The Roguelite + Town Building mashup should appeal to me but none of this works.

The Roguelite stuff is so barebones, weapons don't feel different, you don't get any cool powers, no synergies etc. You literally just mash Square and use Magic sometimes and dodge.

The Town Building stuff is so badly put together imo. Sometimes stuff just doesn't work, there's no real UI to display anything to the player, and worst of all, I never felt like I was actually upgrading anything. The Town management system is so stressful and hard to understand that I can't recommend this game to any casual player.

One of the craziest decisions this game made is that your followers die. When you recruit a new follower you're encouraged to name them which I assumed would work similarly to X-Com in which it makes you care more about each villager. But around 1 hour into the game, my first villager named after my girlfriend died, then I came back from a dungeon and all of my early villagers who I named after my friends had grown old. Eventually I just stopped naming them and at this point I couldn't tell you any of the names of my current villagers. I don't think I had any more than 16 cultists at the one time (other than grinding for the 20 you need to unlock the final boss.) WHY do you not grow a huge army! A 16 person cult isn't a Cult.

Lastly this game is buggy and has crashed multiple times on my PS5. Overall the game feels unfinished and reminds me of when Biomutant got hyped up and then was just ok. This game isn't bad, but it's not an 85/100, it's just fine.

Check out The Adventure Pals from the same developer which I really liked, but if you want a game similar to this, just play Hades or Spiritfarer instead.

A very ok game that is front loaded with all the actual good stuff

Remember when they said “don’t worry it’s not really a stealth game”? The last 1h 30 of the game is a stealth section with bad checkpoints

I will get the platinum at some point though

Edited my original review as I can't be bothered reviewing each episode.

It blows my mind that this got such a huge marketing push and is so mediocre. Feels like they must have some huge money behind the game or something because I find it hard to believe Geoff Keighley saw the game as was like "WOW!!!".

Really ugly, bad writing (I'm sure real people actually speak like this but I don't want to spend time with them) and the sparse gameplay bits feel awful to play and I could genuinely make all of them in Unity if you gave me a week.

They honestly should have just tried to get this on Netflix as an interactive story instead of pretending it's a "game".

(Also it had a good trophy list but had some really annoying trophies at the end which require you to replay the final 1h20m chapter except it's not like "look how different it can be if you make different choices!", all 3 playthroughs are almost exactly the same but you get a different cutscene at the end.)

I have no clue if I finished this or not, I got to a clear ending and then the game froze, alt+f4'd and restarted and got no indication that I had done anything.

I'm 90% sure I rolled credits but just didn't get the chance to see them.

I find these games interesting but they've not fallen flat for me 3/3 times. I am excited to come back and see more (maybe I haven't actually got to the credits!) but I don't think it'll satisfy me. Also when I say fallen flat I mean I am usually in awe, inspired and blown away in the first half hour, then find the whole game a slog, then I resort to a guide (not this time!) and then am let down by the ending.

I do like that you can watch the whole story in chronological order now though, which is something I really wanted in Her Story and Telling Lies.

Also I can't wait for people on Youtube to explain this to me properly.

Even if I didn't love it, I can't deny this game (and the previous Sam Barlow/Half Mermaid games) are incredibly special. Like ok, I didn't fully get it, I got annoyed at some parts, I thought some of it was unintuitive, but in 7 years there are only three games like this. As a recently graduated game designer, there's just something incredible about this game.

Was kinda not enjoying this and then it crashed and I lost about an hour of gameplay so I took that as a sign (just because it’s a remaster doesn’t mean you can’t add autosave!)

More of the same but instead of the sequel being bigger and better, this feels like they lost the budget. The fun and interesting mini games are replaced with arcade games that I could make, had 0 interest in the story after playing the first game so I was skipping every cutscene. And while the actual gameplay does feel “better”, it’s literally the exact same. I dunno man.

Also the bit where you play as the girl has some of the worst platforming in any game I’ve played. But the ranged fight where you play as the guy was quite cool!