like there was going to be MUCH more to the story. Instead, Act 3 feels like an afterthought.

There's an imbalance between optional vs mandatory content in Act 3. If you were to immediately battle the final antagonist of Act 3, then the game would have an excellent & impactful ending. It will hit like a truck. But, doing so would still leave you with a couple dozen hours of optional content.

For the record, it took me ~30 hours to reach the end of Act 2 and clear all optional content along the way, and yet I have ~60 hours of play time, meaning that easily 20 hours of play time was just optional content during Act 3.

Due to such a high volume of optional content (combined with my curiosity), my final team was nearly max-level by the time I reached the final boss. I killed the final boss within 2 minutes by just spamming a generic attack. It's not like I was explicitly trying to trivialize the final boss, I was just nosy & became strong along the way. For the record, it's not like all of the extra content felt like a post-game region. In fact, most of it didn't feel that way, and I argue it should've been accessible sooner so that the content could've been consumed throughout the story - avoiding such a huge time gap between what was "nearly" the end vs the "actual" end. Or maybe alternatively, the really high-level content could've been relegated to a proper post-game instead.



I've already mentioned the visual bugs in cutscenes, but that's not the only problem with cutscenes - they have a tendency to cause the game to crash. Luckily, the game didn't crash right after a boss & force me to re-fight the boss, but still... Granted, the game would sometimes crash for me while outside a cutscene as well. Again, that might might be due to my pc being on the lower end of the recommended specs, but I can't be certain.

On top of that, the game sporadically wigged out on me & stopped detecting my controller input. I'd usually have to re-open the game to fix it (which is really annoying in the middle of battle).




It's a solid game. Not perfect, but solid. The story's memorable, the gameplay is fun, the music & visuals are moving, and finally the voice-acting is top freakin' notch.

But, the end-game is all over the place, and the game can feel a little tempermental to play on long sessions.

I'd give it an 8/10. It's certainly worth your time.