Recent reviews by dnaod

I'm not going to finish this game. This just isn't the type of game that captures my attention for very long. But I definitely recognize the quality of the game and love put into it. I really appreciated the immersion of the experience and the beauty of it.

If you like games like Farcry or similar but want a better storyline, this is a game for you.

I mean, kinda yes, kinda no? This was a really fun, difficult game until about 2/3rds through. At that point the comically difficult Marauders just grind your progress to a boring, snails pace as it takes 3-8 tries at some of the longer combat encounters. Combine the lack of a story with this very repetitive gameplay without any progress and it just loses its fun. Uninstalled the game before finishing because I felt that the game had showed me everything it had to offer and I'd rather invest my time on new experiences. Life is short - spend it having fun.

Yeah no. Not for me. I was hoping for a game that was something like XCom, or maybe Shadowrun Returns -style combat. This has some of the gameplay with some pretty frustrating design choices that made it far less fun. Like ammo. I ran out of ammo pretty quickly and realized that inventory restrictions meant ammo scarcity was going to be a thing throughout this game. There's enough frustrations in the gameplay to add ammo conservation on top of it.

Yeah, I'm not going to finish this game. After your n-th time of being stuck on a puzzle for 30 minutes, looking up the answer, and realizing you'd never would have solved such a ridiculous, illogical, arbitrary puzzle, the enjoyment of the game is lost.

Pity too. It's beautiful in it's humorous writing, glorious soundtrack, and amazing cut scenes. But damn... the puzzles are just so stupid and nonsensical in their solutions.

Make some progress, get stuck for another 30 minutes, look it up to find out you were supposed to repeat that action 3x to trigger the advancement. But why?!?!! It's just a game of experimentation with no aha moments. Just moments of, "you're kidding me. _That_ was the solution?!?!"

If you enjoy random experimentation and hunt and click, you might like it. If you like being rewarded for clever thinking and subtle connections, this is not the game for you.

And my play timer is wrong. I played for longer than 2.7 hours.

This game will be very polarizing. I love RPGs that are a mix of narrative and... well... anything else. This game is really only narrative driven. There's some really interesting mechanics thrown in like the ability to assign problems to your subconscious for thinking in the background, the skill tree is fascinating, etc, but ultimately, the game comes down to just listening to very long, well-written narratives and response trees. Did I mention that it's VERY well written? Did I mention that the conversations are very, very, very long?

And yet, I just ended up having to admit that I wasn't enjoying the game at all. I felt like I was supposed to be enjoying it because it receives such high praise but I just didn't like the character I was playing nor the pace of the game. I found it frustratingly restrictive and each time I started it, dreaded having to remember everything that happened last time, how much pointless dialog I was going to have to sit through for very little progress.

Ultimately, I don't know how you know whether you'll like this game or not. I love the Shadowrun RPGs and yet didn't like this game. But it sure sounds like if this is a game for you, you'll really like it. I didn't.

I wish I could go back and experience this game for the first time again and again.

Beautiful little puzzle platformer. But please play this game on the biggest, brightest, highest resolution, highest dpi display you have. I started it on the SteamDeck and it was lacklustre. It wasn't until I moved to my PC that I was really taken aback by the incredible art, colours, and beauty. The use of camera pulling back quite far from the character during gameplay makes it not a really great game for small screens.

It breaks my heart to write this review but I just feel others need to be warned of what they are getting in to if they purchase this game.

First off, this game is excellent. I have enjoyed so much of it. The story has been great, the gameplay fun, the flow an excellent combination of peaceful awe and beauty with high-tension moments of terror.

BUT... I've now encountered my SECOND game breaking bug. I was stuck for a good week and a half on a mission called Signal to Noise because the game scripting did not work as it intended. It took multiple sessions of retracing my steps of that mission to find a workaround for the issue. But I did and I was happy.

Until two weeks ago when I encountered a second bug on a mission called The Power Plant. Now admittedly, it would be pretty easy at various points in this mission to think there's a bug when there isn't due to the challenge of getting all the valves in the right positions. Except I'm at the "tutorial" door where there's only one valve. This first door is bugged and moving the steam pipe valve melts the door's ice but the door never unlocks. I've watched YouTube videos, read FAQs, and more to see if I missed something other than the one valve that needs moving. Nope. My game is bugged. I've tried reloading some previous save points that were reasonably close to the point I was at but the bug persists.

I'm stuck completely and it's game breaking for me. I can't proceed in the story.

I've reached out to Hinterland Support for both game-breaking bugs. I have yet to even receive a response. I'm not going to replay the whole game to this point. I've really liked this game so far. But I'm horribly disappointed that I can't even finish the game without starting over. Frankly, I'm just not sure what to do at this point.

I'm just sad. Anyhow, that's my warning if you are thinking of buying this game. If you do, I really do hope you don't encounter the same severe bugs that I have.

Enjoyable game with strong writing.

Even though this review claims that I've played this game for only two hours, that is not true. This is the 3rd time I've installed the game and will likely be the last.

Over the past few years it's always annoyed me that I didn't progress further in this game. The atmosphere is great, it's dripping with suspense, the levels are really interesting and feel realistic.

Before I make my next statement, let me just say that I usually crank most modern games to the hardest difficulty setting immediately. I don't want route markers, I want the hardest challenge possible, I don't want hints. But I left this game at the normal difficult setting because I wasn't sure what I was getting into yet.

And the first section of the game was great. Up until the encounter with the 3 antagonistic humans in the Spyre. And this is as far as I've gotten through all 3 of my installs. It's brutal. I know you're supposed to stealth and play the avoidance game and yet this is near impossible. Even when you're standing still, enemies still hear "something" and death is only a few seconds away. I like hard games but...

... this is just not fun. And sadly, I've just come to the realization that this is not the game I want it to be and it won't be no matter how many times I reinstall it. As much as I want it to be. This game is just not fun due to the soul crushing difficulty of it. There's too many great games out there to waste any more time on trying to get past the same point over and over - over multiple years of trying.