I couldn't really get into this one. The game has a very pretty art style, but that's about where it stops. There's a lot of little object manipulation moments, rotating things to see the back, or dragging and dropping items from one box into another box. On a controller this has kinda an awkward feeling to it. Maybe it's better with keyboard and mouse? The story kept jumping between the present where you look around in the old house, and then into the past where you play out the memories of what happened 20 years ago. I found the mix to be more jarring than compelling.

I think that the script of Baldur's Gate 3 is generally average, but there's a real Star Trek TNG sitaution going on. The actors are very good, and they can elevate an okay script into a great overall presentation.

The PC version has better UI/Controls than on PS5 vesrion, but I still find it rather lacking as an interface system. I'm frequently able to "do the wrong thing" and a disaster happens where I might as well load. "Lokathor, what are you talking about?", well here's some examples:
- I've clicked on a door frame by accident and then shot at that instead of the enemy.
- I've clicked on a party member by accident and then stabbed them instead of the enemy.
- I've clicked the ground when I didn't realize that melee attack was selected and then stabbed the air instead of moving the character.
- I've clicked a spot where I thought I was placing a summon, but there was a button to pick what type of summon that I hadn't clicked yet, so instead Shadowheart walked to where I'd clicked, provoking an attack that killed her.
- Characters following the "leader" character will happily walk over traps even once the trap has been spotted by a party member.

Even when there's not some disaster that forces a reload, there's interface stuff that's just not great:
- I wish there was a button to actually highlight all containers, not just the "important" ones. There's a mod for this, but it shouldn't take a mod.
- I wish the dice rolls didn't have so much ceremony involved. In 20+ years of playing DnD and other TTPRG games, never have I ever thought to myself, "what would make skill checks be better is if they took longer to resolve". Again, this is a mod, and it would be a simple check box, why doesn't the base game support it?
- Inventory management isn't great. If you're collecting a lot of stuff and going to sell most of it, you have to right-click all the stuff you wanna sell once to "add to wares", then usually a second time to "send to camp", and then you can't sell directly from the camp stash to a vendor, so you have to warp to camp, grab the whole stash up, and warp back to the vendor and sell it all.

The game will track and show you how much the party members like you, but I wish that the game also tracked how much the party members like each other as well. It would likely be a small thing, but I think it would really help make the party feel like they've got some sort of dynamic going on beyond just a Main Character centered universe.

Very early in the game you have to get Lae'zel out of a cage trap, but some Tieflings are stopping you. If you just attack the Tieflings and you're an Order Of the Ancients Paladin then that breaks your Paladin Oath. The game has considered this, and has a special option for Paladins where they can make a DC 10 Deception check to convince the Tieflings to go away. However, if you fail this check, then you're just out of luck. You can't try anything else. You can't try Intimidate, you can't try to bribe them, nothing. Just load the game, or leave Lae'zel there, or break your paladin oath. It's not great, and if it was an oversight then I guess I could get over it, but there's specifically a Paladin option available, so we know that they looked at this specific encounter with Paladins in mind, and wrote it this way anyway. I ended up reloading and trying the Deception check again for nine minutes.

This game is usually pretty cool when it's all "working", but it also frequently isn't quite working right, and then it's just a slow drip of frustrations.

I've previously dabbled with FF1 for NES when I was in middle school, and I got the GBA version in high school. This Pixel Remaster version is definitely the most fun to play version. With the ability to turn encounters on and off with a single click, you can focus on getting where you need to go without being distracted with each little fight. The auto-battle and GP/XP boosts combine to make the parts when you do face off against monsters stay moving at a quick pace, without dragging the game down. The graphics are largely similar to the GBA version, just in wide screen. The real new winner here is in the sound department. The "arranged" musical tracks have full instrumentation, and they all sound amazing.
Overall, I strongly encourage everyone to give this game a play through.

This review and 1-star rating is specific to the Tactician difficulty: I was hoping that the game would actually challenge me to be tactical and make smart/careful plays during encounters. Instead, it's pretty binary if you can beat an encounter or not. Because Tactician improves the enemy AI and also their stats (+30% HP, +2 on most rolls), a lot of encounters just really can't be beaten when you first get to them. The "solution" is to just go elsewhere and level up and come back when you're higher level (and ideally with better gear). Apparently at higher levels this evens out, but at levels 1-3 is really sucks, and the game just crawls.

Steam says that I've played 400+ hours of this game, but I'm not sure I really enjoyed most of them. A lot of it was "something moves a little on screen while I listen to a podcast", and then each game takes a stupendously long time. I think it's unfortunate that the game doesn't have too much to shake things up without completely smashing the player's experience. Mostly things either get smashed flat by the player or will themselves smash the player flat. I haven't experienced anything where there was a sort of back-and-forth, so that I lost a little bit but I could recover if I changed my tactics or something.

Everything about this game is exactly how it should be. This is game is amazing. It's an adventure game, but the "puzzles" are all obvious and you don't need to stress about them. The humor probably won't make you actually laugh out loud, but you'll still be smiling the whole time. The characters are actually pretty well developed by the end. I finished the game, immediately purchased the "DLC" of bonus content just to put more money in the dev's pockets, and I'm excited to try another game from Archive Entertainment some time soon.

This game is a delight, being able to just run around and sale around with basically no "failure" state. Even once there's enemies the worst they do is just put you in a cage that you can immediately escape from anyway. It's an extremely stress-free type of experience. Everything looks great. There are some very killer musical tracks, and the environmental sounds are excellent.
I guess the worst I can say about the game is that the controls are a little wonky, a little too floaty maybe. You don't generally have to do any careful platforming, so it's not a deal breaker for me.
This is an absolutely excellent "short game" experience.

The game has an interesting first 5 minutes, then goes into a flashback that is extremely slow and even sleepy. Once I started doing the tutorial dungeon (after 30 or 40 minutes?) it became apparent that the game wants you to do timed attacks and blocks all the time in battle. When you leave town you get some "relics" you can use to adjust the gameplay, but neither of them would automate the timed hits. When I asked around I was told that later on you can get a relic to automatically handle the timing of basic attacks, but not one for the special skills. There's just no way I'm gonna play battles like that for 20+ hours. The art sure looks cool (I liked the horned slugs a lot!), but the I already can't remember the music, and the storytelling didn't really grab me at all. I know that JRPGs usually are slower to get going with a plot, but you can usually tell fairly early on if the vibe is right or not.
I really should have played the demo first instead of immediately buying it, oh well.