2023:
I'm leaving the below as my initial reaction to how I played the game two years ago, allowing the reality that the frustration I had at the design of the game when bouncing off it the first time was legitimate and would have kept me from ever replaying this game had not other circumstances intervened. That said, while I still think that the combat in NJ is mishandled, having now gone back and completed the game, the mood and atmosphere of Northern Journey is worth struggling through the friction of a badly implemented combat mechanic. There is real magic in this game, and while it can often feel like homework to see the wonderful things within, it is a valuable and unique experience.
2021:
Not rating because I didn't finish the game. The atmosphere is marvellous, the writing is opaque and off-putting with excellent malevolence, and the aesthetic design of the world and its inhabitants is brilliant. But the encounter design is worst in class, perhaps some of the foulest interaction mechanics I've seen in a few years. It takes many ideas from frightening, disempowering games, who in their explorations of mechanical tone took the ideas of horror gaming to new heights, without considering how they were less punishing in practice than in theory: in Northern Journey, enemies have no animations of attack, instead their bodies are hitboxes completely and they all leap at the player repeatedly for their attack cycle. If you graze a sheep, you take 1/6th your health - and you better hope not to graze anything because there are no i-frames after taking damage. Nearly every 3 minutes or so out of 90 minutes of play, I would go down from full health to 0 in less than 1 second due to my PC getting stuck on geometry (which enemies can't get stuck on for some reason; their pathing won't allow them to stop moving so they glitch over ledges) and touching a fly for literally less time than it took to hit the jump button and then touch the ground. And you'll be running a lot because the ammo is scarce, which is fine, and enemies have no leashes at all. And even that would be fine, I can deal with having entire herds or colonies chasing me through a swamp, that even kind of fits with the horror comedy of the game - but, for some inscrutable reason, the game requires enemy kill counts to exit to the next area on every area. WHY?! The combat is so achingly bad and so mindbogglingly included that it ruined entirely my experience. Not only that, but in a wild UNO reverse card from DOOM, the enemies move faster than the player's projectiles, so you can shoot an arrow at a sheep and have it dash under its arc to breathe on you and immediately end your game. Oh, and of course you can't save while in combat, which is more than half the game.
Coming right off of Stalker to this, which had the bland setting (compared to its source) with stellar combat, makes me wish this writer/artist had just grabbed somebody for a month or so with help in the designing the combat systems - they are profoundly horrible, literally some of the worst I've seen in a game not universally panned. Compare this to Resident Evil or Silent Hill, games with similar privation and awkward control - they allowed the player to jostle an enemy at the right time to get out of the way, and at least gave them more than 5 bullets (the ammo cap on your first actually useful weapon, and enemies have no drops at all and the first arena needs you to kill 45 to get through - seriously wtf) if they screwed up. In the original RE, it would take maybe 30 seconds to go from full health to dead, and that is considered hugely punishing in the genre.
If you think you can deal with truly horrendous play (and I'm talking 50 times the frustration of Pathologic) then the world and character design is wonderful and worth seeing. I couldn't struggle through it.
I'm leaving the below as my initial reaction to how I played the game two years ago, allowing the reality that the frustration I had at the design of the game when bouncing off it the first time was legitimate and would have kept me from ever replaying this game had not other circumstances intervened. That said, while I still think that the combat in NJ is mishandled, having now gone back and completed the game, the mood and atmosphere of Northern Journey is worth struggling through the friction of a badly implemented combat mechanic. There is real magic in this game, and while it can often feel like homework to see the wonderful things within, it is a valuable and unique experience.
2021:
Not rating because I didn't finish the game. The atmosphere is marvellous, the writing is opaque and off-putting with excellent malevolence, and the aesthetic design of the world and its inhabitants is brilliant. But the encounter design is worst in class, perhaps some of the foulest interaction mechanics I've seen in a few years. It takes many ideas from frightening, disempowering games, who in their explorations of mechanical tone took the ideas of horror gaming to new heights, without considering how they were less punishing in practice than in theory: in Northern Journey, enemies have no animations of attack, instead their bodies are hitboxes completely and they all leap at the player repeatedly for their attack cycle. If you graze a sheep, you take 1/6th your health - and you better hope not to graze anything because there are no i-frames after taking damage. Nearly every 3 minutes or so out of 90 minutes of play, I would go down from full health to 0 in less than 1 second due to my PC getting stuck on geometry (which enemies can't get stuck on for some reason; their pathing won't allow them to stop moving so they glitch over ledges) and touching a fly for literally less time than it took to hit the jump button and then touch the ground. And you'll be running a lot because the ammo is scarce, which is fine, and enemies have no leashes at all. And even that would be fine, I can deal with having entire herds or colonies chasing me through a swamp, that even kind of fits with the horror comedy of the game - but, for some inscrutable reason, the game requires enemy kill counts to exit to the next area on every area. WHY?! The combat is so achingly bad and so mindbogglingly included that it ruined entirely my experience. Not only that, but in a wild UNO reverse card from DOOM, the enemies move faster than the player's projectiles, so you can shoot an arrow at a sheep and have it dash under its arc to breathe on you and immediately end your game. Oh, and of course you can't save while in combat, which is more than half the game.
Coming right off of Stalker to this, which had the bland setting (compared to its source) with stellar combat, makes me wish this writer/artist had just grabbed somebody for a month or so with help in the designing the combat systems - they are profoundly horrible, literally some of the worst I've seen in a game not universally panned. Compare this to Resident Evil or Silent Hill, games with similar privation and awkward control - they allowed the player to jostle an enemy at the right time to get out of the way, and at least gave them more than 5 bullets (the ammo cap on your first actually useful weapon, and enemies have no drops at all and the first arena needs you to kill 45 to get through - seriously wtf) if they screwed up. In the original RE, it would take maybe 30 seconds to go from full health to dead, and that is considered hugely punishing in the genre.
If you think you can deal with truly horrendous play (and I'm talking 50 times the frustration of Pathologic) then the world and character design is wonderful and worth seeing. I couldn't struggle through it.