Recent reviews by Kikbow

Very neat unique story exploring characters that are totally In Sound Mind, each character being represented by their own area and "monster" with their own mechanics
More story and exploration than horror
Doesn't do the "screaming monster in your face" bit
Overall pretty cool

Recommend Hard difficulty as it was still pretty easy regardless

EDIT: DECISION REVERTED! DEMOCRACY ALWAYS WINS!

Months after release, Sony has decided to come in and announce they will now enforce Playstation logins for this reason alone: to able to start banning players without Steam's help, and enforcing their Playstation Network EULA.
While it doesn't affect me, it turns out you can not have a Sony account in a large amount of countries. So a lot of players who've been playing along side me for hundreds of hours without issues are going to start being unjustly blocked from playing.
So the game was fine as it was, and this mess started happening for no good reason. And decisions with no good reason always deserve backlash.

There's no way to be brief when it comes explaining why the game is good, so I'll just try to limit the amount of explaining by focusing on some broadly applicable key points of interest.


Story and theme:
The plot is legitimately compeling. It gives a much more realistic / down-to-earth depiction of the rewards and consequences of time travel than I'd expect from an initially antiquated seeming 2D action RPG.
There aren't many choices to make (and only a couple temporarily meaningful ones), which is a good thing in my opinion and lets you focus on enjoying playing through the game and not worry about having an "optimal run" in the "right path".
The story and characters evolve a lot throughout and you honestly never know what's coming next. New mysteries are created and solved gradually throughout the entire game to the very end, so there's always something interesting to figure out and it is satisfying getting all the puzzle pieces together.


Content:
I think the single qualifier that describes the overall content of this game is "very surprising".
It's not down to just the story length itself: the amount of areas, enemies, bosses, your own character's equipment, spells, perks and even upgrade mechanics. There's just a lot to play with. Often times when you think the game is reaching its end point it instead throws you a whole new unique way to improve your character, and a new twist in the story leads to a lot more content.
And even with the insane amount of equipment in the game, all of the armor and weapons (and some accessories) get accurate representations on your character.


Character progression and combat mechanics:
Honestly, this game takes 2D action combat and makes it as intricate as I imagine it could ever really be, and going into detail about it honestly feels like spoilers since unlocking new mechanics to work with is part of the surprise, so I won't be too specific.
You start with the a basic EXP levels system and stat allocation, and you can use a directional attack swings combo.
Throughout the entire game you get progress in these ways:
- Equipment. You have a weapon slot, a shield slot, armor slot and various accessory slots which increase in number throughout the game
- Special weapon attacks (situational stuff, like uppercuts, aerial downsmashes, etc.)
- Ranged weapons (bows, boomerang, etc.)
- Consumable items (not just heals but buffs, torches, bombs, permanent stat ups, etc.)
- Crafting systems (for crafting new equipment, restocking on consumable items, arrows, etc.)
- Spell casting (from basic short range fireballs to screen-wide AOEs, there's a lot to pick from including support spells like buffs and healing)
- A feature-length perks menu with pages and pages of abilities that meaningfully affect the the systems mentioned above, unlocking movement abilities, special modifiers to your character
- A "grid maze" unlocks menu where you can use a currency to unlock grids are stat boosts, abilities or perk slots
- A unique boosts system that takes nearly every single item that exists in the game (so your healing items, key items, material drops) and gives them all different combinations of effects, and its a real puzzle to try to set them up optimally

All systems except for the grid maze let you respec, or "pick and choose" your boosts freely, so you can spend hours on just mixing up your equipment, abilities and stats.


Difficulty and my personal playthrough:
My first (and only) run of game was on Hell difficulty (difficulty 5 out of 6) and I ended up 100%ing the game with it.
It was on average a very fun and challenging experience, and I had to actively mix up my combat skills and equipment for specific fights/areas. However the evolution of my and the enemy's stats was not always balanced and it did end up causing specific extreme peaks of difficulty, causing some drawn out boss fights even when playing optimally. Upon reaching the end game the game became easy even on this difficulty.
My recommended difficulty is the "Difficult" difficulty (4/6). Its the highest difficulty that also awards a steam achievement for beating the game, and probably avoids the difficulty peaks issue I had on Hell (5/6).
At the start you can freely change the difficulty at any time, but after the first chapter you are only able to switch to, and between, the 3 easiest ones. So if you hit a wall in your playthrough, don't be quick to jump on the difficulty switch! Because you can't set it back up after and will miss out on the challenge and achievement for that run!


