Recent reviews by EnnaBear

Do I recommend this game in general - yes. It's a beautiful and engaging game I've already sunk 23 hours into.

Do I recommend this game as a Frostpunk sequel - no, not at all.

Don't get me wrong if you liked the first game you'll probably like this one too. The graphics are gorgeous, the music and cinematics are stellar, and the vibe is the same. There's obvious references to the first game and it's set in the same world, so there's a lot there for the fans of the first game, but that's about it. The gameplay, scope, and soul of the game are all very different.

The gameplay is complex but thorough, meaning there's quite the learning curve to playing the game, and the tutorial basically doesn't exist, there's a help folder that points you in the right direction which does most of what you need it to do but it's very much a game that drops you in the deep end with a stunning animatic and lets you figure it out. This was fine in the first game (which was much simpler) but is a bit of a nipple twister here for two reasons - one, the game is more complex, and two, the game is NOTHING like the first game in terms of gameplay.

Now, obviously a sequel can't just be a copy/paste of the original, and I can get behind the changes when it comes to the story and world stuff, but the complete change in gameplay and the introduction of the half-baked political system feels unnecessary, if not detrimental. None of your skills from the first game will help you in the slightest in the second game. Instead of small teams where you need to pass laws to minmax their efforts and take care of them, you now have Game of Thrones Lite with snow, where most of your time is spent navigating between multiple settlements, trading favours to get laws passed to balance the economy of tens of thousands of people, and trying to remember which faction you promised what so you don't annoy someone. And honestly? It's kind of boring. It's engaging, you feel like you're doing stuff, but the gameplay itself is a bit meh. But also the fact that you have a lot of "stuff" to do is a little bit of a problem in this one IMO, because the first game demanded a lot of your mental CPU as well, but each of those campaigns lasted 1-4 hours, whilst story mode here is 10-12. That's a long time to be spinning plates so many plates.

This is where we cross into spoiler territory for the story, and here's where I say being a fan of the original game will do you a service. The original base story of the first game was, you're a group of people fleeing the freezing apocalypse. You build your settlement and survive a storm, and that's it. The story here is similar, except now it's 30 years later and you're taking over from the original Captain of New London. Civil war will break out between two of your factions, and you fix it in one of three linear ways. None of your choices really matter and the endings are all the same unless you fail in which case all the failures are the same. The game even straight up tells you at the end that your choice don't matter, you'll die soon, and the real question is how long the city will last when you're gone. This kind of annoyed me but honestly, it's already better than the basic story of the first game, so I'm not mad. The DLCs are where it was at for the first game and I'm assuming this one will be the same, time will tell.

Overall I would say this game is engaging, interesting, beautiful, well written, and made with love, but also that it feels confused. It's like half of them wanted to make Frostpunk 2 but the rest wanted to make a different game altogether so they tried to compromise. It happens in other areas too. Is it a strategic political base builder where the opinions of each faction and individual matter (in which case the dept of characters is great but the linear story throttles the potential nuance of the factions), or is it a thought-provoking story with a harsh morality system (which definitely exists, but feels underdeveloped and bogged down by the political stuff). Does it want to be gritty, sinister, and emotive, with people running their blood through their lamps and cutting off their limbs for snow-breaking prosthetics (which also exists and is wonderful worldbuilding, but sparse and ultimately only for flavour), or does it want to be an inobtrusive city sim with minimal actual drama and angst (which is 95% of the gameplay). It (perhaps intentionally?) feels like the story of the game - like it's trying to appease four radically different sets of criteria and failing to make anyone happy, but winning on charisma alone.

Now again that isn't to say I don't like the game, I do - it's a beautiful city sim with some cool world building and music I will happily listen to for another 12 hours. It just doesn't feel like a Frostpunk game, and I fear if you go into it expecting it to, you'll be sorely disappointed. Meet the game where it's at and yeah, it's a decent few hours. Most important, the devs have a good history, are engaging and responsive with their community, and seem genuinely eager for us to not only buy the game, but enjoy it after purchase as well. That's worth it all for me.

