Recent reviews by cognitiveAfflatus

still better than replanted

silksong is such a mixed bag of an experience at times, but that's just the sort of frustration you run into when a game is challenging instead of just getting blown over because it was too easy. there's just so much going on here and (ignoring bilewater ) so many of the systems in this game are just so well made and interesting and the gameplay can flow so well. easily my game of the year. it was 70 hours of gameplay to reach the true ending and i still wanted to start a new run after finishing it instead of delving in and actually finishing the rest of my backlog. gonna try other games though so i don't burn myself out, but man is it good.

This game has been out for four years and while I had fun building Bird Up in the first... one year of its release. This is just whale slop. The game isn't fun. Not the main way to play it, at least. I occasionally open it to play Edison or GOAT when they're actually being offered, or to clear the solo modes because... I don't know. It's something to do that's official and Yu-Gi-Oh related, and I sometimes even have fun doing that. But they never stick around. So then I just... don't play the game. I'll probably keep doing that for the foreseeable future, but if you're new, and you want to get into an online card game? Don't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bother. This product isn't for you.

this game's rating should be way lower than mixed, and hopefully it becoming free should do that. the reviews already tipped me off, but even going in expecting a bad, free experience, it still was not worth my time. the uneditable controls improve tenfold on a controller, but expecting a controller and then adding keyboard controls after, which is what i can only assume the dev did, is no way to make a game.

even then the best you get is a monotonous, confusing, and boring experience. there are also a ton of incredibly confusing decisions, such as not explaining anything, which can be done well, but without any sort of intuitive tutorial, just means you'll be opening the menu to find them since at least there's a controls menu. even knowing that i needed to use the dash with no iframes to hide behind cover instead of just. being able to interact with it. even knowing the music was short repetitive and monotonous and pulling up my own after shutting it off (which it does not maintain between loads btw, volume levels i mean; and i did also give the music a chance for the first 10 minutes, and it proved the other reviewers right). even knowing that the combat was repetitive and the game was short. even knowing all of this, going in, expecting a bad experience, it was just SO boring i could not be bothered.

it doesnt help that there are rewards for backtracking BUT it DOESN'T track what rooms you've completed on the map or something (which would be appreciated when they're so boring and barebones anyway that they all blend into each other). for example early on there's this purple orb which you can get with the awful, janky "double jump" (is it really a double jump when it's 8 times as high as your normal jump? why couldnt it just replace the jump outright at that point?), which is actually a shield that lets you survive two hits. it doesn't tell you this, so i assumed it was some kind of permanent upgrade that let me dash through enemies, so i wasted it within the same room i got it. not that it matters, since the poor enemy design would just get me to respawn at the door after a couple of fights, so the shield was worthless anyway. which leads to another good point; how you respawn where you enter each room, but the dev couldn't be bothered to let you respawn after going through each door. if you're not even going to try with the enemies, couldn't you have at least made it less tedious by doing that? i feel like there must've been at least some understanding the encounters were boring and poorly explained, so it would be nice to not be respawned at the start when i already have half the room cleared. the only times i ever died were when i didn't understand something or was trying to speed up a fight because of how boring they are.

the point being is that even with, what i would consider, the best possible mindset and circumstances going into this game, it still managed to be underwhelming and even outright bad. do not waste your time with this, even as a free game, because it certainly does not respect your's.

i didnt even pay for this and i still feel ripped off

the music is pretty good i guess

also i cant tell for sure but i think the scarecrow enemy you see in the first 5 minutes and the fish in the trailer are both AI generated which is um. a decision for sure.

It's finally over, huh.

I figured it might as well be worth it to attempt to tackle my feelings on this game due to this being the first ATLUS game I've ever played in my life and all. So, we might as well tackle the big question first; yes, you should play this game. If it's on sale, it's worth it. I think if I had to give it a rating, it'd be something like an 8.5/10.

Now I suppose is time to get into the actual review. I don't think I need to explain why you should play this game; you can go play the demo for that. It's a 100+ hour ATLUS RPG; if you're getting into them, I figure you have some idea of what the game play is like. Which is to say, it has a very dynamic battle system which I adore and is what got me hooked on the game, paired with a very strongly written story which is surprisingly realistic for a fantasy RPG. Now, I think the thing that helps me the most in choosing what games to get is looking at what people criticize the most, and seeing if I can look past it, so let's tackle that.

There are two big problems I have with the game, which I think are actually just one problem, and that is the pacing. The first pacing problem is, despite this being a 100+ hour game, I honestly do not think that all the characters or plotlines get nearly enough room to breathe. I think that is the problem with tackling such an enormous cast in a completely new world; they all get decent enough time, sure, but despite getting follower rank 8 with everyone in the game, I still feel like I don't truly know some of them. Maybe this is just because I came hot off the heels of playing games like Disco Elysium and DELTARUNE, but due to some of the characters coming so late in the plot when the stakes are fairly high, I feel like I didn't get to spend nearly as much time doing lower stakes things with them like I did with early game characters and truly getting to know the ins and outs of them. I definitely think I am an outlier in this case because I read Homestuck and play every "quirky indie RPG" under the sun, and perhaps some of their voices just didn't stick out as much as the almost obnoxiously unique personalities in that are in that kind of media.

