Recent reviews by mastyza

[written after relase of 1st part of canto 5]

Let me start by saying that I perceive this mostly as a story game, do not expect the gameplay to be anything revolutionary. Still, the amount of effects and mechanics allow for quite complex encounters while keeping the core gameplay very simple. It is hard for me, as a day 1 player, to judge the difficulty as with everything I collected in my time playing, I can bruteforce basically everything, but the game still offers a challenge in form of Reflacion Railways (I have to actually read what the enemies do there, it is terrifying).

To get to the story, it's just great. I'm a fan of other PM games and the story is their strong suit for sure, no excepcion here. The story they are telling here (not just limbus, all of their games) is my favorite story... in ALL of media. And yea I'm biased, you know why? Because they never dissapointed! To put is simply and without spoilers, you become a manager to a group of 12 very quirky and no like other girls/boys characters and collect some tree branches, maybe face some deep rooted trauma or something idk. All the characters are likeable (even though I disliked some at the start, all of them grew on me), they are all like my precious childern, except Faust since she is my precious wife.

As a gatcha game, this is probably the least predatory one I've played. You can get everything gameplay related with just a lots of grind, no need to pay. I would still reccomend getting the season pass as it has insane value if you plan to actively play. I got all of the identities/ego and while yea, I bought more than just the season pass, I would very much be able to compensate for what I bough by playing more. Obviously it will take even longer if you join now as there is a backlog of stuff you'll want to get, but I've seen ineternet people complete the main story content with the base identities, so it's not like you will need to get everything like I did.

There is also music in the game and yea, PM excels with that, the music is absolutely amazing. Only way to improve the music in the game would be if the hired my favorite band to do few songs... OH WAIT, THEY DID THAT ACTUALLY. There are several songs by Mili and they are incredible. Same with voice acting, I do not understand a word in Korean but I love listening to all of the characters.

So yea, try it it's free. Also while sequel to their previous games, I think you will be able te enjoy it even without playing them and who knows, maybe it will get you to play the other games in the future.

I played this game after I finished Library of Ruina. I think this is important to mention since after finishing LoR as one of my favourite games, I was coming into this one hella biased and you'll get bit of that in this review. I should also mention that in the time of writing this review, I did not finish this game yet, however after 90 hours I feel qualified to share my thoughts.

You play as a power plant manager. You probably heard about solar powerplants, hydroelectric power plants, nuclear power plants... Well, here you make power from monsters called abnormalities. You also get few very friendly and not weird at all AIs to help you with your task.
It's hard to not compare the story to LoR so I'll compae it. I think I have issue here because I played LoR 1st. I find it very sad that you only get a very little about anything that is happening outside the facility. I beleive this is only because I already knew how amazing the outside word is and maybe it wouldn't even cross my mind without that knowledge. While youi dont get much about the world, you get to know all the AIs working in lob corp quite well. All of them are very, VERY lovable (especially my boy Netzach, I love him so much). I was already familiar all of them before playing this game, however seeing ther story here brought them much more depth.

The gameplay is simple yet complacated. Simple becuase all you do is pick an employee and assign them work. The complicated part comes from managing a large number of abnormalities at the tame time. It's easy to remember that you can't send employee to work with a specific abnormality since they don't have effectiove armor againts it's attacks, however you might just overlook it if at the same time you must,... oh I don't know, pick up tickets every 2 minutes, be carefull to not send this guy to work since he is sparkling a bit, not hold that item for over 30 seconds, find and shoot different abnormality since the work you assigned few minutes ago did not end up well, checking how many of the random-ass NPCs died so you can prepare for a meatball to murder your entire department and do all that while LISTENING TO THAT ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ FETUS CRY... ugh, sorry got carried away a bit there. Fortunetly the game does not throw all that at you at the same time, your day norrmally starts with you choosing a new abnormality. This means the game gives you day to learn the quirks of the new abnormality so you are used to it the next day where you are learning about the new abnormality for that day. What I can complain about a bit is the tool days. The days where you find tool abnormality are basically just like the day before except you'll send one person to use do tool, most likely die, reset the day and do the same thing, just without dying. After that, I ended up not using 90% of the tools after getting the max research on them. but there is a thing that is more boring that tool days, those are the days where you... don't get anything. You play the last day again without even the minimum of researching the tool you got. Hoever you can normally do this quite fast and get back to researching new fun abnormalities.
Once in a while the game will throw some challenges called core supression at you and man... those are dufficult. I'm writing this after attempting Binah core supression for a while and well, it was so hard I decided to restart from day one. However, even restarting from day 1 won't fully reset your progress since you keep all the ego (weapons and armor) as well as permanent upgrades and abnormality research. This means that even if you get stuck, you don't have to feel bad if you need to reset to try and get to the same point with better gear (and knowledge).

In the end I don't think I can do anything else but reccomend this game. If you don't enjoy the managing simulatro gameplay you probably won't like it but if you do, this is the peak.

Also the music goes hard.

I found out about this game thanks to Mili making music for it, this kinda led me to buying the game without knowing literary anything about it. When I bought it, I seriously did not even know it is a card game. Some might say it is quite a rushed decision, and that would be correct, however it is a decision I will never regret.

As already mentioned, this as a card game. I think some might loose ineterest right after finding out about that but please bear with me, if you don't like crads, you'll find something else you like here.