Finally, little gripes that I really hope they fix. Some of these might be deal breakers for you but give it a few weeks and they'll probably be dealt with, I'll strike them out if they do get fixed:

- Oh my lord I HATE the forced camera move, and I hate the select boxes. I swear an hour of my game time so far has been spent trying to get my camera back where I want it so I can click the district or hub I want to build instead of the skill tree icon overlapping it, or I can select the right hex on the 3D terrain to build on. The camera is more a hinderance than the frost. It's not The Last Guardian bad but it's bad and I am so sick of chasing buttons. Similarly there's a lot of times when you're just trying to place something or move and the info pop-up box decides it's gonna take over the whole screen and you're back to chasing. There's gotta be a neater way to do it.

- Conversely there are times when you're prompted to do something (usually enact or repeal a law) but it will give you no information about what that law is or does, you just have to agree or decline on the spot and hope for the best. For a game that insists on giving you all the info all the time, this feels like an oversight. Similarly some information will come and go like how you can't see your current currency on the research screen where you're supposed to spend it on research.

- Please, please, dev lords, *please* give us the ability to hold shift to build multiple buildings of the same types, I can only click through the whole menu (chasing stuff the whole time) so many times when trying to establish watch towers and research facilities.

- WHERE DID THE SOUNDS GO. There's a lot of information on screen all the time now, so when you get the pop up in the corner telling you the scouts are done with their expedition it's really easy to miss. It doesn't stay on screen long and you get all of your information in the same place, as opposed to noise alerts like in the first game to tell you the cooldown was done for the laws or and expedition was done. Gimmie my sounds back! We need the audio cues, it genuinely makes the game harder to play not having them.

All of that said, I'm still gonna wrap up now and go play some more. For all my nit-picking, I do love it. £40 well spent!

Yeah it's an okay little game, no complaints. If you've played similar games it's nothing new but I mean if it's not broke don't fix it. It's actually oddly wholesome as well.

I REALLY want to like this game, I've played 30 hours and I do find it enjoyable. I don't even mind the grind, though I will admit that even on easy setting, the game is pretty unforgiving. I don't mind that, I like some games to actually feel like survival games, you know? I don't even mind that it feels a bit "half assed" or "watered down". A lot of people have said this feels like an early access or beta game and yeah I agree, it feels like they've left it unfinished, but even that I largely don't mind.

The one reason why I have to give it the thumbs down is that part of the unfinished vibe is that it has a game-breaking bug or two, like villagers getting stuck in places and staying stuck even if you remove all obstacles around them. This is especially a problem when a corpse gets stuck or the villager dies and becomes a stuck corpse, as you then have a rotting sickness-spreading body stuck in the middle of your settlement forever, forcing you to either rebuild on the other side of the map and hope it doesn't happen again, or restart your playthrough.

I've had three good runs (5-10 hours) so far and all of them have ended this way, and when you combine that with how slow the game is to grind and build up, it means you ultimately can't even get half way through before it breaks. A damn shame, because I can overlook everything else, I WANT to overlook everything else, but I need to actually be able to play the game in order to recommend it.

SPOILER HEAVY. You have been warned. The first paragraph is safe, everything beyond that is enter at your own risk.

So for a long while I wasn't going to review this game, it feels like it's someone's passion project and I hate crapping on people's babies, especially when it's a small team. And a lot of stuff seems pretty innocent - the writing's silted sometimes, certain events are incredibly unrealistic, the pacing is painfully slow (so slow that often I'll leave it running in the background and listen for some kind of indication that I have to come back and do something) and it has all the engagement of a free idle game. But these are all things that I thought, okay, it's got some issues, but that's not worth a bad review. And it has some upsides as well - the music, whilst painfully repetitive, is at least inoffensive, and the art is beautiful.

Here's where the spoiler free warning ends, I'm about to deep dive into the story, though I won't touch on the ending.

My biggest issue for the duration of the game was simply that the story itself is pretty bad. We already know the premise from the promo material, and there's no development of that, no plot twists, etc. It's just a series of events that the MCs experience as they're travelling around looking for a home for the little boy, and that format is fine but there really does need to be some kind of over-arching development of the characters at the very least, especially considering the whole premise of the story is "one character faces their imminent death whilst preparing their child for life alone." The character development should be the crux of the story, and there's just... none. Which is extra frustrating because both characters are so very flat. Louise (mum) contributes nothing but apathy and some vague one-liners with a hint of a fiery personality on occasion, when you allow it, whilst Mitch (the boy) has only a smidge more, showing himself to be a generic good child who loves his mother. There's also a system that develops Mitch's personality throughout the game (even when the "choices" you make are ones he doesn't see or hear, which is interesting), defining his ability to relate to others, his confidence, and his respect for law and order. None of these things will have any kind of impact on any aspect of the game, as far as I can tell, and virtually all choices are simply dialogue options, with the game frequently punishing you for attempts to be honest, diplomatic, or empathetic by lowering your confidence (because I guess being a heartless ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and being confident are the same thing). There's no nuance to it and very little sense, though at least relationships and law and order are a bit more developed.

