Recent reviews by Duny

I'm pretty sure this game will still be in my top 3 when I die.
This is the kind of game that makes you change the way you see video games. No other medium could have allowed this kind of experience.
I think about it every day since I finished it, and it's extremely frustrating because once you have played it you can never play it again. The closest we get is to watch someone play through it and be amazed as we have been before them. I pity the fools who spoiled themselves before they got to play, and those who just dismissed it without giving it a chance. For this game more than for any other, they really missed out.
Even just hearing the OST years later still instantly makes me melancholic.

If you're reading the reviews because you're hesitating, don't. Grab the DLC as well, it integrates itself within the game and only adds to the experience. Avoid any and all spoilers even if you're stuck. Just read your ship log or explore more until you figure it out. The risk of ruining your ONLY experience is too great.

This video pretty much sums up my (lack of) thoughts about this game.

Charming, immersive, not too easy, a few plot-holes/inconsistencies/one underwhelming mystery but not enough to ruin the experience. A decently large patch would make this game great, as it stands it's already good. I just finished it and it's having the same effect as finishing a good book.
On normal difficulty it took me exactly the number of days I was given to finish all my quests playing blind, and I had to neglect some places/characters. Though to be fair I immediately got tricked into losing myself in the most dangerous area of the map at the start. I'd say you're good for 2 or 3 playthroughs in order to see everything/get the endings you want/get every achievement.

Edit: The game has been patched since my review, but I have yet to replay it (waiting to forget as much as possible).

The most unique, amazing experience gaming has to offer (And I've played a lot of games); best played totally blind.
Took me 4 tries over the span of several years to get into it, but when I finally stuck with it oh boy, immediately shot up into my top 3 best games of all time.
The base game at least, this review doesn't account for the DLC which I only now bought. Not yet at least.

♥♥♥♥ chimney canopy tho.

Forced 45gb "next gen" update broke every modded save and sneaked in a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ launcher which further breaks more things (and is included as a forced update in the 1.32 branch, defeating its purpose as it still broke everything on top of overwriting my custom configs).
All this to make the game run worse and slap in some references to the terrible netflix show while breaking a ton of mods, a lot of which won't get updated because the modder moved on from the game long ago.
I'm not starting over in an inferior version of the game than the one I used to play on. Not for long time at least, assuming the mods I used get updated, I feel like redoing all my custom changes to the controls I made, and I feel like dealing with all the manual solving of conflicts and unexpected interactions this game's modding is plagued with.

Should have been an optional free DLC.

Amazing atmosphere like all the games from this studio so far, though the game could still use a bit more polish (like all the games from this studio so far). They did fix a lot of very annoying things instead of simply abandoning the game as many do (Amplitude post-SEGA comes to mind...), like some achievements simply being unobtainable and various bugs; and the scenarios offered a decent challenge on Survivor (Fall of Winterhome on Survivor was more tedious than difficult, tho). The UI is particularly good, one of the best I've seen functionally on top of being pretty.
I recommend this without any hesitation. Really looking forward to what's next.

Tried it during the free week end.
The game is just too tedious. And I say this as someone who isn't a stranger to jank, grindy or difficult games. Having to look for and scrap depleted mines one by one manually is not fun and doesn't make the game more difficult, just more annoying, especially considering you're doing it on a planetary scale. Then you have to find new veins and crawl their way only for the mine to get flooded, in which case you have to again tediously click every building one by one so you can click the button that destroys it. Having to manually upgrade roads point to point or one by one is annoying too. Storage? Same thing. You have to tediously set the maximum amount for each resource, unless I missed something. Hyperloops? Yep, you have to tediously link them all one by one after they're built.

The game isn't bad, though very shallow and laughably easy (which aren't good things but it's still fairly enjoyable as a kind of idle game/VN), but it desperately needs some polish and QoL. I'll be reading future patch notes. If it gets it along with some more content that appears to be on the way, I'll buy and revisit it.
Until then, no thanks. Especially at that price. It feels like an early access game that just came out. The only things that feel rather polished are the voice acting and visuals.

I bought this to play on my steam deck totally randomly because I didn't have enough games for it and it was shilled somewhere at some point, probably by the dev himself. I don't like JRPG style games or platforming in general so I wasn't expecting much.
I got hit right in the balls by adventure. Dragged kicking and screaming back to the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ adventure every time I stopped playing. At some point I stopped playing it only on my deck and just started playing it on my desktop PC too, all day.
Playing this felt like I was held hostage by the dev, strapped to a chair and forced to keep going. I can't believe one guy did this with just free assets. It just kept going for so long, much like Hollow Knight did. All I wanted was to play other games, but no, it refused to end. I ended up going for 100% achievements because why not, the game is good at hinting at what you should be doing next to achieve that and I got every achievement except the 500 chests one just by following the clues.

