Recent reviews by Lightning Grimm

Perfect, relaxing bite-sized adventure game.

A great indie blast! This game was really enjoyable to play through. It can be a bit of a grind getting the last couple of achievements done, but overall It was a lot of fun!

I really wanted to enjoy Graveyard Keeper, but the game seemed to have other intentions. Most of my time I felt like I was fighting the mechanics of the game instead of working to progress within the game, which is y'know, kind of the idea. I can't pin it down to one particular thing, it's more of a bunch of small things that all add up to a overall frustrating experience. If you haven't played Stardew, I recommend starting with that. You'll quickly see in the differences between these two. The design of this one doesn't really care about making the experience better for the player. Now to be fair, it's not the like the developers haven't tried to plug these holes in the design, but everything they provided feels like a workaround instead of a fix.

For example, the stone garden. A common complaint you'll see in the reviews here is that you'll spend a lot of time waiting for NPCs to become available on certain days. To fix this, instead of making NPCs more easy to access, they added a stone garden where you can spend 1 minute of your time to pass one day. You still end up waiting and 'wasting' time to reach the NPCs, so the game punishes you because it made NPCs inconvenient to reach and they refuse to walk back on that. Just make the garden pop up a menu with day and time of day (e.g. morning, midday, evening) and save us all the trouble of sitting and watching a dial for minutes at a time. Maybe this was done to prevent exploiting farming certain resources early, but then maybe they shouldn't lock key resources around waiting or they should just make the NPCs easier to reach and fix this whole problem.

Really though, there isn't much time to exploit the stone garden. If you're playing the game the "right" way, you should always be doing something. Problem is, a lot of that something is just feels like grinding away because you'll have 6 things going on at once that you have to balance to make progress in the game. It almost gave me vibes of busywork. You don't really feel the progress because it's so spread out and in turn the grind to progress feels so slow. If you want to actually see progress, you better be ready to do what the game wants you to do. If you don't you'll be punished and waste your time, especially in the early game. And there's no way to really tell what the right thing to do is. You'll just feel like you are spinning your wheels in place until you happen upon the thing you were supposed to do.


Overall, there's a lot neat ideas here, but they all just feel inferior in implementation, and I can't say that this game does any one thing particularly well. NPCs are forgettable, the gameplay loop is mind numbing and in the worst case frustrating and it's just feels overall like they should have condensed the gameplay down instead of throwing so much at the player and forcing them to take part in all of it at once in order to progress the game. Maybe this loop issue was fixed in the DLCs, but I'll never know because I couldn't put up with the base game.

Let me start by saying this game isn't for everybody. I feel like it falls more in the realm of Elite Dangerous or Euro/American Truck Simulator, but with a story that goes far above and beyond anything I've had to deal with. I like death stranding, but at the same time I despise moments of this game. Its core gameplay isn't the problem I have with this game. That part (like Elite Dangerous or Euro/American Truck) is focused on exploration and navigation, but with added elements to raise the stakes to keep you on your toes. This system is incredible and contains great progression mechanics along with plenty of exciting moments. That and the sense of community you get from the online experience is amazing. I absolutely loved that addition, it really helped from keeping you feeling totally hopeless and avoiding pure dread.

That being said, there were still plenty of moments of dread, the good kind. I'm talking the dread that you face when playing a game like Dark Souls. You know what has to happen next, and you've got to push through it (Blight Town anybody)? These parts where the tension was the highest were incredibly memorable, and thanks to the progression in the game, each area felt less challenging the farther along you pushed. It really made the game stand out here.

Now I've got to say the bad stuff. The story...or more particularly the delivery. The story is filled with cheesy moments and with Kojima going full Kojima and just letting his ideas run rampant, but what really killed it for me was the very final stretch of the game, like the last bit before the credits. It may have killed me a bit inside when I thought I had finished the game late one night and then I get thrown into a 2 hour cutscene. I just pushed through your 40 hour game and I'm ready to move on. It's late, I want to go to sleep and you gotta do this to me. Prepare accordingly once you get toward the end of the game and you should hopefully have a better experience than me.

Overall, don't buy if your looking for an action-first experience. Those games are great, but this one fails at that. It succeeds in a different way. If you decide this game might be a good fit for you, you may end up with an enjoyable and memorable experience. Keep on keeping on!

Do I recommend this game? Well yes, but actually no.

Perhaps the game will improve in the future. As it stands, it's a fairly hollow experience outside of main story and the side missions. Night city is a beautiful backdrop to the gameplay. It is by far one of the most well-built open worlds in a game. However, if you look past the veil you'll find a very shallow open world experience that seems to only serve as a hub for missions and quick gigs. You will not get the sandbox experience with this game, it simply doesn't have those features. If you're looking for something where all you do is go from point A to B and occasionally stop to handle a quick firefight or experience one of the many amazing story moments, this game will be a good fit.

I will say, I wish they tuned the driving experience for PC to be a bit better. Most cars handle horribly and feel like they have no traction. That is a shame since it felt like 80% of my playtime was in a car.

Expect a 20 hour experience for the main story, clearing the map of all missions too approximately 70 hours going at a pretty quick pace ( a lot of time getting in and out of cars).

If you're thinking about buying, wait for the dust to settle first. Many of these issues may be resolved in the future.

A small, exciting metroidvania. The game never got very hard. It's a top notch, bite-sized experience that's sure to entertain for the 3-4 hours it takes to complete.

Beautiful little game. Short but incredibly detailed and immersive.

Great puzzle game; however, it's pretty short.

This game truly deserves a sequel.