Recent reviews by idk

Whoever designed this new UI deserves Nuremberg trial.
Optimization is ruined, constant glitches and crashes, pathetic.

They also added a cow that goes moooooo

Very mid aRPG made for western console gamers.
Nothing worth your time unless you played every other better counterparts out there

Captivangly unsettling, equally brutal for both flesh and mind.

At the beginning seems like one of those times where a product wants to lure you in with controversial brutality taken to ones extreme. First few hours don't spare you missing limbs, tortures, abnormal erogenous body parts, nonconsensual interactions with those body parts, flesh and blood, feces and other fluids generally produced by human body. Although It pulls out a few punches in some areas, in general you deal with a product that intends to present starring characters with situations that would make any human snap in an instant with no chance of going back, wrecking the mind equally as flesh containing it.

Starts as a pretty basic jRPG - it's a RPG Maker after all, and most of the games issues come just from this fact, but otherwise i guess that game would have not been created. But as you delve deeper, you discover that existing systems of resources, ailments, interactions with enemies, key items and structure of the locations, - as simple as they are - make this more of an immersive sim than what would you expect.
I can't help myself and i have to make a comparison to Dark Souls in terms of storytelling and side characters progression. Vast majority of the lore is hidden in books, side dialogues and subsuquent playthroughs (which solidify this game as an immersive sim even more in my eyes) and it's a lore worth knowing. Lore about gods, humanity, ambitions and primal rules of the world. Similarly to Bloodborne, faces the characters with horrors of the flesh first, then shifts it's themes, and takes aim at their mind, and it's lack of ability to think at the level of the creatures and powers above them - and it's the second game after Bloodborne that i can confidently call "Lovecraftian".
Ma'habre Streets theme is a masterpiece.

There is beauty in this darkness that can be harnessed and used to usher something new.

So far none of the elements are developed enough to keep you engaged for longer, it's more of a paid demo to be fair, but the stuff already existing are pretty impressive and well polished - premise and immersion is great. Normally i would label it as yet another early access to print some money, but i believe it has potential to become something outstanding, and i like the devs attitude. The main question is, how long do we have to wait to receive the final product.

It's is really worth it to keep on your radar

Banger of a video game.

Fluid, easy to understeand but decently challangeing combat system with different moves used not only to deal more damage, but also letting you control opponents and space around you. Takes an approach of fighting games/soulslike when majority of damage can be avoided, and looking for patterns in movestrings and enemy behaviour is key to winning. Character aging when dying is an engaging concept, but i found some moves being unlearnable while reaching certain age
a bad decision. In general, character progression seems to me to be oriented around more playthroughs and requires some knowledge about the game to be effective. When i got a little gud at the game, i was already an old grandpa with severe dementia that can't learn anything new, has no points at shrines (and shrine unlocks are boring passives) and is a few hours near the end of the game. Makes experimenting with new moves rather hard.
There is an Arena mode and different modifires, where this issue propably doesn't exist/is handled differently but i wasn't interested in checking it out, I think it's safe to expect is more impactful there. The depth is definitely there.

It is Beautifully animated, but sound design is lacking, especially voice acting that seems kinda stiff.
Inspiring story, that's not shoved down your throat, letting you figure some nuances mostly on your own, not barraging you with pointless corny dialogue, in fact there is almost no dialogue. Game is very confident in what it is about, and lets the images and context do the storytelling. It has an oniric and mystic feeling to it, lets many metaphors and background story slide without forced highlighting, letting you interpretate what you see. Makes a bold move with it's ending making a second playthrough essential.

Inspired and confident game, very much worth your time.

If something is compared to Roadside Picnic and Stalker i expected something else than a massive explanation dump, anime-level of bad dialogue writing and a flying robots in first 2 hours of the game.

Two people making more engaging item system than Blizzard will ever make.

Breakfast? Cup Noodles
Lunch? Chipotle
Shoes? Nike
Feeling? Ashamed

Keep in mind it's still early access, and roadmap is pretty long but as of now:

Frustrating and tedious for absolutely no reason. Turn-based system in par with 3 movement options is unintuitive - at least to me - and very abusable. Game runs in that semi turn-based system all the time, there is no distinction between combat and out of combat for that system - out of combat it feels sluggish and drawn out - in more heated combats i felt like im never given enough information what will happen after my turn is over. It's very easy to forget about it when you walk the station you seen 15 times already and last few minutes were shooting mindless grunts. Game likes to swarm you with meaningless enemies until you start falling asleep, then you forget to open the door and leave 1 action point left, and you get 1 shot by randomly placed guy with flamethrower (no resists to fire is death in 2 turns where you can just watch it happen) or guy with that sawblade launcher amputating your limbs from across the screen (with no notification it even happened) leaving you with huge penalties (like -50% accuracy in case of missing hand - basicly end of the run).

Deaths seem very random and it's hard to understeand why did you even die because game doesn't give a duck about giving you any information, there is no log, no death recap, nothing. One time you get hit by some guy with a given weapon and barely get scratched, other time the same guy with the same weapon 1-shotted my character with decent resists and 100 max hp (upgraded from starting 70). Sometimes you are doing just fine, and then some bs quasimorph spawns and the run is over. Whenever i encountered quasimorph with a crossbow i always got 1-shotted the moment my turn is over. If you lack ammo for your weapon that an encountered quasimorph is not immortal to (by resists cranked up to unresonable amounts for no reason) - run is over, resists are not explained anyway. AI is dumb af, very often they just sit there and do nothing, you cannot tell if an enemy noticed you and is about to engage or piss off, they kill each other in crossfire very often.
The fact you cannot drop the mission when you are very often in checkmate situations is a joke, and propably a lazy solution not to let player grind resources easily. Only way out is death or savescumming with alt f4.
Some African warlord said it's a skill issue - but i disagree.