I spent the entire game trying to think of cons to add to my future review, and I thought I had the perfect one when I entered an endgame area with ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ platforming that ended in a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ boss. TURNS OUT, I went there too early and did it without the mount I was supposed to have which made the platforming way more ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ than it was supposed to be (still easier than any actual modern platformer mind you), and I was way undergeared for the boss. Still found a way to beat it. Optional post-game area by the way.
Then the quintar races happened and I really wanted to make it a con, but only the second race track was rage inducing. There's five tracks, and you only ever need to beat four at the most, so it's not even mandatory. The other four are frankly easy. AND the dev lets you cheat your way out of it if you really can't do it apparently. I didn't do that of course, I like being able to look at myself in a mirror.

So yeah, there's only pros in my list. The game has good enemy variety, good class variety (especially with the hybrid system, tons of possible combinations), all the classes at the very least fill a niche (though some are more powerful than other, thinking of one in particular but it's also a late-game pain to make it powerful so fair enough), the graphics are surprisingly charming, there's a lot of secrets/hidden areas to discover and they're not ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hidden so you will discover them if you're curious enough, there's good equipment variety, the platforming is good (with a controller) and the map is well crafted to complement it (there's ways to get into areas early if you're good at platforming, or you can come back later when it's easier if you're not), there's a lot more content than you expect, the game isn't a pain in the ass to 100% even without guides as long as you like exploring and have a somewhat decent memory, status effects are actually useful even against bosses (can't stress how much of a pro that is), the entire map is a big seamless area and the only thing stopping you from going somewhere is how good you are at figuring out how to go there, threat allows you to know who is going to attack who, the game tells you outright what enemies are going to do during their turn, it's fully tactical not rng.

The only thing I didn't like is the lack of an achievement for hard difficulty, but whatever. The game more than makes up for it. I guess there's also the fact tanking becomes mostly pointless at some point, your damage dealers generate way too much threat for a tank archetype to keep up in very late game thanks to their big boy damage numbers so the boss will just go for them and ignore the tank, but that's a nitpick and it might get changed in a future update.

I've seen a lot of people complaining about the difficulty and I can't understand it. To me it felt perfect aside from that one boss on top of that one area that I was clearly undergeared for, finally a game with decent challenge without it being artificial (and I still rolled all over post-game bosses with very few subclass changes in my late game team, mostly carried by two of my characters). Any nerf to the difficulty of the game would make it less good, imo. You can already lower the difficulty significantly at any time so I truly don't get it.

All in all a very nice surprise and I wholeheartedly recommend it. Good job Andrew, you sure do love your adventures.

Since they switched to UE5 the game becomes unplayable every patch for a while, and performance degrades more and more. Latest patch as of writing this broke most of the killer roster and introduced stuttering and more lags. What did the patch add you ask? One new survivor and her 3 perks.

QoL is only ever added for survivors (and they are favored overall), killers can stay bugged/barely playable for months or even years while BHVR focuses on creating some new mechanic that will pander to survivors (recently an abandon system that lets survivors ragequit for free (they consider that a draw btw) in every scenario where they're likely to die, even if it just saves them five seconds; killers got the right to choose to lose if survivors hold them hostage for 10 entire minutes in a specific way and still have to suffer through the entire match in every other scenario including when survivors have clearly won and the game itself knows it). Killers are obviously meant to be the harmless plaything of survivors playing together for as long as those survivors want to then vent their frustration on solo queue survivors (whom can now ragequit for free in most scenarios on top of being able to suicide anyway), and everyone somehow wonders why toxicity is rampant and survivors who play in groups are so entitled.

How do you avoid that you ask? You play one of the two good killers. One of them has a power that's straight up cheating, bypassing all game mechanics, and the other is a superior version of the killer who just came out and already got nerfed multiple times for being too OP. And you play every match like your life depends on you winning. How fun. Don't want to do that? Enjoy almost every match being a stomp watching solo queue survivors suicide or being bullied by a group who's very happy to be facing a trash tier killer on the stupidly survivor favored map they chose.

Wanna play survivor instead? Hope you have 3 friends, because survivors are allowed to simply kill themselves whenever they feel like, with no punishment whatsoever, thus ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ over their team. And they do it CONSTANTLY.

I still play (when the game is playable, so not as I type this) but I don't recommend the game to anyone new. Because to all that you have to add the early grind and the terrible tutorial that doesn't teach you anything.

BHVR tricked us with a "health update" implying they'd focus on bugs and QoL. All they did was introduce more bugs, remove tome challenges from the game, and give legal ragequits to survivors. And they're announcing the FNAF collab while the game is in this state. Believing they're after anything but quick profits would be foolish at this point. Future will tell if they get their ♥♥♥♥ together but it's pretty obvious the horendous legacy code, running on a notoriously horrible engine, coupled with their need to make more and more profit by releasing new content very quickly is driving them into a wall.

One can only aspire to be as much of an absolute chad as Jorji is.