And a lot of the lack of development seems to be by choice? Like, there are plenty of times when realistically a mother would sit down with her son and talk about what just happened, but all we get are a couple of bumper stickers and "I'll tell you off-screen" comments. It's like the developers had a cool idea for a game but didn't realize what that game would actually entail, or maybe they were scared that their vision of the game - which would be mostly a mother and son talking about life and racism and such - would be boring. Like, I don't think any of us bought this game for the QTEs and action, but that's what they seem to have put most of the work into.

As for the other characters you come across come in two flavours: completely flat with no personality what-so-ever, or a personality comprised entirely of tropes and stereotypes, and honestly that's what pushed me over from "just leave it alone" to a bad review. I appreciate that not everyone will care about this, but the cast of characters includes:
- Almost all women (except the FMC) is a victim
- Virtually every straight white man is a rapist, pervert, or violent racist
- The queer character is a manipulative pervert
- The black characters are meek and mild mannered victims to the white characters
- There's a couple of cliched Native Americans who only exist to aid and die for the MCs
- I literally don't think there's a single child in the game except the MMC who isn't abused by their parents

What I'm getting at is that it's a game that prides itself on the diverse cast of characters, but it reads like it was written by someone who's never met another person in their lives, and it's handled with all the sensitivity of a tooth extraction with a rock. Honestly in places it feels mean-spirited, it's so bad. Combine that with a character development system that does nothing for characters who don't develop, a game that's so slow it's basically an interactive lullaby, and a story that doesn't exist, and you have a pretty but genuinely crap experience that I honestly have to avoid staying away from.

And in response to the idea that life just sucks for some people - yeah, no ♥♥♥♥, I love those stories, give me all the grimdark, that's literally why I bought this game, I wanted to be heartbroken. That's why I'm made - I wasn't heartbroken, I wasn't even moved, I was *bored.* Comparably my dislike of the victims/abusers thing from the rant about the cast of characters - my problem isn't that victims and abusers exist, it's that EVERYONE is a victim or abuser, and their role is defined primarily by their gender and secondarily by their ethnicity and age (with the exception being Kiki the queer pervert exploiting barely legal girls for sex work who's heralded as a saviour). If they'd thrown in a male victim of domestic violence, made Kiki a woman, or ♥♥♥♥ even just show us someone getting smacked around by someone other than Louise, I'd have been happy, but nope, any badassery is done by the incredibly bland FMC in dialogue that sounds like a 10 year old wrote it after too many Sunday morning specials.

In conclusion the game has very little to offer, including the premise it sells itself on. It's a really long and boring interactive road trip with two character you'll struggle to care about, doing things you'll struggle to care about, until nothing happens or something happens off-screen. Nothing's fleshed out enough to be significant, nothing's developed enough to be impressive (except the art, IDK if I'd call it impressive but it's pretty, at least), and the characters and assets in the game are neutral at best and annoying or offensive at worst, depending on your tolerance for harmful stereotypes and buggy point and click. If it's developed further and gets better I'll come back and update, but I'm not holding out hopes at this stage.

Well, I've been with the game since the early days and I do love it. It's nice to see how it's grown since early access, and grow it has - the world is huge compared to the initial release! It'd just be nice if they'd improved the performance a little along with the expansions of space, lol. There are so many bugs and glitches it's not even worth reporting them all, and whilst none are game-breaking (at least none I've found so far), there's everything from amusing to annoying to locking you out of certain achievements. I know it's only just been released and I'll re-visit my verdict later if the post-release bug fixes continue, but for now, nah, I can't honestly say I recommend it, at least not as a "finished" game - it's not.

