I find this game incredibly difficult to pin down to a star rating and it might actually inspire me to ditch the stars on BL altogether.

I think I got kinda screwed with this one and my expectations of it. I knew about this game for awhile but I wasn't really interested until I saw all the comparisons to things like Outer Wilds and Tunic. I definitely understand why people make those comparisons but going in to this game thinking of those experiences really put me in the wrong frame of mind. This seriously is just a really good Metroid with some super neat ideas. It's only when you get to the discord study group required sicko third layer that the game becomes something truly mind bending and unfortunately, everyone who got early copies of the game talked about it like that was the entire experience.

The first layer of the game is really fun though! Finding your way through these areas and collecting the four flames is super rewarding, especially because the major items are so esoteric and multifaceted. There were more than a few times that I picked up a new item, thought it was completely worthless, and then realized it was so important in ways I never even considered. On top of that, you can have that sort of discovery multiple times with the same item! It's nuts!!

The main thing held me back from really falling in love with this game though was the save system. For me personally, I think the saving in this game completely fights against what makes it so special. Once you get past the credits the game becomes about collecting hidden eggs throughout the map (which feels extremely similar to collecting missed energy tanks in Metroid). I was pretty excited to dive in to this after getting to the first credits but I quickly came to the conclusion that getting around the map just felt tedious and unexciting. I constantly had the sensation of brain blasting a new idea to try out being undercut by the realization that I had to find my way back to wherever that room is. I think this would immediately be one of my top games of this year if it just had the same screen respawn from Celeste. I know that would completely ruin some bigger parts of the game but I think it could just be temporarily disabled for those sections. Once you've gotten to the egg finding portion it is just so bothersome to mess up a platforming section you've already done and be sent back to some phone that is 20 screens away.

I had a lot of frustration with this game but I always felt like I wanted to be playing it when I was away from it. When I play a game like this I think a huge draw is the narrative mystery behind the puzzles that is being chipped away it. When you play something like Tunic it always feels like you're getting closer to a revelation about its world as you get deeper in to the puzzle web it's made up of. Animal Well feels purely mechanical to me. The atmosphere is truly incredible in this. I especially love the lack of music for a lot of the game. But it took me a bit to realize that the reward for completing all of these puzzles would be more complicated puzzles. There wouldn't be some kind of eye opening moment that made me view the would world differently. It would just be different ways to look at these rooms.

And that's ok!! I want to be clear that this game is incredibly impressive and that I probably am not even capable of having a conversation with Billy Basso and his gigantus style brain. I just think it's not my flavor of whatever this genre of game is and I mostly wanted to share these thoughts because I disagree with so much of the messaging I have been seeing about it. This game is for puzzle freaks ONLY who also can put up with a lot of backtracking. I think that would have been me if there were the promise of something a bit more there along the way.

IDK tho! Part of me loves Animal Well and I think I would like to revisit it some day in the future with the right mindset.

In That Review Form Everyone Likes


---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☑ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☑ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☐ Decent
☑ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☑ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☑ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☑ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☑ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☐ Worth the price
☑ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☑ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10


Review

kinda hate how games turn out these days, especially this one, but nonetheless, its a good game.


Expectations VS Reality

the reason i first bought this game was because of the way it gave you the option to exlpore a whole galaxy, read about interesting fauna and flora, build habitats wherever, and progress your tech and become the ultimate astonaut.
and while thats entirely possible, its not what the game strives to be nowadays. its beginning to turn more into a: get big ships with good stats, make a money farm and become a rich guy flying around focusing on becoming the most overpowered guy around.
that being said, i have to mention:

Incredible Support

as everyone and their grandma knows, this game has had, probably, the biggest comeback in gaming history, with updates coming out every year since the release, still at the time of writing this review, 7 years later. the thing i find incredible is how its all made by a small team, under 50 people!
every update this game gets makes it a more enjoyable experience, and at this point, im sat thinking how they continue to make these updates of great quality, but apparently, its one of steams top sellers, which i find jaw dropping.