Art:
The artstyle can at first look a bit wacky/uneven but within context of the game plot it holds up better than the store's out-of-context screenshots, since they show entirely separate areas of the game. It can definitely shift a lot between areas, but it stabilizes within those areas and either way you eventualy get used to it. Also, without spoiling things, I can say that the unique content of the story gets good graphical representation resulting in very unique and cool character/creature designs, especially when it comes to the increasingly-wild areas you visit and enemies you go up against.

I'll give credit to the artists and the marketing team for making this game seem like much more than it is.
TLDR: The visuals and grand world are great, however it fails at being a great game. Gameplay wise, there are below par design decisions throughout and the implementation of the movement/combat mechanics are just baffling for a game of this size. The size of the game becomes a con as you realize how long you still have left to explore and fight in this mostly annoying chore of a game who's difficulty is all over the place, more often than not due to straight up bugs.

The movement and combat gameplay in this game is simply buggy, dot. It really doesn't feel like that should be a thing when that is most of what you do in the game.
Hitting enemies gives weighty feedback and feels nice, but the animations often do not compliment this. Many attack animations feel weirdly slow and paced as if the player is casually going through the motions holding foam weapons.
The player character itself feels like its being pulled along by a elastic string, and there are several bugs to be experienced by simply using the walking buttons, such as being teleported forwards into a cliff when trying to back away from it. There is also the spammable instant 5 meters length roll which can get you in and out of situations at cartoonish and immersion breaking clown speeds.
You can add online multiplayer lag on top of all of this to get really wild bugs mostly related to being sent flying in random directions, or even teleported (often to your death down a cliff), because you tried to *checks notes* attack an enemy you are locked onto?

The overlapping real and umbral world is very fancy to experience at first but quickly becomes an annoyance. Depending on which version of the world you're in, doorways can be closed or open which just causes cumbersome, repetitive exploration and easily missable paths. Have fun doing every area twice to ensure you missed nothing, and missing things anyway because a lot of the areas are large with very open ended multiple paths.
Additionally, being in the Umbral dimension has a oppressive atmosphere in every way: visually, sound and constantly spawning enemies. This would all be very cool if it also wasn't a dimension you spend half your time in. It soon grows old, and just imagine trying to make a full playthrough of Dark Souls except there's a heavy noisy screen filter, there are random easy to kill enemies spawning at all times which stop you from taking in the area you're in or doing inventory management, and you got "AGGRESSIVE ELDRITCH NOISES - 10 HOURS" video playing in the background, set to loop.

The difficulty is all over the place.
Both the player and the enemies deal too much damage, which would be fine if the game didn't have the previously mentioned floaty and sluggish, buggy gameplay. At the beginning you will feel like you're doing a level 1 challenge run and yet it immediately takes a 180-turn when you get your bearings stat and equipment wise, turning the game into a boring and frustrating who-will-stagger-who-first AFK farming simulator.

Overall, gameplay and bugs wise, the game feels like an open beta. I did not play day 1, I waited weeks to play a patched version of the game. Yet I haven't played a bugless session of this game. There's crashes, physics bugs, and at some point the game doubled my levels just because I dared to try and respec my stats.
The devs do seem to be actively working on the game (but this is not without consequences, such as a patch that reworked weapon upgrades system and lost many players a lot of progress and very rare materials).

Play it in 2025.

Decent game but the devs seem to be out of their minds, at least their Epic Games leadership is, and so are for some reason choosing to downgrade the game.
Right now they are removing a trade system that has gotten entire trade communities and websites to spawn many years after release.
I'm not a trader in the slightlest, I've done maybe a handful of trades 2+ years ago, but this trade removal will make players leave and thus downgrade the game for me as matchmaking becomes thinner.

A game with great world building/story and characters which will put you through every emotion, and has fast paced action combat with strategic elements.

Mostly perfect, the only real issue I had with it, which depending on the player could be the opposite of an issue, is that it has so much content that you may eventually get fatigued/overwhelmed, specially if you are like me and refuse to progress until you see every bit of content (such as when going through long areas/dungeons, trying to finish every quest in an area, talk to every NPC, etc...).

Alas, the great story was more than enough incentive for me to plow through it all and finish it with a hunt for all achievements.

The DLC is required for reaching the true end of the story, and also adds some content thorough the base game, so you should get it as soon as you realize you want to play through the whole thing.

I'm not big into rhythm games, so I wasn't sure if I was going to like this. However upon watching the intro sequence, the art style/characters and how everything moved to the sound got me interested enough.
Even if you aren't a rhythm game player before this game, this game will make you one, with your character, the UI, the enemies and even the world's environment itself moving to the beat.
The story/characters/soundtrack are all great, and the game itself is ALIVE with the soundtrack.
If this doesn't sound fun to you I honestly don't know what would.

Real good, hyped for alzheimers so I can play this again

An excellently made game by an excellent developer.

It's a cool game