Nedávné recenze uživatele The Abysswalker

I would love to put a mixed rate instead of a negative review. The game is quite short. I did in 45 minutes (I left the game running on the menu for over an hour before starting), but most of this time, I walked from point A to point B at the speed of an early PS1 game, e.g., Parasite Eve. That's all the loop of gameplay here: walk, take a key, put a key in something, take another key, find another door to put the new key, and it goes like this until the end. The atmosphere was nice for the first 5 minutes, but after that, the monster appeared everywhere, lowering the game's tension. Regarding the ending, It was so senseless that I thought for a second that this was an early access game and the end was not finished yet. It's a cheap game, so I think it's fine. It's not terrible, but it's far from being decent.

This marks the day that no one will talk about any other game released this year

Story-driven gamers assemble! This is my best experience with narrative-driven games in a long while. The last time I was so immersed in a game was with Prey (2017). It took me almost 30 hours to complete the game while talking with every character and seeing all the content offered in a single playthrough. This game is not shy about showing its aspirations and benefits a lot from doing it this way.

The constant existential dread as in Nier: Automata. The solitude and the difficulties in building bridges between people are similar to The End of Evangelion. The fear of the unknown and the search for a way to build a bridge between past and future, as in The Arrival by Denis Villeneuve. How do you deal with a tragedy? How can you stop past mistakes to impair the happiness of your future? How do you know that someone is beyond forgiveness? These were just some of the questions that I was asking myself while playing the final sequence of this game. There are some other themes that I'm not capable of talking about, e.g., the Asian diaspora and Hong Kong independence, but that play a significant part in the whole story (We are playing with the descendants of immigrants, after all).

One other major aspect of this game is the direction. You can feel how diverse the background of the team responsible for this game is. The last time I experienced something with a direction as bold and unique as this game was when I played Nier: Automata and Undertale in 2017 and 2019, respectively.

Ultimately, I went fully blind on this game just because I found the name funny (and someone on Reddit commented that this game was like Nier meets Evangelion), and it ended being one of my favorite games of all time. I hope the TGA this year does justice to the artistic vision that this game represents. It's a breath of fresh air in the game industry, and I only hope more games like this will be made in the future.

Short but good

Overall, we have a gem in the making. If the developers are able to properly finish this game, it will be probably the greatest medieval city builder out there. However, there are some problems with the current game (as expected since it's early access).

1—The diplomacy system is still non-existent. It can be fun to play the game without a proper AI opponent, but it gets boring really fast. I hope the update with the AI opponents is released soon.
2 - I believe we need some QoL updates. During the game, I was missing an easier key to speed up and slow down the game. Usually, in grand strategy games, you just press "+" and "-" to do these things, so it would be nice to control the time progression like this in this game.
3—Colonizing a new city feels just like a new game, and I don't think that's how it should work. We should be able to freely transfer resources (I know there is a pack station, but it is not enough since it requires fair trade between the cities). Also, we should be able to transfer families between cities, maybe at the cost of approval.
4 - Is trading really balanced? I found it strange that almost everything has the same pricing. Also, is simply impossible to import anything in quantity because every import price is at least 3x the export price.
5 - It would be nice to have a buildings tab to know the family distribution inside the town. There are times I completely forget that I put 5 families inside a useless building (due to the winter or something) and a buildings tab would help a lot.
6 - We NEED an option to expel families or at least to refuse new arrivals. When I know I can't have more families, I have to maintain my approval <50% with taxes, which is not optimal.
7—We should have more ways to gain influence. One possibility is to become a major trading city.
8 - We should have the option to relocate families between houses.
9 - A construction planning function is welcomed. I'll cite for this one of my favorite games: Rimworld. In Rimworld, you are able to construct a layout of your base at the very beginning despite not having the resources to build it. I think a similar approach would be welcomed here. I like to have everything planned from the start, but here, this is not possible. The only planning that we currently have is the castle planner which I think should be expanded to the whole town,

In the end, we have the framework for something great. I didn't have any bugs or performance issues (my GPU is not even high-end, it's just an AMD RX6600). I'll leave the thumbs up as a sign of good faith despite the game being really incomplete (again, this is the objective of the early access, so for now, it's fine).

There are better GBA games out there

Update: Perhaps I judge this game too harshly. I bought it on the Switch, and it's amazing so far. I'm not sure why it didn't click when I played it on PC, but it's definitely a very good game that does cosmic horror right.

An excellent example of branching storytelling

It's fun

I'm halfway through its campaign. I have been blown away by how good the story in this game is. A rare atmospheric SCP/Stalker-based sci-fi game. Usually, rogue-lite/like games are not strong in the story department, but this one seems ike it had its story planned before the conception of its gameplay. I'll probably be updating the review after finishing the main story.

Great game with subpar ending.