Recent reviews by Lowpass

boring

Honestly, there's a lot to like about this game. But it's _so frustrating_ to actually play.

First of all, there's a lot of bugs, especially later in the game. The game crashes not infrequently, and when it does, for some reason it also erases all of my settings (gameplay, graphics, etc). Saving is pretty slow, so there's no autosave. So unless you are saving manually with some regularity, that means each crash is just that much worse.

Enemies will start fights at the slightest transgression. Sometimes it's hard to tell what you even did to anger them. And once you're in a fight, you can't get out very easily--you have to be some distance away to flee, and if you're trying to get distance they'll be chasing after you on their turns. And in some areas of the game, you simply can't flee.

Multiplayer mechanics are interesting, but require diligence if you want to really experience the story. Can't count the number of times one of us had to say "Hey, you should probably join this dialog". Moreover, the game is fairly character-centric; you're probably playing because you're interested in the stories of the characters, but when playing multiplayer your ability to actually interact with them is hampered. You can't talk with a character another player is controlling at all.

A recent example of some of the above.

I loaded up a save, my partner joined the game and everyone was T-posing. They had to restart the game and rejoin. Then I went and completed a quest objective while they robbed a bank. They managed to get away with it, but my game crashed. I restarted the game, reloaded the same save, and completed the quest objective again. They tried to rob the bank again, but this time got caught. They were stuck in combat with over a dozen guards, slowly taking their turns. I suggested, "hey, just get killed, and I can resurrect you." They did, but then one of the characters passed all their saving throws, so they were just hanging out, still downed, but no longer dying. And none of the enemies were actually attacking them. I also didn't really want to murder all the guards, so we again reloaded the save. Completed the same quest objective a third time, begging my partner not to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ rob the place again so we could hopefully move on.

Things like this happened several times throughout our game (which, as of writing, we still haven't finished yet). Crashes, accidental combat, and other such things have led to one of the most frustrating gameplay experiences I've had.

Again. There's a lot of good here. If there weren't, I'd have stopped playing long ago. But I can't really recommend it, unfortunately.

hours of book

A lot of the puzzles in this are obtuse and/or require a lot of annoying back-and-forth travel.

It was somewhat amusing, in that Monkey Island way, for a while, so it (in my opinion) balanced out to a "meh" game. But then that ending. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ the ending is awful.

buggy and not _that_ interesting

For all the hype around this game I really expected more from the story. I guess lots of people reviewing this just haven't read a lot of hard sci-fi. There isn't really anything original here.

- Plot is uninteresting and unrealistic. Basically, it doesn't go much past "androids are people too!"
- People behave in a completely unbelievable way around them. People anthropomorphize Roombas, for ♥♥♥♥'s sake; they (for the most part) aren't going to be this abusive to androids that are virtually indistinguishable from humans.
- Most of the human characters are the most rote stereotypes imaginable.
- One of the three playable characters has no real impact on the other two. She could be cut from the game entirely and nothing of value would be lost. There's a twist in her story that is completely pointless.
- The main interesting part is that your choices have consequences. You can even see the flowchart of the story (with paths you haven't taken visible, but the actual text concealed). But replaying the game is an absolute slog. You can't skip cutscenes, and there are some sections of the game with very little story branching that you have to suffer through. Especially early on.

Great game; challenges your creativity.

I played the original version; it's quite good.