Recent reviews by Lament8ion

A very tentative recommendation, for reasons you'll see soon to follow.

The game itself is beautiful and has wonderful music. Each character has their own "voice" (a series of sounds they repeat over and over, a bit like Undertale), and all "main" (read: useful) characters are distinctive. You're not going to miss them when you see them, and there's a fair bit of personality to every conversation that makes talking to them intriguing and interesting.

The English isn't always the best, and dialogue can be lacking. Thankfully, that doesn't ruin gameplay too much; you get used to it after a while, and it adds an odd sort of quirkiness to the game (though sometimes text disappears into "..." if it's too long for the speech bubble, and you just have to deal with that).

Much of the issue with the game (unfortunately) comes from the gameplay.

It isn't by any means a bad game, but there is a LOT of grinding and backtracking involved, with very little explanation or reminders available to help you. For me, someone with memory issues, this was less than ideal. I've spent a lot of time trying to remember the steps to every quest, but there are some things that the game just doesn't deem worthy to tell you; for instance, that you need to talk to Ms. Charm as part of the Stamp quest is completely vacant from the "Known NPCs" screen without explanation. I had to look this up, as she wouldn't talk to me at all. It turns out you need to unlock another character and complete his quest before that, and you need to unlock a new monetary system. Not the end of the world, for sure, but with the amount of quests in this game it really doesn't tell you how interconnectivity works, and without looking things up you'll be stuck on what to do at several points.

Additionally, the Technologies are a horrendous pain. The game does NOT tell you that you'll need specific technologies for specific items, and you'll find that even to do something incredibly simple, you probably need to unlock three or four technologies because making the thing they're asking for requires other things to be unlocked first. In a game where you're just told "make me x thing", and sometimes those things are unlocked for you almost immediately during a cutscene or only require one technology to complete, this can be absolutely maddening. There's no distinction that what you need will require more points than something else, or sometimes even of where you MAKE these things, and again having to look things up is key.

On top of that, there are places where you'll need things for machines that MAKE those things, and the game doesn't tell you that there's an NPC that sells them. So, again, without the wiki open you'll be wasting a lot of time trying to figure out how to make these parts that can't actually be made yet.

The game is also exceptionally big. This isn't exactly good. The map is next to useless at telling you where people are, so a lot of that is trying remember where you were told they show up and then getting to get to the Village in time to explore it when people are actually around. It takes forever to get from the Graveyard to the Village, meaning that half your daylight time is spent walking until you unlock the shortcuts (which also cost resources). Additionally, the game doesn't tell you that these shortcuts exist. So you might, for instance, go all the way to the Swamp, take forever to find the middle, and then realise you can build a bridge... out of items that you don't have on hand. So you have to walk all the way back home, then all the way back to the Swamp, just to create your shortcut. It's worth it, but you never know that these things exist in advance. You'll almost never have all the items you need with you at the time.

So, a lot of the game for me has been:

- Be told to get thing
- Realise you need technology for thing
- Unlock technology
- Realise technology unlocked new thing that requires more things you don't have
- Unlock new technology and items
- Rinse and repeat until you can finally craft first item

Which, admittedly, can be cut down a lot on second playthroughs. When you know what to expect you can very easily set everything up in the most efficient way possible - but a lot of the time you're just not given this sort of indication. The first playthrough can be made falsely long when you're stumbling through technologies and crafting. This is why, as I say, you really need to have the wiki open a lot of the time. It cuts down all the time wasted on trial and error, and makes the game much more enjoyable by cutting out the frustration.

So, that's a lot of negativity. Why the recommendation?

I actually really do love this game. Despite the flaws and confusion, the Technology system has kept most of my gameplay time going and without it, the game might be a little too short/easy to beat. The plot, though bare, has me invested, and I really do love the way each character has quests that interconnect - meaning that, with some planning, you can smash through a few quests in quick succession, which feels SO sweet.

It's also a visually appealing game, and for all its frustrations I find myself wanting to beat it. I don't want to leave it left like that, having bested me. I'm going to try and get as far as I can, even if it takes me several tries and a lot of frustration, and about ten wiki pages to keep me up to date on what I need to focus on, get, craft, and give.

In that sense, it's addicting and investing. It's also, once you know what to do and where to get it all, very peaceful and a little mind numbing. It's nice to just play when you have the time, focusing on getting things and completing tasks or quests bit by bit, and seeing yourself make actual progress is incredibly rewarding for how much you might struggle with it.

But it's definitely not for everyone. This is a game that takes time and patience and frustration. Worth the buy, in my opinion, but something you have to be prepared for before you lunge into it head first - something that can make the experience very bitter and annoying.

This is a really interesting and addicting game. The concept of the game itself - an elemental firewall protecting her network, with the possibility to destroy or save the world - is utterly thrilling, and as my first step into this genre, I have to admit, it's got me hooked. Scouring the game for every option, every possiblity, makes it wonderfully replayable, and I have no shame in admitting that I've played this game almost all day doing just that. The puzzles within the game are simple when you understand them, but have a note of complexity to them that makes them brilliant and charming in their own way, and despite being such a short game, each character is personalised and developed in such a way that they've stuck with me and are quickly becoming some of my favourite characters going.

The features you get after the first completion of the game are fantastic - they definitely make replaying the game a lot easier - yet don't detract the joy of playing the game itself. And that's another thing, actually; the game is still wonderful and still charming to me, despite having played it over and over.

The achievements are likely part of this. I'm not an overly avid perfectionist or completionist, but for some reason, this game has me totally hooked on getting everything - to the point that I now only have to get Hellfire, Janet's Final Log, and Perfect Ending. I think my only criticism would be that I'm actually struggling more with understanding Hellfire's hint and what needs to be done than Extreme Nightmare Hunter Toby - yet Toby's is the one that had the extended hint/walkthrough attached. I wouldn't have thought Toby's achivement was complicated enough to warrant this, considering Hellfire requires you to be "spiteful" - and honestly I have no idea what of BEL/S responses sound spiteful enough to get this achivement - in contrast to Toby's achievement explicitly stating that you need to make Pyreworm and Toby meet. It seems like odd prioritising to me, but I think perhaps that's because I struggle with tone, especially through text, so this achievement had me bested before I even attempted it.

Edit: almost right after posting this, I got the achievement. I still stand by the original point, since I actually stumbled on it by accident. I only realised what I'd chosen was spiteful as the very last option on the branch came up. I think the struggle made getting the achievement much more satisfying, though, so I have little negativity on that!

Even with this struggle, I'm absolutely enjoying the game, and I most definitely would (and have) recommend it to people. I'm even considering buying the mobile version, considering it supposedly has more to it!