A roguelike that captures a cute cartoony artistic style and parodies the Zelda series. While the game juggles the core tropes from Zelda it goes for a much more whimsical and silly tone, such as its legendary equipment being called Toys and power ups represented by Stickers.

The basic idea of the game is that there's an evil witch who curses the world and a hero arises who is challenged with defeating her. However every time you die 100 years pass until a new hero is born during which time the world changes.

The game's broad loop is that each time you're reborn you have 5 days to explore the land, gather equipment, complete dungeons, destroy the 'anchors' that weaken the final boss, and go face off against the big bad Mormo in her castle.

I think the problem with this game is that its whole design is contradictory. It wants you to explore but not to make too much progress, it wants you to get stronger but has scaling difficulty on enemies so you never feel stronger, it wants you to beat dungeons but imposes a bunch of arbitrary difficulty modifiers to slow you down. At every step it sort of punches itself in the face to justify it's own mechanics.

I think after my first win I realised that this is the type of game that's more interested in doing what it wants to do than really factoring in if that makes the game better or worse. For me it just didn't make the game any more fun. A lot of the design decisions seem arbitrary and I just couldn't get on with it.

Everything, everything
Everything, everything
In its right place, in its right place
In its right place, in its right place

Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon, yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon
Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon, yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon

Everything, everything
Everything
In its right place, in its right place
Right place

There are two colours in my head, there are two colours in my head
What, what is that you tried to say? What, what was that you tried to say?
Tried to say, tried to say, tried to say, tried to say

Everything
Everything
Everything
Everything

You know how people reductively say "it's like Dark Souls" to describe a game?

Well this isn't like Dark Souls, it's so Dark Souls it almost feels like From should pursue them for copyright infringement.

Just about every aesthetic, storytelling device, character archetype, leveling system, game design and trope is a straight lift from Souls with a slightly different veneer to make it jussssst different enough.

that being said if playing Souls as a 2d side scroller pixel action game appeals to you, this seems to have that nailed down

This game is Quadruple Ass.

I am so glad I don't have to play this at launch. I played the open beta and an even earlier version about 6 months ago. The two versions were identical, and all accounts are saying that nothing has changed from the beta and the final game meaning I can talk about what I played.

That is, to say, a baffling regression from the 11-year-old AC: Black Flag. A game where 95% of all actions are done in your ship, only stepping out at specific ports to buy items and accept menial side quests. A game where you do all of the combat, exploration, and SURVIVAL MECHANICS in your ship. A truly baffling game that is so clearly limping out of development hell, and you can see it in every aspect of the game.

You can tell this game was going to have some sort of story at some point, but it just.. doesn't. I sometimes complain about RPGs that have a main quest that feels like a bunch of side quests duct-taped together but that's LITERALLY what this is. There is no overarching storyline, no interesting characters, NOTHING. Just awkwardly presented window dressing for you to do boring open-world quests that either ask you to find some materials kill a couple of ships or some flavor of those two.

It doesn't help that the game doesn't look that great either. There are moments where the visuals look pleasing like during a sunset, but the closer you are to the visuals the crustier and less defined they look, made all the worse when you see just how BUGGY this game is. There were so many opportunities to fix the bugs from the previous times I've played this game and we got NOTHING. Audio bugs, visual bugs, frame drops, server crashes, game crashes, the whole shebang. I have reported at least 8 of the bugs that still show up in the final product of this $70 Quadruple-A game.

The open-world and survival bullshit is not frustrating, but it is incredibly monotonous. Ship controls are generally janky and the process of mining for loot, using it to upgrade your ship, and increasing your infamy level CAN be super rewarding if it weren't for several baffling design decisions like the fact that you have to do ALL of that in your ship. But the other big one is that.. that's the extent of the game.

It's not deep enough to invest all your time into, but it takes the place of an interesting story, actual quests that mean anything, out-of-ship exploration, all of it. While it may have some nice music and there are brief moments where the stars align and the gameplay loop is decently engaging and interesting, it just doesn't make up for everything that was lost. It's just an objectively lesser version of a PART of Black Flag, stuffed with microtransactions and shoved onto stores for $70. What an embarrassing turnout from Ubisoft.