Recente recensies door Kaimatten

Slapping things with leaves never felt better

This game made me realize how lamp shaped I am. Highly recommend.

This is a smaller game. There are a few things "missing" out of a comfortable game experience like a skip button or nice feeling menus. You will likely feel disappointed in a lack of variety/choices, as the game will feel like it has a specific path. This is NOT some huge open ended epic. It's an interesting cyberpunk tale.
It's a great experience for point + click lovers/visual novel lovers/general narrative game lovers. I highly recommend this.

Interesting game and concept. Good familiar engine to play around in. Overall loses fun after the first few hours and becomes tedious soon afterward. Never managed to finish.

I wanted to love this. I like games where you repeat things and I don't mind FPS experiences, but there's a lot that bugged me about this game that I think can be boiled down to two things:
-For a game that repeats a lot, the gameplay doesn't really change a lot. After you see each location once, it's a bore to have to revisit, and the game expects you to revisit a LOT.
-For a game really reliant on narrative, the narrative feels out of reach, uninteresting, with no feel of actual consequence or direction.

Like, there may be 2-3 ways to deal with any issue, but those are your 2-3 ways of dealing with all issues. Worse yet, there's only 1 "correct" way to do things, which means it doesn't matter that you have found another interesting way to solve something - it's still "wrong".
There are a dozen weapons or something like that, but half work the same as others, and so most gunfights feel pretty same-y. The powers are cool, but lose their punch due to being reused from older Arkane games, or just not mattering for most scenarios.
Most quests deal with an interesting time mechanic to it, but it comes off tedious, especially as it takes way too long to get back and utilize the information of a puzzle. It feels like one of those games you need to have a guide for, or you need to take notes. I love taking notes, but not in an action game?
A big thing I could also say is: the gameplay of putting missable spawning text and audio within an action exploration game it not favorable to a unique gameplay experience. This is more of a pet peeve I think that got too popular from Shock games. Sometimes it is not bad, but it really feels out of place here.

Best time I ever had trying to make a phone call

At first glance it may feel that the game is a rehash of an older NES experience, but the experience is far beyond that. The controls are tight and refined, and the design is well crafted around these controls. The levels feel fresh and interesting, and super repayable due to the different character mixes and paths. Just satisfying all around.

As a narrative or mystery game: this game doesn't seem to be good.
As a point & click interactive game: this game might be pretty good.

This may be a game for some, but really not my sort of thing. I play a lot of visual novels and read a lot of books, and in the end I'd prefer those over this type of game that is like... ALMOST a visual novel, but falls short on what makes narrative games feel interesting.
There's only so much media I can consume starring "grizzled self centered man dealing with exes, ogling women, is also a drunk, and maybe a detective who is seemingly bad/good at his job" combined with other cliché "amnesia and sort of multiple personas."
All thoughts of the character being personalized to your tastes is more of a -chance- than actual case (you CAN be smarter, but it's still random. You CAN be smoother, but it's still random). So in the end, what defines WHO you are is still just completely random, and you HAVE to be this boring trope-ridden amnesiac.
I couldn't make it too far - I quit after "dying" my first time. I couldn't even tell you HOW or WHY I died because it was so inexplicable and the last few minutes of conversation had me saying "What even is going on?"
It might get better, though I think for my tastes I know I'd just get more disappointed, especially with some of the narrative choices I know they make later (after deciding I wouldn't play, some people spoiled me on later events that made me glad I stopped when I did).

All that aside: The art is quite good! I can also see why and how they made choices they wanted to, even if I don't like them. I can't recommend this for me or many others I know who like narrative heavy games, but I am still glad we are getting these higher quality/budget story-heavy games and hope we get more.

This isn't to say Eastward is awful, but it definitely is not a game for my style of game (despite my yearn for more bizarre or creative games), and not a game I can suggest to others.
It could be that I've played too many fun narrative focused/Earthbound-esque games, but I found most of the dialogue here tedious, the machismo culture tiring, and the pacing awful. While this game definitely has the budget to be huger than most similar games, it fails to capture me like the majority of other RPG's do in both story and gameplay. Additionally, while the art itself feels creative, the writing fails to be creative and feels so copy-paste of not only every sympathetic manly gamer trope, but also of itself for how much the same few conversations happen over and over (like an anime padding run time).
Eastward will likely be studied by artists for a long time for how beautiful it is, and I think the animation is amazing and the sound design is solid.
The parts where you actually fight feel good to me, even if simplistic, however in over two hours of playing, I've only had a few minutes of actual gameplay due to the length of all the cutscenes. Funnily enough, there is a live stream of Eastward playing in the corner while I write this review. I glance over every few seconds to see what is happening and I kid you not: it's been a cutscene the whole time. Just dialogue with no control and slowly panning cameras (and this is definitely of a part later in the game I haven't seen yet, so I know it's not just because the game has a weirdly long beginning).
Most of the gameplay is just going through rather repetitive dialogue, then being forced to walk to an area often already visited and see another cutscene that half regurgitates what was already said, then return to the first section. There is minimal exploration to find useful/interesting stuff to pace it out, and the actual combat/puzzle areas where I thought I'd be playing the game for more than a couple minutes lasted... A couple minutes. Then it was right back to long, repetitive talking.
On a more personal level, I also find it hard to like any game that uses manly women as a joke, feminine men as a joke, and fat people as a joke - of which this game has much of. The general treatment of women is uncomfortable to say the least, where the majority exist solely to talk about men, be a one-note mom with no other purpose (unlike the tons of different men that exist), or as pointless eye candy, sometimes put in uncomfortable situations for the fantasy of the straight men.
So really, while I cannot say the game is bad or that people won't like it (I'm sure people will DESERVEDLY find this game quite good), I cannot personally suggest this game for anyone except artists who want to study some incredible animation.