Core

at launch, reviewers described the gameplay loop as something like this: hold down your mouse button to pick up rescources, deal with a full inventory, get an upgrade, leave the planet, go to another planet, repeat.
and now it looks more like this: hold down your mouse button to pick up rescources, leave the planet, take part in a space battle, get a giant ship, go to another system, encounter a broken big ship with lore and interesting loot, land on a planet, encounter one of many different POI's, get an awesome new ship, get some random new item you didnt know existed, get attacked by pirates from space, kill those pirates until a big ass capital ship spawns and shoots everything thats ever been at you, panic, escape, and so on. and its barely ever repeated, because of the amount of different stuff there is.
that being said, holding down your mouse button is as boring as ever.

Settling Down

one of the main reasons i bought this game was the idea of settling down on a planet and buidling whatever you wanted. and im glad to say that this game does that incredibly well, and i can say that atleast 50% of my time is spent browsing the immensely well varied oppurtunities it gives you when doing so. you can do so much, create so many feelings, you can even place 20 floors the same place as a design choice. i could go on and on about how much i love this system, but id want anyone to experience that for themselves.

Variation

another thing that done well here is the variation. for example with vehicles, which there are six of, which all feel different, like the mech that makes you feel safe and strong, or the fast and agile nomad, or the underwater nautilon, which all have great designs aswell. this is just one example, as there are many different suit upgrades as well, which can work as builds themselves, or the many ways to upgrade and customize your ship, freighter, exocrafts, bases, and you can even tame every single animal you see to ride on, from a wolf, to a dragon-like bird, or a long necked dinosaur, which all are gene-customizable aswell, allowing you to fine tune them however you want. all these variations are exceptionally well done, and are worth experimenting with, to truly make this world - or galaxies - your own.

11/10 would hold down mouse button again

Remedy absolutely knows what's up when it comes to making games.
This game takes all the ideas they experimented with in their previous games and cranks them up to 11.

Can't say more without spoiling it.
Definitely go into this one blind.

It's not a loop, It's a spiral.

I didn't think they could do it. I beat this game with the day one patch on PS4, and it was a mess. An intriguing mess with a lot of interesting lore and great art direction, but still a mess. There seems to be a revisionist effort to say that Cyberpunk 1.0 was a functional game. I am here to tell you, it was not a functional games on console. I really thought that release was the end of CDPR.
The 2.0 patch is the game that should have been released. They completely reworked the driving model, the skill trees, the crafting system, and how many of the weapons work. It feels like an "enhanced" version of the game made by Nightdive Studios or the best mod you've ever played. These changes allow the story, art, music, and other work to really shine.
This is a success story, albeit a painful one. Games should not release in a broken state and developers should be given the time they need to put out the best product. I hope that other business owners will take that investment to heart.

There was a moment where I was having a firefight in a VHS shop which just made me smile and think "i'm fucking loving this"

Like a lot of people I watched Robocop 1+2 way too young and so I have a big ol' softspot for the tin man. I loved Teyon's Terminator game but I was worried it'd be a one off, so I was sceptical when they said they were doing Robocop, how do you make a game about a slow trodding, hulking behemoth powerhouse fun for extended periods of time? easy, you turn fully in with the power fantasy, mix it with great writing that just fully gets the satire of the original movie, throw in fun callbacks and all that sort. Amazing game and the few flaws it has dont compare to the list of great stuff.

Judge Dredd game next please Teyon.

YOU -- "But what if humanity keeps letting us down?"
STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST -- "Nobody said that fulfilling the proletariat's historic role would be easy. It demands great faith with no promise of tangible reward. But that doesn't mean we can simply give up."
STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST -- "I guess you can say we believe it *because* it's impossible. It's our way of saying we refuse to accept that the world has to remain... like this..."