I must say, I am someone who did not play Lobotomy Corporation (the prequel to this game) before this so I did not know anything about the characters and the setting of the story. While the story is good from the start, it took me like 10 hours to get HOOKED. That is a long time, longer than some whole games I play. This is and argument people use to make others read One Piece becuase "IT BECOMES SO GOOD AFTER 500 CHAPETERS" and I kinda hate that argument, but it is true. One Piece did get good, and story of Library of Ruina sure did get AMAZING. I think this "problem" would be "fixed" if I did play lob corp before as I would come to this game already with attachement to to world and characters, however as I did not play lob corp before, this game had to make me attached to them from the scratch. When I got into the story, I REALLY got into it. There will be people saying "We don't talk about Love Town" and I won't be talking about it since thats spoilers but man, thats when I realized this game is not playing around.

In simple words, you play as a librarian doing your job, you know... murdering people. You invite citizens of the distopian city the game is set in, with a promise of a book about something they might be interested in. When your guests come, you fight and turn them into more books. This allows for some great world building and also uniqe game progression. Not only you can read books of your guests to learn about how they and other people in the specific part of the city live or think, you can use them to lure in other guests. Some of the people want to retrive books of their close ones, while others want to steal books of there competitors to learn their secrets. When I say the story starts slow, it is because you need to know about the word to actually care, and you don't really know anything at the start (unless you consumed other PM merdia). But when you do more progress, oh boy you suddenly know things. When I revisited some stories after finishing the game, I found them much more interesting even after dissmising them after I saw them for the 1st time. The story telling is simply impeccable. They made me care about every single character to the point I was sad even after winning a fight.

I mentioned uniqe game progression before, let me develop on that a bit. So if you win a fight, you'll get books that you need to invite more guests. You also need these books to get cards. While this works well, probably my biggest complaint comes from it. After you finish a fight and get your books as reward, you will want to burn those books to get cards and become stronger. But after 1 fight you will sometimes not have all the cards you can get from that enemy (book) so you will want to fight the enemy again to have more of the cards. This still makes sense, if you want all the cards you need to put in some grind. The problem comes because you want to keep books to invite new guests, and if you fail, which is something that will happen in the endgame, you lose the books and will need to go to the previous fight and get the book again (I hope I'm, making sense here). The thing is, fights in endgame can take you over an hour. You might need to do fight 3 times to get all the cards and after that still have to repeat it if you fail the next one. There are some tricks to get more cards but that is something I found out I can't really do in hard fights if I actually want to beat them. But well, if you can't go like this you can always get no grind mod or something.

Now let's talk about gameplay a bit, shell we? It starts kinda complicated and to be honest, if the game needed you to fully understand mechanics right form the start, I probably wouldn't get very far. Good thing is, you can simply play, make some mistakes and still progress becuase while complicated, it starts really easy. This allows for very natural learnig curve without being flustrating by forcing you to repeat levels multiple times until you finally do everything how the game wants you to. Until you reach endgame, it always felt like the exect time I undrestood what I'm doing, the game threw in something new. At the start you simply play cards and well... that's what you do the whole time, but if you find the first few fights repetitive (which I kinda did) do not worry, quickly all the fights will gain their own quirk. This way it never feels actually repetitive after you get through the "tutorial", and when you reach endgame, you are prepared for anything that comes at you. OR THAT'S WHAT YOU THING BUT WHAT COMES AT YOU ARE SOME OF THE MOST INSANE BOSSFIGHTS POSSIBLE. While endgame is really difficult, I never got so stuck that I stopped enjoying the game. I myself was streaming the game {LINK REMOVED}(twitch.tv/mastyza, shameless plug) and viewers helping definely saved me some restarts, but it never did feel Impossible or like I needed to be completely perfect to progress. sometimes you just need to take a step back and build a good counter deck for a specific fight.

Now that I mentioned deckbuilding, that's an important part of the game. It starts with a low amount of cards. Deckbuilding at the start for me would go like this "oh, this enemy is week against slash attacks? Let's just put in every card with a slash attack." And that worked perfectly fine... until it didn't. In earlygame you don't really need any light recovery (resource to pay for cards) or page draw, as the battles aren't long enough that you would run out. But there comes point where you definetly need those economy cards and you need to know the balance between strong cards and cards that will let you consistently draw and afford to play those strong cards. This is something you will need to play with to make work for you, but the decks only consist of 9 cards so it won't take you ages. In the end, if you are not confident in your deckbuilding abilities but still want to enjoy the gameplay and story, you can find some decks online.

Let me end this with simply saing, I LOVED this game. I do not think it is a game that everyone would enjoy but man... I LOVED IT AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD.

If you consider buying this game, I hope I helped you make the right decision (which is buying the game).

Hesitation Is Defeat

Very epic game.
Devs are very based chads.
Constant updates are incredibli poggers.

This game is really story-driven without much gameplay but the story is amazing. If you like to just relax and cry while playing games, this is for you.

I like this game. :)

Cute and fun.

good game, like... really good

I started following this series when my age was in single digits and after all these years, there is something that alwys brings me back.

Let's start with my only complaint though. Roguelikes are kinda known to require certain amount of RNG. This especially applies to this one, my 6 y.o. brother could beat some of the most op runs with one hand while some runs couldn't be beaten even with players who have 6 years of pure gametime. That can be really frustrating.

I have much more for the positives though. The story is not forced down your throat and even if you follow the story it will take you quite a while to even start understanding what is actually happening. But it feels incerdibly good to finally know what happend to the character you'll get the know through the simple cutscenes, few dialogues and even item descriptions.

The learning curve feels satisfying, your starting runs will probably end in 1st stage but not long and the enemy patterns will start carving into your brain because with excpection of some of the bosses, it always comes down to few simple attacks. But enemies aren't the only thing you can master. You will know how many coins you can afford to give to a random beggar or how much of your life you can sacrifice to the Devil. You will know what item will make your build as strong as possible and where to find said item. You will see the secret rooms on the map even though you can't... you know... actually see them.

But in the end, the thing that makes me always come back is the vast amount of items, enemies, stages and characters that will never let the game get stale.