This game is a hidden gem. 10/10

I was sceptical and waited until it went on 85% sale, because graphics don't look good on the first glance and it doesn't seem like a long game to complete. But...

Turns out I was pretty damn wrong. Game turned out to be an amazing fresh experience with mechnics I couldn't even imagine could exist, it's simple yet very emergent. As an avid fan of the anime and manga I really enjoyed playing this and aside from some clunkiness it's a pretty good representation of this world. It's easier than the real experience would be, but somehow this makes gameplay extremely fun and non-repetetive, like I could go down the same path for 12th time and it's still fun and cool.

So your goals range from going deeper to see some creatures, fighting them, retriving lost gear, helping people and there's a story that both uses part of the source material and then builds atop of it with your own character and dare I say it's really amazing somehow. While doing so you must upgrade your gear, collect food and avoid dangers of the abyss. You'd expect this to be an open world game, yet if we have to box it, it's actually a semi-linear rougelite, but more than that it's its own genre completely, it's this unique and everything here has a purpose. And just like in the source material, it all looks cute and all untill you die, plenty of gore, explicit content, hell there's Bondwerd here, you know what he does.

Now I won't lie, the graphics may have grown on me and in spite of AI not being too good sometimes, other times it turned out to be pretty competetive. I have been surprised at each step of the game.

After 9 hours I have only completed Riko's story which is a tutorial ending at end of layer 2. And in the main mode I only now reached 2nd layer. The game has 5 layers, so not all of them, but I've got to say I love what I am seeing right now and I can't wait to see what's deeper and how they represented it. I think it's a great, fresh purchase for both people who know and don't know the source material. All the negative reviews I read have a point about this not being a perfect game, it's a B class production, but don't be alarmed, it's a really solid game and the only downside is that we were robbed out of this being a higher budge production. Gameplay wise, outside of some clunky AI or some animations, it's really no worse than an AAA game from a respected studio.


It's deffnitely worth a buy, but I completely respect anyone who would buy it only at a discount. Still don't be me, it's worth at least half a price.

I'm just disappointed, it could have been such a great game.. but it's just not

Wow, I hate this.

I didn't read the manga, but the anime is one of the best shows I've seen in the last 10 years. I wish the game was that good.

The inventory size is a huge problem, but not my biggest problem. I kinda played myself into a corner, because I didn't realize how important food is. In later layers you need salt to prepare most meat you find and the only place I've seen salt was the store in the town. Without food you don't regenerate stamina, that means you can't fight or sprint and worst of all, you can't go to the next area. I'm about 4 hours in and stuck and don't really feel like restarting.

If there is a tip I can give to new players, it's this one: sell everything in your inventory and take as much salt with you as you can and don't use food for healing.

[For my fellow Steam Deck users: Tha game runs and looks perfectly fine on the Deck. I would verify.]

controls are terrible :C

Overall a good survival game. There's a few annoyances, like the 1HP enemies that spawn if you stay for too long and the abyss curse, but nothing game breaking. I don't think I would pay full price, but definitely worth it on sale. Solid 8/10 score.

for die hard fans

sucks

not my thing.

really fun if you can get past the first mode

If you liked the anime/manga, and would like to go on an adventure in that world, forget your tissues and go on a little rpg adventure... yes, I recommend it. However.

Without mods... well, if you like spending half of your gameplay in your inventory, micro-mannaging every little bit of weight, and needing to go back and forth between your chest and the abyss every couple minutes. If you don't mind entire ecosystem charging head-first at you infinitely if you don't rush from point A to point B instantly upon entering a location. And don't mind carefully staring down your stamina bar whenever you climb - trying to get a relic that's just a little bit further on the wall, or maybe trying to come back on a bit taller than you might've anticipated wall. And don't mind waiting for 10 seconds every few meters climbed up, so the curse to calms down a bit.

If so, go for it.
If not, then well, you might want to look up some mods in order to play it and not get a migraine or feel like you're wasting your life away in x2 speed.


Mods in question that I definitely recommend.
-No infinite enemy respawning - (for no entire ecosystem swarming you infinitely after few brief minutes of adventuring, just because you didn't rushed from one location to another as fast as you can. I heard it was an intended game feature, but at least in my humble opinion, it's a very poor design choice. Especially when you want to do some fishing and literally can't because you're being swarmed even if you did brought the anti-insect incense(since even the bigger one lasts just too short of a time to fish, and you can't really use it for wall-climbing and artifact-mining since you'd just drop it, plus it lasts way too short of a time, not to mention it also has it's weight.)
-Extra backpack space and/or decreased weight of things. (Since I don't know about you, but I like to play my game instead of spending 50% of my game time in my inventory, micromanaging every little bit of weight just to be able to deliver few more artifacts home per run.) I understand it being a game feature, forcing the player to carefully manage their inventory and limit just how many tools & supplies they can have at a time and still be able to deliver X amount of artifacts home, but - feel free to disagree, especially since it's supposed to be more of a brutal world - but I feel it's just a bit too big of an annoyance/limitation to deal with, I'd like to have just a bit more fun.
-Rebalanced durability of tools. (Since I don't know about you, but I feel some high-end tools, especially the ones made with abyss artifacts, should be a lot more durable than improvised light pick glued together on the field. Not to mention the higher-end ones weigh a ton.)
-Thousand men wedge not draining hunger (Since 1. You could always unequip it outside of combat and reequip it during one, and this mod prevents more even more toying around with menus 2. I feel it should give more inventory space - increase max carry weight - but since it doesn't, why such an annoying side-effect? 3. With it being this bad, Ozen would need to eat an entire restaurant worth of food every minute just to breathe, not to mention make a single punch)

Also heavily recommend using cheat engine to x2 speed the game whenever you don't have to do some QTE, since otherwise you'll spend just a bit too much time idly staring your character down as they take their time moving around a wall or wait for the curse to calm down.