---

A 2 week old fetid corpse hangs from a tree, a ghastly sight; a human life reduced to a macabre piñata for small children to pelt stones at in a twisted idea of entertainment. The children themselves, a hopped-up junkie and a nameless orphan respectively, both the result of a broken system that has unequivocally failed them. The district of Martinaise, pockmarked by the remnants of revolutionary war, abandoned by the world at large, it and its people subject to the pissing contests of petty government officials to see who is lumped with the task of looking after the place, the site of a months-long, on-the-brink-of-warfare labor dispute that's about to boil over with the lynching of a PMC soldier who was meant to "defuse" the situation. All of this, left to the hands of a suicidal, vice-riddled husk of a cop who can barely get his necktie down from the ceiling fan without potentially going into cardiac arrest. Disco Elysium is an undeniably depressing experience that isn't afraid to cover the messy spectrum of humanity, from insane race-realist phrenologists to meth-addled children to every kind of ghoulish bureaucrat under the sun. The district of Martinaise, as fictional as it is, is a place I've seen before, reflected in the streets, reflected in the people, reflected in the system; an undeniably full-faced look at the horrors faced by those below, and the resulting apathy expressed by those above.

---

SUGGESTION -- Brother, you should put me in front of a firing squad. I have no words for how I failed you.

---

Every aspect of Disco Elysium reflects its overall theme of "failure". Martinaise itself has been failed by the institutions meant to help it, abandoned by the powers that be, who only intervene when it looks like anyone is trying to enact change. NPCs can reminisce on days gone by, of the tragedies in their past, or of their cynical rebuke of the future. The various schools of political thought you can adopt and their representatives are mercilessly picked apart, from the Communists too entrenched in theory to take notice of the suffering around them, to the frankly pathetic fascists who use their prejudiced beliefs to shield themselves from their own flaws. Our protagonist is constantly haunted by his past and even starts the game recovering from his own self-destructive ways, and on a gameplay level, the way that our intrepid detective can fumble the bag in nearly every way imaginable and still be allowed to make progress in investigations and sidequests is commendable. Failure is so integral, so vital to Disco Elysium that it's not only an aspect deeply ingrained in its story, but also its very gameplay.

---

VOLITION [Easy: Success] -- No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it's still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You're still alive.

---

And yet, despite this cloying cynicism and acknowledgement of the ugliness of reality, Disco Elysium is magical because of the fact that it ultimately believes that there is a world worth fighting for in the end. It would be incredibly easy to be defeatist in the face of such constant, institutional and societal failure we are presented with in Revachol, to be ceaselessly apathetic in the face of your own overwhelming shortcomings, to fall back into the comfort of old vices instead of facing our problems head on. Still, Disco Elysium has that fire inside of it, an untapped hatred for fence-sitting, for passivity in the face of oppression and valuing the status quo over any meaningful change. Roll up your sleeves and fight for a better future.

---

RHETORIC -- "You've built it before, they've built it before. Hasn't really worked out yet, but neither has love -- should we just stop building love, too?"

---

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST -- "In dark times, should the stars also go out?"

---

RHETORIC -- "Say one of these fascist or communist things or fuck off."

---

Disco Elysium believes in the people. It believes in humanity, no matter how messy our supposed paragons are, or how flawed our beliefs and values can be, or how cyclical we can be in the face of it all. In a city plagued by an inability to move on, Disco Elysium says that there is always a possibility of change. If two broke Communists and a junkie wino can defy the very laws of physics in a slummy apartment, no matter how briefly, with the power of their faith and co-operation; imagine what we could do as a group. As a city. As a species.

Disco Elysium says that the cup is half full. Even if we won't see the own fruits of our labor in our lifetimes, it still looks you in the eyes and says:

"The only promise it offers is that the future can be better than the past, if we're willing to work and fight and die for it," a conviction belted out by the youths of tomorrow.

"Un jour je serai de retour près de toi", written in bright burning letters across a market square.

"TRUE LOVE IS POSSIBLE/ONLY IN THE NEXT WORLD--FOR NEW PEOPLE/IT IS TOO LATE FOR US," painted on the side of an eight-story tenement.

"Disco Inferno...," a lone voice belted out through a boombox's speakers across a frost-bitten sea.

---

MANKIND, BE VIGILANT; WE LOVED YOU