For context, I've put well over 50 hours into the game, completing it twice in a fit of madness, and I think that there are still many secrets I've never seen. Although there are many narrative connections between it and the first, and familiarities in the gameplay systems, you can absolutely start Termina without having played Fear and Hunger 1. Before any spoilers, I will say I would recommend this game to most people willing to endure a game that will make them die horrible deaths many times in the process of learning its obtuse mechanics. After the frustration, there is an incredible game brimming with personality, meticulous detail, and many overt influences coalesced into a unique artistic vision.

Termina is a fascinating game, at times masterful, and at times confused in its direction and storytelling. It builds upon the first game's foundation of unforgiving survival horror gameplay where every combat encounter can be deadly, mostly retaining all of its strengths, while greatly expanding its scope. The gameplay is a bit more complex, with more options and powerful tools available to the player, and plenty of bosses that seem impossible to overcome with normal means, forcing you to use those tools.

The initial gameplay loop is running into a new obstacle, then dying several times until you figure out a method to overcome it. It can be very discouraging, given that places where you can save your game are few and far between, and many of them progress in game time, with time being a hard limit for your entire playthrough, and potentially locking you out of events where you can recruit other characters to your party. The difficulty curve of the game is almost purely knowledge, but this is knowledge that can be gathered by paying attention to clues the game gives you, and by logical deduction. It plays more like a puzzle game than anything else, where often the challenge lies in being able to appropriately apply the many consumable items you find, or which order to cut off an enemy's limbs to minimize the damage you'll take. All of the frustration of failure made these moments of small progression immensely rewarding. Despite you feeling incredibly out of your depth in the city of Prehevil, every time you figure out a method to reliably kill an enemy that's killed you half a dozen times, you can feel the tangible step of progress.

The story is far more expanded, with twice as many playable characters that each have immense personality, intertwining backstories, and tragic development over the course of the game, and a death game premise where our lovable characters have to trust, betray, and eventually kill each other. It's also a Lovecraftian horror where an ancient god in the sky's cold gaze twists everyone in the city into abominable monsters that reflect the secrets of their hearts. It's also full of extensive side plots bubbling under the surface, like WW2 era political turmoil, military experiment conspiracies, or newly emerging satanic cults, that end up becoming far more important than they may seem. All of these mysteries can only be uncovered by you, putting together sparse clues while making your way through this city of nightmares, while the moon's time limit of 3 nights until your death draws ever nearer.

All of this sounds insanely cool. And sometimes it does live up to that potential that the premise promises. There were several moments of moving character writing, be it people holding true to their ideals amidst the ever growing shadows, or more often, succumbing to the terror of the festival, and coming apart at the seems. That element of tragic, character driven Lovecraftian horror shines through as the core of the story, and yet, I think that it's immense scope is also Termina's greatest flaw. With all of these disparate narrative elements competing for relatively little actual in-game text, I think that it suffers from a lack of focus. Particularly in some of the few endings, where it feels like a very sudden shift to another story entirely that's hardly related, plot-wise or thematically. And this isn't helped by what I think are an over-abundance of overt references. Some of the most obvious ones being Majora's Mask, a fantasy species taken from furry subculture, and several designs heavily inspired by horror movies like Hellraiser, Terrifier, and Human Centipede. I think that the game still has so much original, creative material that it has a strong identity regardless of this, but it's still a bit much, and seeing so many wink-nods to pop culture hurts the immersion. This is a bit more frustrating considering that this isn't a crutch that Miro needs, the original designs are incredibly good, I just wish that the game was filled almost exclusively with them.

*This paragraph is an addition after initially writing the review, after completing a playthrough on the immensely more difficult Masochism difficulty. It's a difficulty setting that at first seemed so comically stacked against you that I wasn't sure how it would be possible, but it ended up being surprisingly fun and achievable. After relatively mastering the systems, it takes you back again to the feeling of terror and vulnerability you had on a first blind playthrough, where even the most minor encounter can be deadly and you have to carefully prepare for every step you take. I had to chart a detailed plan of progression with pen and paper, and continually amend it as I tried and failed, getting a little further each time. There were multiple moments of sudden realization where I figured out a strategy to get through a portion I'd been stuck on for hours, and then successfully executing it brought a degree of satisfaction I hadn't felt from video games in a long time.

