Recent reviews by Mati

Unable to summon cooperator

Cool game, a blast in a coop too

Cool game, great rougelike. Can be pretty unforgiving but has a lot of variety.

A really fun detective-style game adventure game.

The story follows a magical artifact, the Golden Idol.
You are presented with a snapshot of a situation in "exploring view" and by inspecting the scenes you learn of the events. While doing that you have to provide the right information in the "thinking view" to summarize the events and learn a bit more of the context. The game consists of 11 cases and an epilogue, which is a summary of the whole story.

Most of the puzzles are rather straightforward with some deduction. Few of them require a bit more thinking and reusing or combining the prior knowledge. The game insists on not using the hints and I ended up not using any of them, although sometimes I had to rehash my story before figuring it out.

Overall it was very fun. I wish it was longer. It's also best to finish it in few continuous sittings, as forgetting the prior story and characters can negatively impact your ability to proceed later on (although you can go back to the finished cases and just look around or see your previous thoughts, which helps).

FIrst good Dark Souls game. The previous two were displaying some terrible choices, but this game is very good from the beginning. Worth playing and finishing, and even the DLCs are good!

Pros:
- Dynamic and fluid combat. Finally you control your character and not wait for the ages-long animation to finish.
- Interesting and beautiful world.
- Different types of weapons and enemies.
- Boss fights are fun, challenging and rewarding.
- No dragging on ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ areas like in previous games.
- Much better bonfire placement.

Cons:
- NPC quests are still ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Without a guide you will miss 90% of them. Using the guide, you will only miss 50%.
- Navigating through few areas is very annoying and progressing is hard without a guide. Several side locations are easier to find then some of the main ones.
- Most boss enemies are still hard because they 1-2 hit you. Sometimes you wish it would be an actual duel and not you fighting a one-punch-man.
- Even though the lore and worldbuilding are nice, the storytelling is lacking.

Overall, a solid 8.5/10 experience including DLCs. It also makes previous games kinda obsolete - building upon the predecessors and fixing their mistakes makes their faults much more obvious. Good job on learning from their past.

Ultimately I only beat the game to beat it. It wasn’t much fun at all. An improvement from dark souls 1 in many aspects, but still far from enjoyable experience. Feels like a wasted potential.

Poor and janky animations (some enemies move like they have poop in their pants), annoying bonfire placements, items hidden in the weirdest of places, unresponsive controls, unnecessary arcade elements requiring jumping which is terribly implemented and straight up unenjoyable level design for most of the areas make this game a chore rather than fun. Enemy design which makes fights extremely easy or extremely tedious. Online often takes multiple times to connect and can be unreliable at times. Final boss fight is a lackluster (again) - the unskippable credits were much longer then the final fight although just as engaging. Also getting some items or progressing in certain places is next to impossible without use of a wiki or a guide. Same with certain mechanics that are not explained anywhere so your best bet is learning them from the internet.

The story is just okay.

The improvements include the graphic design, bonfire travel being available from the beginning, slightly better quests and covenants availability, weapon and spells variety, less linearity in progression and lots of content.

Some might like it, but having played a lot of good and bad games I’d give it 6/10 at most, for me personally it’s closer to 4/10. Definitely won’t be playing again and it wasn’t good enough to make me want to finish the dlcs.

While an important game in FromSoftware's history, the game itself is not worth the money or time of the player. It is riddled with bad design decisions and while it can be fun, most of the time it's just frustrating and tedious. Examples include:

- Sparse respawn points; dying makes you go over the same spot again and again. This makes the game "grindy" without the actual benefit of the grind.
- No explanation of game mechanics and poor UI, which artificially raises the difficulty and prompts players to lose time or make bad decisions. I think this is one of the biggest problems of this game; once you learn the mechanics and few other gimmicks, the game becomes much easier (which further proves this point).
- Slow movement which feels unresponsive and frustrating at times.
- Artificial difficulty introduced through poor mechanics, such as "darkness" (which also makes the level feel longer then it really is), invisible pathways, sparse spawn points again or enemies waiting all day in that small nook behind a corner for an off chance that player comes by.
- Jumping mechanics are just atrocious, but sometimes required to reach certain places.
- "quests" which depend on player doing random stuff with no indications of what to do (people with stockholm syndrome might call it storytelling).
- Blighttown, 'nuff said.
- Price (worth 10$ tops).

If you are a big fan of FromSoftware's games, I still would not recommend to buy it. Watch youtube playthroughs, it's going to be way cheaper and more fun. If you still want to play it after going through a playthrough you might enjoy it more now that you know the gimmicks that artificially inflate the difficulty.

I finished the game only to be able to say I finished it. It wasn't very enjoyable experience and a lot of my struggles came from the game not explaining itself (which can be mitigated a bit by reading wiki/guides). I only enjoyed about a quarter of my time there; most of the game is dying in stupid ways due to some of the flaws listed above. And after all that time final boss fight was anticlimactic, easy and the ending disappointing. I recommend their later games; the more the improved on their formula, the better it gets.

I definitely do not recommend this game and regret wasting my time on it.

+ The artwork is nice
+ The music is noticeable.
+ Some puzzles make sense
- Unfortunately most are ridiculous and not intuitive puzzles. I've had to resort to walk-through multiple times.
- Puzzle difficulty varies a lot. Once it's obvious, the other time it's very stretched.
- The humor is pretty dry. Maybe if I were a 12 years old I would laugh.
- The world is uninteresting. The main character is bland, we do not create or maintain any relationships and the motivations of the hero themselves are not really convincing.

I wouldn't get it. I had to force myself to go through this game and it wasn't very fun.

Doesn't feel special. Kinda generic MMORPG. There's plenty of better options out there IMHO.

One of the weaker releases from the wadjet eye games. The characters are not interesting, dialogues aren't either. Many of the puzzles are using the worst examples from the point & click genre - sometimes you need to do pixel hunting, shooting mechanics, sometimes you have to interact with something a few times to get a result and you need to choose a proper thing to interact with (e.g. using eye on retina scanner instead of "interact" button). If you are fan of their games, consider skipping this game. If you're not, outright skip it. I really forced myself to play it for 10 hours, took me a few tries and I wish I didn't.