Recent reviews by anhedonia

somehow manages to only run at 40fps on a pc that gets 200+ in cs2

crazy, borderline ridiculous power spikes if you have experience in this genre and play "as you're supposed to", but they feel really good + the core gameplay is fun + the music owns + the stick figure guys are funny and cute

I feel completely scammed by this game and the community around it. First playthrough finished with 108%, with every side quest done and every collectible found, fought the "true" final boss and I have no idea what is going on. There is no setup. There is no story. There is no lore dump from any npc, even after the game ends. All I got was a flying mushroom winking at me. The introduction to the game is "hey man there are caves below us" and then I spent 20 hours trying to uncover every room in the map, 5 more doing the main story quest of "go to points A B and C", then 10 more hours running around doing the classic metroidvania completionist gig, just to finish everything out with no development at all. I made sure to do as much as possible because I was sure I was missing something. I am in absolute disbelief that this is the game I've been hearing about for years.

Again: there is no payoff to this game. It starts pointless and never stops being pointless.

I was waiting and waiting and waiting for one of these useless, bland npcs in this empty world to start hopping up and down and tell me something that oriented me. I got a few absolute crumbs of lore from at most three of them. Worst of all is the guy whose job it is to buy your ancient artifacts and tell you things about them. He says one or two lines of lore then defaults to "wow you found a lot of these!".

This complete lack of direction in the plot is made even worse by the attempts to make the world alive. Here's some examples:
1. You don't know what you're doing in a region of the world until you find the room with the guy who sells you maps, but you might not even be able to access him (looking at you fog canyon), so too bad!
2. You have a choice with the final part of the circus quest: you can either do the quest as you've been told to the whole time, or you can ... go to the furthest corner of the map to an unmarked location that nobody told you about to talk to a circus employee (why is he there?) and go a different path! I only knew about this one because I looked it up!
3. Most characters you bump into (there are a few, very charming exceptions) do nothing and don't help you in any way. You'll spend the whole game with a pin marking their room waiting for them to be relevant. Sorry!

Extremely important things are too missable. You can actually miss an entire section of the map if you don't break a wall in a certain room. Lots of the upgrades are in locations that have no thematic tie to the upgrade, it's just "congrats you made it here you go", so if you're missing something you won't know where or why without scouring the map or looking it up. (Note: I just love exploring so I found all of them on my own. Doesn't make them less random)

You ABSOLUTELY need external resources to properly get through this game. You need a wiki to tell you that you actually had a choice in this questline that you didn't know about. You need a wiki to tell you that the banker that stole your thousands of geos didn't poof away and can be found somewhere else later (really, truly, the worst design choice I've ever seen in a game: just take all the player's money for 5+ hours of the early game! surely they don't need it!). You also probably need a dozen 90 minute youtube video essays to get anything meaningful out of this disaster you just played through. It seems like everyone but me has watched them.

+ stunning visuals and sound design
+ different builds are viable
+ fluid combat/platforming
+ some little things are done very well and full of heart

- fast travel system is so sparse and inconvenient I wouldn't even call it fast in 60% of cases. you unlock actual fast travel in endgame
- several mutually exclusive achievements. no I don't want to play through this game 5 times
- no difficulty ramping, final boss is a joke
-- NO PREMISE. NO STORY
-- VERY easy to miss core story elements you didn't know existed
--- the banker

I'm going to play through the extra boss rush content in desperate hopes that someone falls from the sky with a textbook in their hands to explain what this game was supposed to be. As of now this just really wasn't worth it at all.

my friends kept taking the elevator without me but then i got to watch them die on the beach for over an hour so who really wins here

such a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of a game that my last played was april 12 2016 and im still disgusted by it

one of a kind

no way they let me play this for free

one of the best in the Free Hand Drawn Hidden Object Cat Finding Steam Game genre

- when you find all the cats in an area it gets colored in, so you know where to look without hints
- really impressively good music
- beautiful art, 3dish background, and vivid colors

the best picross experience on steam

Researchers Stumped By 100th Cat's Whereabouts -- "He Could Be Anywhere"