Recent reviews by Pancho

a good game

after all these years

The shining star of the crew simulator genre.

The story is good until it's suddenly absolutely awful.

The gameplay stays good the whole way through, though!

Overall I think it's worse on average than Dying Light 1, but still very fun with friends

A masterpiece.

a bag fumbled like no other

Legitimately gripping survival RPG that's fantastic with friends and features actual RPG mechanics. Much better than it looks.

Game is awesome, honestly. Really great aesthetics, tiny download, simple but high potential building mechanics. But not without some serious flaws.

Sailing could be sped up 2 or even 3 times over. The raft is slower than walking even at top speed, and the carve is about running speed with full wind. Haven't tried the longboat yet. It's a cool and bold choice to make ore not able to be teleported, but goodness' sake at least make shipping it home in batches not take 20 minutes - especially considering that if I want a second shipment (which I do, because boat storage is microscopic) it's another 20 minutes back there and then another 20 home.

Oh, and some way to line things up when building would be nice. I spent a while making a cool bridge to pull my cart across and found myself wishing there was some method to align my beams to the other side of the river, so I could build on both shores and connect in the middle. Ended up having to just build a long beam across as fast I could, before all but the last piece collapsed, and then go from there.

I am a huge fan of Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight, and was excited to play this game after a friend got it for me for Christmas.

If you haven't played M:RUtM, play it before you play this. It's better in a lot of ways, but I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say it's a lot better overall.

This game has less interesting visuals (in my opinion), though it still looks quite nice.

The soundtrack is okay, but I don't really remember any specific tracks that I want to listen to again (unlike Momodora).

Gameplay wise, it's very good. I'd say that it's easier than Momodora, with only the final boss really giving me some genuine trouble to do without taking damage. I can imagine that if I was just trying to beat the game, using as many healing incenses as I wanted, there'd be virtually no challenge at all. It introduces more weapons with a few different movesets, but only one actually does bonus damage so I didn't get a whole lot out of that aspect. Otherwise, though, the boss and level design was fun and satisfying. Parrying isn't exactly hard, but it's still satisfying to casually deflect an entire boss's combo and then chunk them out. Boss design, both in gameplay and aesthetically, is very good. The world itself is very pretty to look at and explore, though the lack of the ability to teleport between bonfires can make for some tedious backtracking if you missed a room.

In conclusion, I enjoyed the game very much, despite a few flaws, and might 100% it in the near future like I did Momodora. It's a fine sequel to one of my favorite games, and I think it's worth playing. If you're choosing between this and Momodora, buy Momodora. If you're just coming from Momodora, this is, for the most part, what you're looking for.

Really gripping, and absolutely loaded with the kind of old-internet nostalgia and jokes that make it both a world I wanted to explore and learn about as well as the setting for a remarkably compelling mystery story that was immensely satisfying to figure out. Highly recommended.

Pay to win.