All the missions have basicly the same goal (besides station defenses) and get boring real fast. Every station is structured in the same way - main corridor with doors to the other rooms on its sides. You walk up to the door, open it, shoot, hope there is no afromentioned flamethrower/sawblade guy hidden outside of your line of sight. It's all SWAT-like breach and clear, zero diversity in enviroment and approaching to the engagement,

Inventory space is a joke, 60% of your inventory is occupied by ammo/meds/food - even more if you carry grenades etc.
I know it's extraction shooter standard to never walk out with everything you would like, but here it is way too much. You rarely walk out with reasonable amount of materials.

UI needs some serious work, in mission select/crafting menu - it's unintuitive, in game - you waste too much time for most basic things (dissasembling items, amputating limbs), sometimes it's very hard to manouver through dozen of items and bodies on the ground.

Overall, i find the game premise very interesting, but there are clearly some core ideas that are poorly executed. Desperetly needs balancing, more information given to the player and more variety in missions. It's worth to keep it on your radar, but given the roadmap, I'm afraid devs will focus more on adding more mechanics to a flawed game, instead of refining it.

I had mixed feelings at first, but in the end it's just not worth it.

It really takes you on an adventure, starts rather boring, but the farther you go, the better it gets in terms of atmosphere and locations. It's very long, but wastes a lot of your time, with camera pointing on ♥♥♥♥ you already know what to do with, unskippable stuff u already seen, but mostly with boring puzzles, that are waste of everyones time.
I dunno who at some point decided it's a good idea to add puzzles to slasher games, since it's obvious they have to be braindead easy to do so you don't get stuck, but here it's abundance of them and they are really tedious, game would benefit from removing 80% of them (to anyone behind music box level - i hope you are well and happy)
Combat could be fun and have a little of depth, but it falls short in the end.

Game emphasises fighting without taking damage (obviously), you charge your bar when attacking without receving hits, if it's full, following attacks will fill your other bars - one you spend to heal from attacks, other boosts your damage. Simple, understeandable concept they keeps you engaged in combat. And it's completly ruined by both camera work and abysmal hitboxes.
You don't control camera, it's static, trying to recrate some of that old Castlevania games vibe. It always shows you what it decides to show you. It is rarely fixed on your character, there are many angles it uses, and very often it is positioned in a way you can't see an attack, can't see all of the enemies, can't correctly judge the distance, or enemies blend with the background. In some areas it changes angles as you fight, so you can juggle between all of the listed problems in a matter of seconds. Combined with amount of effects attacks are generating, very often i was getting hit when i that moment i had no idea that attack is even coming - resetting my bar. Blue bar is your only way to heal up in a fight, so that is a huge problem. Also checkopints are bad, poorly placed forcing you to redo tedious parts, and you always respawn with the same amount of resources you had when you unlocked a checkpoint. Amount of resources also transitions between levels, and because of that, many many times i have been forced to run around with sliver of hp, having to basicly no hit upcoming fights until i heal up to a reasonable level. The same reason made the very last boss of the game such a ♥♥♥♥♥ chore i nearly hated the game. I was forced to fight a boss through ~6 phases being constantly at ~10% of hp, trying to bait the only one attack i knew i can safely dish some damage after it, because nobody thought to heal me up before the fight.

Hitboxes are a war crime, some of them are a size of a refrigerator or some ♥♥♥♥. Your defensive options are a parry (generous timing window, but using it on the fly is pointless because of what i listed above) or a dodge (with no iframes, they had no iframes in 2010). Jump cancelling a combo will almost never work, because you will get hit by refrigerator-sized attack. Which contradicts how the combo system is designed - you can fluidly go from one to another, there is for sure some depth there, but because of the above it's heavily impractical to do and it's better to give up on min-maxing as soon as possible or you will just get frustrated, so you are stuck to hit-hit-dodge style for vast majority of the fights. Such a flaw in the very core of the game makes it unrecommendable in my eyes. Slashers were designed very differently before Souls games took over, but this level of junk is not excusable.

Visually it holds on very strong as for game that came out in 2010. There are many really nice vistas, and levels are detailed and distintict from each other. Only cutscenes don't hold up to that, these didn't age very well.
The strongest point is the game story and atmosphere, it has some guts to tell some darker tale, that might not meet the happy end. Plot itself is fun to uncover, but narrative is severly lacking, most of the characters development happens off screen, it takes some time to get to the interesting part, characters act weird and don't seem to be analyzing what's going on around them too much. Kind of a dissonance between the plot itself, and it's realization.

Platforming is garbage, Asassin's Creed/Uncharted style climbing was never fun and never will be, and when it goes 2D style with no ledges etc to grab, it feels like you are playing drunk, never knowing where the ♥♥♥ will you actually land.

I would give it a pass only on normal difficulty or below, and if you played all of the classic slashers out there before. Play MG:R first, GoW games, Baynoetta, Ninja Gaiden or whatever. And on a discount of course.
I will play the sequel just to find out how was the story developed, but i am coming into it with low expectations for sure.