Now, I guess I can get into the even more nitpicky stuff, so I hope you like black bars because I'm going to air out more writing grievances.Due to carrying the baggage of every game that came before it, and the free dating options in them, I think they really kind of dropped the ball with Eupha's secondary arc. She's very clearly supposed to be The Love Interest if her Rank 8 and what her brother implies when you talk with him later on is anything to go off of. Of course, the problem is you normally get to choose who you're interested in in Persona games, and I've even seen a lot of people complaining that this aspect of her character was introduced at all. I disagree entirely with those people, but I do wish that if they were going to make there be One Canon Ship that they... you know. Actually leaned into it a bit. I absolutely adored their Rank 8 interactions and the fact you can do her entire follower line and then never see an ounce of this clearly important relationship between the two for the entire game. EVEN THE ENDING. Just sort of... rubbed me the wrong way. Whether you want it to or not, that's going to be a big part of their dynamic, but because it's behind a technically optional event, they can't really let it interact with the rest of the game.

I think this also contribute to my feeling that, despite Will being one of the most independent protagonists in how he is written in ATLUS games (according to my partner), Will still has the self-insert-eclipsing-characterization problem still. Again, maybe this is just because I came off the heels of games with INCREDIBLY vocal and defined main characters, even if you are playing as them. (Hell, Disco is all about player choice, but those choices still always feel stuck within the sphere of Being The Protagonist, which I consider a good thing for character writing for MCs.) But sometimes Will does just feel like the body we're controlling. And the usage of the player name vs. character name thing just feels so weak. The entire True Seeker plotline just feels kind of tacked on, and while I appreciate the sentiment, it just... does not go anywhere remotely interesting with it. They dance around the edges of a metanarrative, but the closest you get is the narrator thanking you at the end of the game with your inserted name. All that build up and it basically amounts to a couple dozen lines tops. It kind of sucks.

Last big grievance; all of Altabury. Seriously, man, what the hell happened there? Why is the Mage Academy not a dungeon? Why do we literally never investigate the giant floating rock said to have been shaped by the hand of God himself? Like, that is obviously a lie, and even all the other purportedly mysterious places that exist in the game get explanations! If it isn't one of the Hero King's doings (which a character will usually mention), then it's probably remnants of the Old World, and if it's neither of those, then they're usually at least explained in the Memorandum, but no! It's just! Nothing! Altabury is the peak of rushed pacing and bad design decisions. It was so obvious the Mage Academy was supposed to be a dungeon, because it being one would've fixed like 90% of my problems with the Altabury section of the game. There just isn't enough time to actually let the Rella situation settle in for the player before she's already dead, and then you're just tossed immediately back into more plot. If they ever do a rerelease like the Persona games for this, that is something they NEED to address.

Now, to toss in a couple more points at the end; sometimes characters look a bit weird in the fully animated cutscenes compared to their ingame counterparts. Again, incredibly minor nitpick, but it was something that occasionally annoyed me at most. Furthermore, enemy variety goes from high to basically non-existent as you progress through the game and everything turns into pallet swaps. That kind of sucked, but at least they were pretty solidly unique at the start. A lack of an enemy memorandum also sucked when trying to figure out weaknesses for enemies before getting the skill that basically outright removes the need to scout for information. Also, some cutscenes that absolutely deserve voice acting just. Did not have it. Like the first actual superboss. A character literally dies there why is it not fully voiced like damn.

Overall, I understand why this game was nominated for Game of the Year, and I also understand why it did not win. Still, I absolutely adore this game, this world, and these characters, and am so desperate for more. Don't be surprised catching me tackling new game plus in a week or two and doubling my playtime, because despite my grievances, I do, truly love this game. I think that's why I wanted to air my problems with it, and why I do hope we get more that tackle these issues, because I want to see this game at its fullest potential. Fingers crossed, I suppose!

tl;dr 5/10 it's the most mid game you will ever play

very nice artstyle but a tad generic, and it frankly suffers from it sometimes with cutscenes simply being single frame pans that look quite dull, music... exists, which is better than a lot of games ive never heard of before, to be fair, controls are weird but mostly fine (why is there a dedicated ground pound button instead of it just being attack+down...), but the biggest sin of all is that the character controls like garbage.

they're super floaty, which isn't inherently a bad thing, BUT everything you do other than the basic attack and jump needs you to stand completely still. actually just the worst. i had more fun mashing through most of the Tell Don't Show story (i dont care if it's technically a storybook we didn't need an entire cutscene just for the vine to grow when you could've just... made the vine grow in game. i can only assume this was done to hide the fact they just swapped to a version of the room with the vine or just spawned it in or something) and using the basic attack (which actually has some sauce! you can airstall with it! which i honestly can't tell if it was intentional or not, im going to assume it was because the game has a time attack mode so being able to skip some of the jumps with it is probably on purpose) to dodge all the enemies and obstacles and just rush to the end to see if it got any better (it didn't).

my favorite part of this rayman-hollowknight knock off is when i got to the area where you're suppose to practice using the ranged attack like how you open the path to greenpath and they gave you NO fodder enemies to get your meter back from so i just had to stand still and let the log guys kill me. why don't you get soul from shielding or breaking the projectiles or something? it could've avoided this sudo-softlock. or you could've just actually let us backtrack and kill some fodder enemies too. feels like a very simple oversight and i stopped playing shortly after that because i realize i would rather just be playing rayman or hollow knight because i can't think of running into any oversights like this in those games, and they also control better and are generally just more fun.

puzzles are basically brute forcing everything until you find the solution because they're incredibly unintuitive unless you just take the mindset of click on everything because it's probably an interactable, and paired with awful controls makes this an absolute no from me

as many others have said, despite the care that was clearly put in in some places, nothing more than mobile port garbage

criminally underrated, arguably better than undertale in a variety of aspects. if you haven't made up your mind GET IT. if you're not sure if you'd like it, the RPGMaker version is free and you can try that and it would STILL be worth buying this JUST for the Solstice DLC.

zoe still best girl