I wasn't even able to mention so many of the things I loved about this game, like how every song on the soundtrack is absolutely perfect at building its strange and frightening atmosphere. Or how every monstrous form that each main character can potentially painfully mutate into, becoming their own boss fight, is a poetic twist on that character's inner conflict. Or the environmental storytelling of areas like the orphanage and the mold apartments, where you could peel back the old and buried dark mysteries of the city. Overall, although I think it muddies its own story in some ways, and stretches itself too thin, Fear and Hunger Termina was a powerful and consuming experience that will stick with me for a long time, and an incredibly impressive creative project coming almost entirely from a single developer. I'll be eagerly awaiting whatever Miro makes next.

Banner Saga was an entry point for me to its genre of turn based tactics and managing a small army, but I had no issue with quickly understanding and being invested in all of its systems. And it was a great experience, excellently intertwining its gameplay and narrative to immerse me in its tale of fighting desperately for whatever it is you value as the world comes to an end.

The star of its gameplay is the armor/health system, where all units have 2 health bars that each have unique properties. Armor gives a flat reduction to regular damage, making high armor enemies immune to almost anything you throw at them until you chip it away. All units can do specifically anti-armor attacks instead, doing a much smaller amount of damage directly to it, but this is necessary to be able to later do significant damage to high armor enemies. Where it really shines though is that every unit's health is also its attack damage. So it's not only a decision of how to most efficiently kill an enemy, but when you can weave in direct damage so that it will be less dangerous. Doing some small chip damage to an enemies' health might be less efficient than armor damage to kill it, but can prevent it from getting an attack through the armor of one of your units. These decisions become all the more meaningful with later enemies that have huge amounts of health and armor, where you'll have to chip away huge amounts of armor, but for as long as you don't do direct damage, they can one-shot your units. This also puts an exceptional value on a few abilities that can do direct damage ignoring armor entirely.

This is in addition to all of the vital strategy of positioning. Units normally can't move through each other, and many powerful abilities have limited fixed ranges. This makes some clever positioning and manipulation of enemy move and attack ranges able to make your damage much more efficient, force enemies to attack your tanks, or even skip their turns entirely.

This natural depth to the combat made me excited and engaged in every single fight. There isn't a ton of variety in enemies and enemy abilities, only at the end of the game do we get a few more complex ones that I might've expected, like enemies with passive buffs to their fellows until you kill them, and spells that do damage over time. But I didn't mind that most fights are against the same relatively simple enemies, because the depth of the gameplay is in its basic systems, such that there's a lot of meaningful decision making even fighting just big stat sticks. At normal difficulty you do have a comfortable margin for error, but I'd be interested in a replay on hard to be forced to play as efficiently as possible.

I've went this far without mentioning the story, which certainly bears mentioning. It tells a story of two races, men and Varl, a race of huge, long lived ox men. Although previously in conflict, they've come together in the face of worldwide calamity, from an incursion of a race of violent stone skinned creatures, and more mysterious and celestial signs of the end times. The main character perspective changes intermittently, giving you the points of view of both men and Varl.

It's this use of perspective that was the most engaging part of Banner Saga for me. The most main protagonist is Rook, a man who's inherited the responsibility of leading a village of hundreds of peasants on a journey through desolate mountains and the crumbling remnants of civilization, now inhabited by vultures looking to pick you for scraps, and beset by monsters that far exceed your human stature.

These parts of the game give an immense immersion of Rook's desperation, your caravan is just barely holding on by a thread, every risk needs to be calculated, but you won't be able to survive without large risks. This is impressed on you by the gameplay, with your team of largely vulnerable archers, facing down and defeating hulking brutes that can club your head in with one swing, through the cooperation and ingenuity of mankind. It's also impressed on you by the out of combat decision making, as you're faced with constant dilemmas--do you take these men with you, or leave them to die, when they'll take more food and might betray you? How do you settle disputes within your caravan to maintain order and resources, while still maintaining morale? Do you risk going through enemy territory, or take the long way, losing precious time and food? I felt the game was constantly calling attention to Rook's character, what is he really fighting for? What is he willing to sacrifice? I felt the weight of his life, and those of everyone he was protecting hang in the balance for all of these choices.

Compared to the intimacy and palpable mortality of Rook's story, the perspective of the Varl is distinctly different. Armed with the confidence and wisdom of hundreds of years of life, they feel much more detached. Many of the Varl have isolated themselves, living in small communities in the far north. You feel that solemnity in the historian Ubin, who may be the oldest living Varl, and even in the great warrior Hakon. They react to the impending apocalypse with more of a grim resignation. You particularly sense this in the immense value they put on historical landmarks and achievements of their forefathers. In the vast scope of their lives, men will live and die quickly, but a monument that stands for centuries is far more meaningful.

I haven't yet started the second and third games as of writing this, but I'm excited to. Banner Saga is an excellently cohesive experience that I'd recommend to almost anyone.