It's pretty rare that I have nothing bad to say about a game. I'm British, you see - whinging is what we do. We rarely speak directly about what we want to discuss, we hide everything behind fake smiles and music, and talk in circles and hide behind silliness and melodrama to avoid discussing anything of substance. No politics at the dinner table, no religion at work, definitely no sex, we're British for heaven's sake... and maybe that's one of the reasons I can't fault the game. It's masterfully captured the essence of what I imagine it would be like to Keep Calm And Carry On through a crisis, to bulldog our way through our very own dictatorship and emerge from the other side. There's a kinship in this game that I've never seen before in anything else... somehow it's even more English than the BBC, the Jeremy Kyle Show, and Top of the Pops combined. There's something nostalgic about it from the moment you load it up for the very first time and I'm absolutely here for it.

Beyond that, let's talk about the mechanics. You already know what the game's about and how it runs - basically you're the broadcast editor of the National Nightly News (which only has coincidental similarities to the BBC, honest) and you are responsible for editing the broadcasts for everything from censorship and flavour to shaping public opinions and influencing companies and celebrities as they rise and fall in the public eye. It's wacky ridiculous fun whilst also tackling some very serious issues like government censorship, reeducation camps, police brutality, murder, suicide, grief, exploitation, drug use, journalistic integrity, war crimes.... the list goes on.

But more than simply covering the issues with Very British fluff and fanfare and satire, it distracts you from the issues at every turn with a manic assortment of tasks you need to stay on top of. Do this, but only for up to 10 seconds, then do this but for no more than 3, avoid this, make sure this happens, cue these up, keep an eye on that count down, listen to both of these feeds at the same time, make sure you censor the drunk prime minister's foul language, and wait, what was that they said about seizing passports? Wait, who's being stripped of their wealth?

But honestly my favourite part is the fact that, behind the scenes, the team have been working hard to make the game as accessible as possible, everything from optional UI mechanics and colourblind-friendly graphics customization options to subtitles across the board and options to reduce not only the difficulty of your tasks, but the number of tasks you have to do. This means that the majority of people will be able to play this complex and nuanced game even if they have limitations that normally lock them out of playing... not to mention it makes replaying it more fun as you challenge yourself or simply let yourself breeze through and enjoy the broadcasts more actively as they go out.

Add to that the 14 different endings and you're sure to get your moneys worth from this masterpiece.

25 hour review - the game is basically unplayable, and isn't going to get better. Avoid it unless you get gifted it and you don't mind potentially losing your save file to random bugs.

Okay so look, I wasn't going to review this game. I like it well enough on a personal level, but I can't recommend it and I'll get into why in a second, so I thought it was a bit rude to leave a negative review for a game that I like. I was just going to leave it alone and let it carry on being a guilty pleasure in peace, unmolested by unbiased honesty.

But then it it pushed me to buys its DLCs just one time too many, with all the subtlety of a full-screen popup of Local Neighbours who want to "meet" you, and I just.... just. Okay. You have my attention game devs, I hope you're happy.

The game is slow, it's tedious, and I don't just mean in the way that most farming sim type games are slow and tedious, I mean you'll spend over an hour ploughing a single field, and god have mercy on you if you need to actually go through the whole cultivation process for a field away from home. Have fun with that. Personally I don't mind that too much, I'm autistic and games like this are soothing and low-sensory for me (I'm not going to talk about the music. Nope. That crap went off before I even left the first menu screen) so I mean if you too are autistic and dealing with crippling stress right now and you too would like something that you can do repetitively for hours and hours then sure, I recommend it (so long as you don't mind the fact that progress is virtually impossible because it can decide at any time to break your file and force you to re-start for no reason other than the fact that it's an abandoned piece of crap).

The NPCs are incredibly cringy. Which I can live with, I'm not here for the NPCs, but it matters to a lot of people. The dialogue was described in another review as sounding like a text-to-voice advert and yep, that's exactly what it sounds like. The graphics are clanky and blocky (and not in the cute intentional way), the gameplay itself isn't clear or intuitive, the tutorial is lacking to say the least, the relationship building elements are so bad they might as well not be there... basically you're just spending £24.99 or whatever they're asking in your country for the chance to run your tractor back and forth on poorly rendered soil forever. And that's something I want to do, and I got this game as part of a humble bundle, so I'm not mad. Heck, I'm so not-mad I even bought those aggressively promoted DLCs (when they went on 70% off, I might add. Except the guide book, that can get wrecked, but more on that in a minute).

