Recent reviews by STJ

A very special experience worth recommending to anyone looking, primarily, for a good tragedy.

To expand on this a little, prior to playing the game I've done my very best to avoid spoilers for many, MANY years. A necessary precaution as the game lives and dies by its story. I've heard and read countless times that this is a good game, but frequently that isn't really expanded on and after I've played it I can't say that I entirely agree with this statement. So I've decided to compile a few of my gripes with the game while they're still fresh.

By no means, however, should this lead you to believe I do not wholeheartedly recommend this game.

The game is perfectly fine in terms of gameplay, however, there are vast stretches of time when you will effectively be doing nothing but traveling from A to B. In many ways this is an almost therapeutic experience and one that fits the game thematically of course, but one that I found myself encountering and disliking more and more the closer I got to the end of the game. While the design decision makes sense to me overall, I felt like I had fewer options to use the quick travel system, this coupled with the obvious climax and ending to the story being spaced out regularly made it slightly less enjoyable toward the end of the story.

Some of the side missions are a little too quirked up, to the point that they took me out of the moment when I was playing. For every war veteran showing you a glimpse into an all too recent civil war or old man you go fishing with there is an overly eccentric Tesla analogue or implied Time traveler. It really felt hit or miss, and it felt like, at most points in the story, Arthur (The main character) was not the man that would or should be engaging in some of these activities. Mostly this felt like GTA bleeding into the Western fable being presented and was, at least for me, unwelcome.

Lastly I've got the most personal issue of all. I HATED most of the music containing vocals. At near every story critical junction I found myself attacked by some campy song while trying to internalise and work through the message at the time. What made this especially obnoxious was the lyrics hitting you over the head with what you're essentially meant to be understanding anyway.
The soundtrack itself is stellar, I cannot heap enough praise onto it. It does more to immerse you into the world around you and accompanies bitter-sweet melancholy and bombastic action perfectly throughout the game. It is lucky, then, that instrumental tracks comprise about 80-90% of the soundtrack.

Finally, one bit of praise I'd like to highlight is how urgency was handled in the story. More than any other game I've played, I felt happy at any point to miss bits of additional content in favour of the main story, even if it meant that it would be permanently unavailable to me. I'll credit this to the narrative and how it handled themes of finality in general in the latter chapters of the story.

TL:DR Game is okay but the Story is exceptional and would have likely been a formative cornerstone had I been younger when I played this for the first time.