Recent reviews by Wretch

There just isn't enough to make this game feel like a worthwhile investment of time. There's no purpose. The gameplay loop starts out strong but eventually just feels like you have to keep repeating yourself infinitely to keep repeating yourself infinitely. You'll quickly hit a mental roadblock where you realize that all your working towards is making your car more powerful so that you can continue doing what you've already done 100 times. There's no goal, this game merely exists as a journey and unfortunately that journey is only enjoyable during the discovery phase. Once you know what you're doing and you move onto the question of why you're doing it this game swallows its own tail and becomes a chore.

Hard to decide whether to recommend or not to recommend tbh but ultimately had to say no. I got this game for the local coop to play with my son and we are in fact really enjoying ourselves with it but there are so many issues currently that make for an infuriating experience that cant be ignored.

The UI in local coop is arguably the worst I've ever seen in my life and it's probably best just listed out:
- Both players share a single UI. This means things like; mousing over armour to read stats can be interrupted by the other player simply moving. All armour and weapons have to be equipped or viewed separately but done while sharing a UI. Which is "hey buddy don't touch anything I'm going to change my armour." and then "alright Dad now it's my turn." Every time you want to do anything.

- Buying items in a shop uses the age-old method of walking up to an item and then seeing its stats floating above the item in a window but if the other player approaches an item in the shop their window overlaps yours making both unreadable... So again, you've got to ask them to just stand there and wait while you shop and then you stand there and wait while they shop.

- There's a cute little base decorating system in the game that gives you much needed cores for upgrades but we've completely given up on placing the items we build in our base because it requires us to again, do it separately and one by one. So, you open the menu, craft the item, walk around and place it. If they go to a vendor? Build cancelled. They go to their inventory to change weapons? Build Cancelled. Effectively, only one player can do anything at a time while the other watches because if they dont, then nobody can do anything.

- The NPCs talk a lot. Or rather, they want you to read a lot. and I really do mean a lot. After every run every single NPC will have something to say to you and... you guessed it. You have to sit through each dialogue once for every player. So you go through this long spiel from an NPC explaining something and then you have to do it again with the person sitting right next to you on the couch otherwise it won't count the progression for them.

Let's say you just finish a run, get back to town and start doing your housekeeping. Here's what it looks like. Talk to the trainer and collect your rewards. Wait for your partner to do the same thing. Go through any new dialogue options with the trainer. Wait for your partner to do the same thing. Upgrade your weapon. Wait for your partner to upgrade their weapon. Build any base cosmetics for bonus cores. Wait for your partner to build their base cosmetics. Talk to the weaponsmith for any upgrades. Wait for your partner to do the same. And so on. There are 4 NPCs with dialogue. That's not even with changing your weapons, or trying to decide on which armour to take. It's. All. Done. Separately. On the same screen. It's gruelling.

All that said the gameplay is actually really fun. There's a good amount of meta-progression and it feels very impactful. The game isn't too punishing and you can absolutely break it with godtier drops on your runs. Combat feels great and even some of the systems in the game are unique and innovative. Runs well, easy to pickup and play and doesn't feel awkward or janky in game. If the UI experience wasn't so jarring this game would be an easy recommend but I would absolutely feel disingenuous recommending this game to somebody looking for a local coop game to play in its current state.

We will keep playing and hopefully this review can flip the thumb up because it's so close.

Game is brilliant, innovative, and extremely thought invoking. I have no idea how the devs came up with this idea but it's been a while since I've had such a great time playing a game. Don't be intimidated by the wires, after 10 minutes everything feels so good. Try this game.

If you dont like democracy you probably won't like this game.

The game brought me back to a time when I used to fall in love with many things. Like eating your first taco or riding your first roller coaster. It awoke something within me that will forever be factored into my personal metric used in judging other games. "It's good but is it Risk of Rain good?" Game is hard but rewarding and worth every penny... Based on the amount of enjoyment I've gotten from this game it's worth more money but in the very least it's worth what they're asking. Amazing game. Nothing about rain though...

From my initial entrance into the game and when they introduced the workshop I felt as though I was getting into a variation of My Time at Portia, or Stardew Valley type but quickly came to realize it wasn't that. The game has been classified by some as an RPG, Adventure and Puzzle game but I feel as though if you go into it with similar games of those genres in mind you'll be disappointed.

My best description of my time so far with the game would be that it's like playing out a story, not a choose your own adventure, there's no levelling or XP, no inventory and no real gaming at all and the game relies fully on its ability to tell compelling stories to keep people engaged. The stories are interesting in the very least but I haven't gotten through the entire game and I would say that none of the mini-stories in the game have entirely gripped me and none have completely fallen flat either.

You can tell that the developers of this game were trying to keep it relevant with current issues and the theme of death is not only constantly recurring but pretty much at the forefront at all times. It's apparent from the very first scene in the game that this project was more then just a game to the development team, each story is told with weight and respect to the people who were putting it out there and the developers handled it well.

The animations are interesting and at first struck me as novel, I honestly thought they were going to bother me but even after a couple hours I was still saying "doot dee doot dee doo" everytime I walked anywhere. The characters in the game were well-written and it was easy for me to come up with voices for them as I read all the dialog aloud on my stream with 1 viewer.

I'll likely find the time to finish the game but I also felt that after playing for 3 hours I was exhausted and couldn't possible read anymore. That being said I also didn't want to just skip through to get to the end because every piece of dialog was compelling and I wanted to soak it all in, therefore, I had to stop and wait until I was ready to read again.

At one point I found myself thinking that maybe this game should've just been a book, then I started thinking of how that would tell and it wouldn't work. Honestly, the game is one of a kind in the sense that the way the stories come out and are told could only be achieved in this platform and for that alone I would recommend this game.

When people say the "mini-games" are compelling they're either generally mobile gamers or they are really easily amused. The "mini-games" could have not existed and the game would've been equally as compelling or more so, just simply based on the fact I find them extremely tedious and pointless.

As mentioned, I'll finish the game because I want to hear all the stories and learn more about Elk but after I'm done I can't imagine there's a lot of replayability.

Ultimately, I would recommend this game to anyone who's looking for a new style of storytelling that's done really well, I would not recommend this game to anyone who's expecting an RPG style adventure game.

This game has a lot of reasons to play and for the price you're definitely getting your money worth. I think it's been a genre-defining experience and is definitely worth checking out if you're into horror-survival type games. Maybe I'll go against the grain a little and recommend that if you're more interested in the horror side of things then you should probably jump into the game Single Player for your first playthrough. The game is much more serious and comes with an added tension of being isolated on an island with whatever the wilderness has in store for you.

It's alright