Recent reviews by DawnTyrantEo

While it's still quite early in development, Depersonalization is an excellent story-driven game that combines the best features of linear and roguelike narratives, mixed up in a wonderful cocktail of anime-style narratives, visuals, characters and quirkiness working alongside the curious, eldritch and exploratory vibes of the Lovecraft mythos. It delivers an extremely well-balanced injection of melancholy, absurdity, coziness and a deep desire to seek every nook and cranny, directly into your brain-meats. (This leads me to suspect that one of the of the developers may have been taken over by a Yith.)

Rather than a conventional tutorial, Depersonalization gives you an independent adventure that introduces the narrative, and gets you to grips with the mechanics, both in a basic sense and in the meta-mechanic of trying, trying and trying again! From there, you can create quirky and/or tragic investigators-slash-identities to take on a number of multi-branched adventures, and try to find every ending.

Depersonalization is excellent at crafting adventures that entertain and intrigue, but unlike many such adventures, the meta-narrative encourages you to pull through to the end instead of looking up the 'golden ending' as you might have done in other choice-driven narratives. Each run isn't just a chance at success- it lets you hone your investigators, as well as learn more about the mysteries you're uncovering. Seeing a bad ending isn't a failure, it's simultaneously vital clue- and a new encouragement to find whatever cracks in the cosmos you missed so narrowly the last time... And sometimes, you'll think you've found the answer, only for new questions to send you straight back into an old mystery as you read up on the aftermath.

This excellent use of mechanics is what will really help you find the narrative, particularly if you're the sort of perfectionist like me who's usually going to start poring through strategy guides whenever a mystery pops up. But the twisting tentacles of narrative and mechanics are merely two on a multi-tentacular beast. Tightly-knit, interesting setpieces to explore and peruse are combined with often-sombre, often-whimsical musical accompaniments for a setting that's just as intriguing to explore with the eyes and ears as it is to explore with the mind. And the moment-to-moment mechanics are just as fulfilling as the greater mechanics, giving you the experience of being a lowly human poking at the doors of gods, cults and monsters- and yet one who has just a little something more that lets you try, try and try again until your luck or sanity runs out, or until other mysteries begin to call to you.

Of course, it has its flaws- the english translation is very understandable but still quite rough around the edges, a few of the peripheral mechanics might take a few tries before you understand them, it's still quite early in Early Access, and it might get a bit frustrating to play if you miss the central narrative-slash-mechanic and/or spoil the stories- but it's rare to find a game that combines such understanding of both its narrative and gameplay identity into such a cohesive whole. Depersonalization is, at its core, a game that's intriguing, charming, and oh-so-moreish- and one I can't recommend enough!

This is probably a bit overdue, since I've been around since testing, but whatever I got here eventually.

The game has been around for something like four months now, and it's made excellent progress. Since it's been released, we've had acro, velo, elasmo and... maybe rex? I'm not sure if rex was on release. He's in now though, rex is a gud boi. There was an iffy bit where everything kept crashing, but that was more a string of bad luck and difficult-to-fix crashes than a lack of effort, and it's fixed anyway. Development is speedy and content-rich, and though bugs are frequent they tend to be fixed quickly after appearing.

Basic mechanics and design goals encourage fun gameplay. Terrain, strategy and creature balance means anything is a target- in the past there's been issues with giant creatures becoming invincible, but that's being rebalanced in the next patch in agreement with general feedback. However, there is a tendency in marine habitats for groups of mosas to dominate the server, which is yet to be addressed (though the devs are taking it into consideration for future patches). Game balance is skill-based and allows for any dinosaur to be useful and effective, though some creatures do have a few flaws that need to be ironed out.

Most of the community is focused on both the official and community discords, since that's where the devs or popular servers are. The communities are generally wholesome and well-moderated, and it's definitely worth finding one to hang around in while playing BoB.

The game has a lot of content- flyers, aquatics, carnivores, herbivores, storms, droughts, various maps and so on. However, currently the game is lacking in certain types of creature- non-predatory marine animals, small prey and battle-focused herbivores. The latter two are currently planned, and I've heard word of the former also being relatively likely, though not necessarily confirmed.

As the development is fast, promising and listens to feedback, I would recommend buying this game. However, if you'd like a 'full' experience rather than a fun but still-mostly-WIP experience, I would probably mark the arrival of in-game Saichania as a good goal post of when that will arrive. As long as you don't mind risking a horrible death for your dinosaur in the name of the occasional adventure- the game's at its best when you play fast and loose rather than just sit around a lakeside, in my own opinion- you're likely to get a lot of hours out of this fun dinosaur survival game.

Haven't had a game give me this many feels and this much awe since I played Child of Light for the first time. It's magical. I cannot recommend it enough- Ten out of ten.

Threw an enormous spear straight through the brain of the God of Civilisation.
Shot the Goddess of the Hunt in the ass while dodging her shots like I was a deer in the matrix. (I was a deer.)
Drank about twenty vases of alcohol with the God of Tits and Wine after being repeatedly left unconscious on the floor by the stuff.
Slaughtered my way through the guards of Olympus with a sword.

Ten Gods of Tits and Wine out of ten.