Recent reviews by PracticalFX

Even if this was just the soundtrack I'd be shouting its praises from the rooftops. Thankfully there's also an addictively fun and challenging gameplay loop, gorgeous art design, achingly three-dimensional characters, and a cracking good story to keep you busy while you listen to the music.

Genuinely feels like getting to be a part of a season of Star Trek. Definitely hit all the right notes narratively and thematically. Some of the gameplay was a little clunky but for the most part it was unintrusive enough to keep the story front and center.

Yeah it's alright I guess

It took a lot of trial and error but I finally managed to fix all my performance problems, and now I can say I heartily recommend this. Really really excellent balance of tactical combat, open world exploration, and character dense RPG. Feels like 3 different games stapled together in the best way possible.

As kids, the adults in our lives are larger than life, especially our parents. It's weirdly dehumanizing in a reverential way. A part of growing up is finding the empathy to understand the full human lives our parents lived while we were mythologizing them. This game does such an astoundingly good job navigating that feeling. Memories can't be trusted, especially memories formed as children when so much of your perception of the world is skewed by your inexperience in it. I loved the writing in this game. Yeah some of the more emotional scenes had the wind taken out of them by clunky and stiff facial animations, and some of it is admittedly a bit cheesy. But it takes on weighty subjects like grief, mental illness, living with queer identities, and moving on from trauma while still being fun. It allows for a lot of player choice while still pulling threads together in a satisfying way. It takes a story with a foregone conclusion and lets the mystery unfurl so very naturally as questions start to come up and pieces don't quite line up anymore. Love love love it, and I honestly can't wait to run through it again sometime with different choices, because I'm curious how differently it can go.

Subtitles were very necessary. The overlapping voiceover was neat but basically impossible to actually hear. The gameplay as it were and the story felt super disconnected, and while the environment was beautiful there wasn't a lot to it. The landscape changed all of about twice, and there are only so many procedurally generated expressionist trees you can look at before thinking "yeah man I get it." It actually would've been more interesting as an animated short film. I'm honestly only saying I recommend it because they plant trees for every download and because it's only 30 minutes long.

Storybook XCOM is a description of a game made exactly for me

The gameplay is absolutely incredible, but I do have to turn my Tolkien nerd brain 100% off to enjoy it because good god does this thing go off the rails

It's like if XCOM was a stealth game, wasn't turn based, and was about cowboys. So basically it's nothing like XCOM.

This is beautiful. This game is poetry. Playing it felt almost like a violation, like I was learning things I hadn't earned knowledge of about a person I'd never met. And yet I felt as though I loved this person, and pitied him, and felt sadness as he felt sadness and joy when he felt joy. At times I couldn't breathe from terrible anxiety and at others I cried fbecause I felt inner peace. This game is an experience and it touched me to my very core. I was going to do some work but I think I just need to lie down for the next couple hours to contemplate my life.