Recent reviews by Rist

A fun little choose-your-own adventure type game that makes you explore every possible branch to get to the one true ending and discover the whole story of Beacon Pines.

Cute visuals, engaging story, likable characters, great soundtrack.

Being able to influence damage with movement is fun and all, but the game stops being enjoyable somewhere around the end of level 3 - when the level checkpoints stop and every level after that starts throwing much more difficult enemies at you. If you die on levels 4 and up, you can only continue from the portal on level 3.

There are no tutorials. You don't even see a training dummy to practice your swings until halfway through level 2. All you get is a manual with some very general info. Sure, it says movement affects your attacks, but how about something more concrete, like "performing a small side-step at the beginning of your attack can significantly speed up your swing, especially with heavier weapons"? Or even better some video clips showing basic swinging techniques, or a practice room with a dummy that shows the damage when hit?

Other mechanics aren't really explained well and you're better off searching the subreddit for them. Healing salves are only described in a note on level 2. Never found anything that explains blue orbs and actually had to look up what are they even for - why not have a location with a drained orb next to high-condition weapon and a note or something like that? Character's height affecting combat is never explained in-game either, afaik.

Most of the locations are very dark, so you'll either spend the entire game with a torch in your hand, being forced to use one-handed weapons, or wearing the one helmet that grants night vision. Or just stumbling around in the dark, possibly missing half the containers and running into enemies you can't even see.

The combat itself can get extremely frustrating: parries not working, enemies running circles around you, forcing you to spin the camera while trying to keep the cursor on them, enemies swinging so often that you can't get a hit in (especially if you don't have riposte or have a heavy weapon), random collisions with the tiniest bit of an enemy's weapon at seemingly low speed draining most of your health, falling over because your left foot stepped on a slightly raised bit of terrain...

Other random gripes include:
- Being unable to switch weapons between primary and secondary sets while moving in non-combat mode and the process of switching taking far too long
- Turning with A/D for precise positioning in non-combat mode could be smoother, can't even hold to rotate continuously right now
- Closing/opening doors can sometimes feel unreliable - like clicking and dragging the door simply doesn't register, which is extremely frustrating when you're trying to lock a giant demon in a bathroom
- Getting up from a knockdown takes ages and can't be affected by player's actions, which is especially infuriating after being defeated
- By the way, the fade-out-fade-in after getting defeated takes just far too long
- Same for the fading when clicking through characters available for hire in the arena
- It's not always clear which rank of quality and condition is better
- Operating levers can be very fiddly, why not just let me double click them like buttons?

This game went from having fun while grinding happens in the background to just another f2p cash-grabbing scenario. Can't recommend it unless they fix Hema's build requirements along with all the other problems.