If you, too, manage to get this game for £1 in a bundle then sure, you too might not be mad about it. It's something to do. But can we just go back to that £24.99 part for a moment - they want *how much* for this unfinished janky piece of sh!t? I'm sorry, what? I get that there was still a significant amount of work involved in what they have yadda yadda yadda and normally I'm not here to crank on artists for charging what they think their product is worth, but combine the poor product with the fact that they've clearly abandoned it half way through, with the fact that they're cash-grabbing with covid-level virility in their DLCs and their guide book (SERIOUSLY?! You're substituting your terrible in-game instructions with a £7.19 "DLC" GUIDE?!) and... yeah. It's not about the game at this point, it's about the blatant "f^^k you" to the customers.

Basically they're trying to be Bethesda without the fan base. Sorry guys but even Bethesda can't get away with that anymore. All I can say about this game is thank god I got it through humble bundle instead of paying full price because if I'd paid even the current sale price of £6.24, I'd be mad. As it stands, I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed. And no, I don't recommend this game, no matter how much time I plan to continue putting into it.

ETA: Oh! Also the discord they pop-up keeps pestering you to join is dead. The pop-up's still there though, aren't we lucky.

ETAA: Also the game just randomly decided after 25 hours that my save file needed corrupting so I can no longer use the agri store. You know, the one where you buy all of your crops and animals from. That's not important in a farming sim, right? Bugger me....

So first things first, yes it's a deck builder, yes the tutorial and explanations are god awful, no, it's not unplayable because of that. It's not worth what they're asking for it, but if you think it sounds interesting then sure, go for it, just maybe wait until it's on sale or they do some more work on it.

The reason why I don't feel like I can recommend it is probably going to annoy some people. See the "enemies" of the games are various folks like gangsters and coal miners in the audience, and they're all fine, but I did a little bit of a double-take when I saw "Indians" in the stands with tomahawks and totems and ceremonial garb. I get that it's set in the wild west and it wouldn't bother me if that's what a character called them or how they were described, but narratively I'd expect better. It's what the characters say vs what the game creators are saying, you know? I know it won't bother most people, honestly it's not even bothered me to the point that it ruins the whole game or anything, I'm not trying to cancel anyone over it, but it feels like the creators just kinda grabbed handfuls of generic first nations tropes, stuck 'em all together into "Indians" and went for it, and I can't, in good conscience, recommend that.

It's such an easy fix, too. Either leave them out or do a teaspoon of research. I mean hell, just call them "natives", join the Nanoland group on FB or some other large creative writing group, and ask for feedback on what you should use and avoid regarding outfits and totem poles. Heck I'll do it for you if you want, it's not hard. But yeah, that and the tutorial are the areas that need work. There's a pretty solid (if somewhat generic but that's okay with me) game under those two issues.

I've been playing this game on and off for a year and genuinely enjoyed it in spite of its simplicity and inaccuracy, because I agree with what I perceived to be the core sentiment - the need for change in our society. Change is a clever play on words here (and in a lot of campaigns to aid the homeless), i.e. that we don't need change, we need change. A few coins might help our immediate woes, but better services or even just better treatment is a far more efficient fix of the problem. The game makes this point well, both overtly and more discreetly.

However, after 50 hours of playing, I have to say they destroyed themselves with their newly released official ending. Spoilers for said ending.

Basically, you don't change. You make it off of the streets and you become a member of the masses, walking past a sea of the destitute refusing to help them or even see them as human beings. No matter what you do or how you play, it doesn't matter - your PC has no room to grow, and by extension neither do you. The whole thing smacks of "eff you, don't even bother trying" which I can handle as a gamer, but as a formerly homeless person myself I find incredibly annoying. If anyone should be a source of change it should be the PC - throughout the playthroughs I am generous by default because it's easier to empathise with the homeless when you are one, and yet the ending of the game undercuts you, your choices, your character, and the games own core message.

I really do love this game. Platforming is solid, the cutscenes are absolutely breathtaking. Truly, the Ori franchise is masterful in its art, music, composition and story-telling. I wasn't impressed when it first launched all buggy and unpatched, but now that it's at it's best, it's breathtaking. I've bought several copies for friends, I recommend it to everyone I know, my kids love it... it's amazing.

If you're wondering how long and/or hard it is by the way, my 12 year old beat the whole game in one weekend on the easiest difficulty so yeah it's as hard as you want it to be. Beautiful game either way.