Recent reviews by noxlunesia

This game is amazing so far.
So, get this. You're a drummer, your instrument is the enemies and you can just let loose and freestyle to the beat. Mix up beats, counters, perfect dodges, quarter-beat barrages, and takedowns to build your score and sound.
A little bit of practice and you'll be styling on waves of enemies and chilling to your favorite tunes, including the excellent few that are in the game already.

I really wanted to enjoy this game, and to be fair there are a lot of positives. Beautiful artwork and animation work. A pleasant soundtrack to listen to. It's the gameplay where this all falls apart at the seams.

To put it bluntly, this game was built to be frustrating more than it was built to be challenging. An example: Many enemies have different hurtboxes along their sprites- in layman's terms you can hit an enemy in a spot and it may not hurt them. However, hitboxes are all the same and it's the entire sprite. Did you bump into an enemy's ankle? You take damage. But you strike them in the head? They don't take damage. They took the effort to meticulously program different hurtboxes, but left hitboxes to just... the entire sprite. This can be taken as laziness to be kind, or outright malicious to be unkind.

Many parts of the game are like this. The game is stacked against you, never in your favor even if the same rules should apply both ways. The runbacks are many minutes long, but a single mistake lasting 2 seconds can force the runback to happen again. The 'souls' mechanics just plain need to go- they were included for the game to ride on the 'souls-like' bandwagon without intention behind them. It's just more tedious ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

I'm genuinely sorry for all the effort done in the visuals, artwork, writing, etc. I wish I could see more good in this game, but it's buried behind so many hours of just feeling like whoever coded the game itself seems to hate the idea of fun.

Had a group of 4, we all died like 6 times before saying screw this. It's just a meat grinder with no fun allowed.

This game is an art gallery for the grotesque! There's much in the way of cosmic horror, body horror, and different forms of monsters to see and interact with- and I do mean interact, not kill!
Look Outside takes those same horror visuals, and gives them heart. If you're coming from Fear and Hunger, Look Outside is not the same. This game isn't about pure suffering, it's about the human spirit and how it can manifest in the creatures these humans become.

As far as gameplay, we're looking at some pretty standard RPG combat with a difficulty curve that is built to challenge a more casual player, but will be a bit easy for a seasoned RPG gamer. That said, it's really the writing and the characters you're here for. Look Outside has so many interesting little stories to tell, and the greater mysteries of the setting will help you push through even still. You DO want to know what's actually going on, right?

There is some gameplay polish needed still. Equipment swapping in-battle is missing, there's some balance tweaks and adjustments still needed as well. These things ARE being worked on, so it's worth playing and giving feedback!

♥♥♥♥ nintendo this game is great

Endgame is locked behind a PvP zone. You will not have access to the entire final tier unless you want to deal with griefers on your way to mine Titanium or gather spice. Even private servers that you pay for cannot be made PvE. Up until that point it's a pretty good survival crafting game, but the entire last portion is so rotten that I cannot recommend this to anyone until the issue is addressed.

This game was amazing, definitely a strong recommendation from me!
Gameplay is very Elder Scrolls-esque, but with a strong caveat that I feel is in this game's favor. When you commit to heavy attacks, spells, etc you are not locked out of movement/strafing. It's what I would call "frictionless", and got me into a sort of flow state during each encounter of moving, swinging, and later popping off spells to do things like poison the enemies or give me a big speed boost.

Style wise, what can I say. The sky has the color pallete of a fresh, raw, marbled slab of steak with moving bits and a big purple star serving as the sun (I think). Everything fits the 'acid fantasy' vibe, and every look into the distance is it's own little wallpaper for your desktop.

Graphically, while there were some bugs here and there (only one that I found to be so obtrusive that it broke immersion) and while the game is entirely pixel art... it's going to be up to taste. The only other major flaw I had graphically was that the loading stutters and pop-in between different 'zones' felt like they could be a lot smoother. You can definitely feel when you are switching from zone A to zone B and visually see the assets un/load in. Along with a momentary frame stutter, that bit is definitely a more major downside that you will have to decide if it's a deal breaker or not.

Story wise, the writing is pretty damn good. I wasn't blown away necessarily, but every character acts like they should for their admittedly fantastical circumstances. You are going to be caught between different people with different agendas and opinions about the world, and you are free to choose who you do or don't want to believe in. One questline had me legitimately flipping a coin for the outcome because I couldn't decide between my two options.

I do feel like towards the end, you are more incentivized to avoid combat. I think end game enemies just have a little too much HP (This was on hard mode) but that didn't really make the game harder? I'd have cut most of the values by about 10-20% and it would have been fine, just about one or two swings too much per enemy which adds up over time with combat fatigue. This was with pretty good upgrades, and I'll replay the game on normal to see if this is even an issue with that difficulty in the future.

Overall though, fantastic vibes. If you're looking for a game that you can get into a good flow with, get wrapped up in it's story, and come out in about 20-30 hours, this one's for you!

Never have I seen a game go from a solid 9/10 to a flat as ♥♥♥♥ 1/10 because of a MASSIVE difficulty spike out of nowhere.
Say it with me
I N C R E M E N T A L
D I F F I C U L T Y
That means having things GRADUALLY get harder, which happened in the first half of the game, until it suddenly decided I needed to play damn near perfectly to progress at all. Like what the actual ♥♥♥♥ is that, dude?

This game has NO RIGHT to be this good. All the music is a bop, the controls are smooth AF, multiplayer works pretty great, and the weapons/upgrades feel satisfying.

I left a positive review about a week ago, after having played it over the course of the last month. New patch is out. Basically, DO NOT BUY THIS GAME RIGHT NOW. Movement and dodging are now fundamentally broken. Until it's fixed, play something else. I hear Ark is coming out with something new soon. That game's still fun. Play that.