Recent reviews by Girth Certificate

I want to start by saying I had already played this game in the past, before there were even secondary bosses or a Cove area, and I did so for very, very long. it was an intensely fun and rewarding experience, and it absolutely made me think it would be money well spent to acquire it for myself when it was finished. Hell, I'd have paid twice its price tag, to get a completed game which was that enjoyable.

I received it as a gift from a friend recently and was positively overjoyed, I could not wait to come back and see all that was added in this past half year. I created a new save file, started playing... and despaired. But I decided to keep playing, and to not stop playing until I had seen all the changes and could properly grasp what the game presently had to offer.

So it is now, after over 30 hours of gameplay time, that I want to write this review and say that I do NOT, in any way or form, recommend this game as it currently is. It is no longer the game I played back then. It has changed into something that is barely recognizable; it -is- technically the same game, but it most definitely does not feel the same. And it comes nowhere near what it once was in terms of enjoyment.

I've read many bits and pieces of (sometimes conflicting) information as to why this happened, namely:

-A highly-vocal group of "fans" steering this game into its sad current state
-Developers which have a very particular vision for this game, and scour strategy guides and topics for things to nerf in order to take away any and all slight advantages a player could afford

So before I get into any details, I want to make this clear: I am not familiar to any such forum drama, I do not know who holds the blame, and I have no idea whatsoever as to why the game changed into what it is today. The one thing I know for certain is: it did change. Badly.

This game is now unquestionably an anti-fun game. By "anti-fun" I don't mean overly hard, I don't mean overly grindy, I don't mean overly complex. I mean it is a game that seems carefully tailored to remove all sense of fun from playing it. Practically all enjoyment is gone, all progression feels meaningless for the most part, all achievements help you in basically no way whatsoever.

Chief among the worst offenders are two mechanics: corpses and heart attacks. And yes, I know you can turn corpses off, but then we are not playing the game "the way it's meant to be played", we are not experiencing all it has to offer. And so, to elaborate:

Heart attacks - having a hero reach the 100 stress threshold was already a terrible thing to happen before, in a GOOD way. It was a challenge to be overcome, it was an entertaining encumbrance. That lone hero would bring the entire party down the path of stress soon enough, and you'd usually end up with a group of raving lunatics cutting themselves, refusing heals, shuffling about, acting on their own... and a lone hero who passed the Virtue check going strong and carrying the expedition. It was a predicament, it was not a situation you wanted to be in at all, but it was FUN.

This is not the case anymore. Stress accumulation is now roughly 2-3x higher than it once was, everything stresses out our heroes greatly and continuously. And it doesn't stop at 100 with a potentially compromising situation which would force you to seriously consider withdrawal, while still having a chance to go forth in case other conditions were favorable. No, now it NEVER stops, and it is guaranteed to erase hours of game time and tens of thousands of gold that you spent treating, training, and equipping the heroes that WILL inevitably die from it at some point. You used to be able to bring a mildly-stressed hero on an expedition; doing so now is signing a death sentence for that hero and possibly the others as well, and a virtual guarantee that the expedition will fail

I will not even touch with a 10-foot pole how unrealistic it is for everyone to be getting heart attacks left and right, and will simply leave it at: This is not fun. This is not acceptable, even. It is not enjoyable to have to constantly be worried because stress, something you can't effectively heal from, is an ever-present threat of almost instant death, which, thanks to this game's unforgiving RNG and mechanics, is VERY usually the same as instant death. Heart attacks could maybe, -maybe- be acceptable if they happened at 300 stress. And this is still a VERY big maybe. But as it is, it is undeniably an anti-fun mechanic that serves only to aggravate players for things we are unable to control.

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Corpses - This is by far the worst offender of the two, and that's without even touching how stupidly unrealistic it is for a lone, butchered body to be effectively keeping an enemy out of our reach. This mechanic kills the utility of certain classes, artificially inflates the usefulness of certain skills which, for the most part, are otherwise generally useless, and perhaps most importantly it can cause catastrophic situations for essentially no logical reason. Enemies are -never- inconvenienced by corpses unless we use a move skill on them, and even then, most enemies will quickly return to their preferred position since every other skill of theirs causes them to move in their preferred direction. It is simply and legitimately a mechanic meant to drain the enjoyment and sense of accomplishment from the game, causing us to need more turns to take out a priority target that's out of reach, thus taking more damage and stress for, again, -no reason whatsoever-.

But I want you to fully appreciate the actual stupidity of this mechanic. Corpses appear when the enemy is killed with regular damage that isn't a critical hit, which is like 90% of all killing blows, give or take. If the enemy is killed by a critical hit, bleed damage, or blight damage, there won't be a corpse. BUT:

-If the enemy is bleeding/blighted, and is killed with a regular attack, there will still be a corpse!... that is bleeding/blighted. For some eldritch reason, if the enemy doesn't have those last 2 HP taken by bleed or blight damage, it suddenly turns into a corpse that CAN take a load more bleed and blight damage. Absolutely fantastic.

-If the enemy is killed by a critical hit that does 2 damage, there won't be a corpse. If the enemy is killed by a regular attack that does 30 damage, there will be a full HP corpse. Being labelled a critical hit apparently means more than what makes critical hits important, which is their damage.

Both of the above points happen for a very simple reason: artificial difficulty. Forcing you to not attack an enemy and kill him instantly this turn, and instead have him bleed out over 2 turns so that you won't be wasting a turn dealing with its corpse. Taking the ability to avoid corpses away from your hands and into the RNG's by making it so the blow has to be a critical hit, and not just a powerful hit. Because attacking bleeding/blighted enemies, or hitting near-death enemies with powerful skills, so that they wouldn't leave corpses behind? Those would be things the player could control, and we wouldn't want that, now would we?

In order to make corpses borderline bearable, at -least- the following changes would be needed:

-Any enemy that dies while bleeding/blighted would leave no corpse
-Any damage beyond what is needed to kill the enemy would be subtracted from the corpse's HP. For example, if you deal a 5 damage blow to an enemy with 2 HP, the corpse would lose 3 HP right as it spawned

And again, this is so corpses would be more bearable. It is no substitute for the fact that, much like heart attacks, they shouldn't exist at -all-.

This is a game I loved and I'm actually really sad that this is the state it is currently in. But I cannot, at all, recommend this game. Regardless, I will update this review once the game is completed

UPDATE: Game is completed, nothing really changed.