Recent reviews by Patrickbuit

A complete masterpiece. One of the best 2D platformers ever made and honestly a contender for one of the most polished and complete games ever made. There are no dead spots here. It's constant quality from start to finish, as you'd expect from a game that took 6 years.

The art is incredible. The sound is incredible. The movement is incredible. Hornet is extremely charismatic as a protagonist. The NPCs are lovable.

With all of that being said, I am a die hard Hollow Knight fan. So I went into this with hundreds of hours in HK, including a lot of experience with that game's final stretch. Silksong is hard. This game is significantly harder than the original. Even as an extremely experienced HK player, I had to get used to Hornet's movement and I died a LOT. The game actually gets considerably more reasonable in act 2 as Hornet's toolkit expands and you get used to how she controls, but overall the game is still highly challenging. I personally love it, but unless you're a bona fide speedrunner you will struggle at some point in the game. For me that roadblock didn't come for a long time, but then I was stuck on a boss for 4 hours.

Couple "gripes" I have with the game:

- Bosses in this game generally don't really reward you traditionally. No big chest of gold, no powerful upgrade, no new spell, etc. Story bosses in particular are purely used to gate progression. Once you kill them, there's nothing you get other than a new area. I understand the design decision. The game is absolutely massive and if you handed out upgrades after every boss, exploration would naturally have to become less rewarding. You can only give out so many upgrades after all.

- Please give me a long optional endgame platforming challenge like Path of Pain in an upcoming DLC. Hornet's moveset is amazing for platforming and I want to see it pushed to the limit.

- Environmental hazards doing double damage is rough imo. I heard they patched some of this out? I'm not up to date on it, but when I played almost all endgame environments dealt double damage. That means getting hit into a hazard evaporates half of your half bar in an instant. I like punishing games, but this might be a bit overkill.

- The game generally demands far too many rosaries imo. If you're going for 100% completion you're going to need to collect everything. Even if you don't lose your rosaries often, the rosary economy is pretty rough. I also don't think checkpoints should ever be locked behind rosaries. Save it for optional upgrades.

- There are so many instances where you can't use a boss' stagger. I'm sure this was intentional, but I don't personally like it. A lot of bosses will summon projectiles right before you stagger them and then sit in the hitbox of said projectile making them more or less invulnerable.

Probably the best combat I've ever experienced in a videogame ever. It takes the best parts of Hollow Knight, the best parts of Sekiro and seamlessly blends them into one. I thought the general presentation was spectacular. That includes both art and sound of course. The level design reaches a very high level

My biggest issues are definitely with the story. I generally do not like story heavy games. However, I can appreciate them if the story is presented well. To me that wasn't the case with Nine Sols. My main issues are this:

- The dialogue is too simplistic. Most of the characters feel bland and when the game forces you to interact with them so much, what they're saying needs to be more interesting. The game has very typical cartoonish friends and villains. Yi himself also just always says the most predictable thing you can give on. His entire personality is "hard exterior, soft interior, hitman" and every line of dialogue drives that point home. I also dislike how everytime someone does something on screen that's surprising, Yi immediately tells me it's surprising, asks the other guy how they did it, and proceeds not to get an answer. It's like watching a shounen anime.

- Almost everything about the story is revealed in a burst near the end of the game. Nothing you read up on makes sense until the very last area where you suddenly learn everything. It's not a satisfying puzzle or anything. It was a massive information dump.

Overall I think Soulslike generally present their stories better than this. And I really wouldn't have cared at all if the story wasn't something I was forced to interact with so extensively. The game will actively halt you to force you to engage with the story.

As I said, the combat is exceptional. Yi's moveset is massive and you can tinker with your playstyle even more with different Jades. Something I admittedly have not done so far, because I've mostly just found joy in learning specific parry timings and finding openings for my Qi blasts.

Overall a game I highly recommend. If the story was just that tiny bit better (or completely in the background) this may have become one of my favourite games of all time. As of now it's still very good and 100% worth buying.

It's the best game of all time