Despite coming out of it with very positive feelings, sea of stars is a pretty weird experience to describe because it felt like the game consistently swung back and forth from clicking perfectly with me to feeling like a bit of a slog.

First, to quickly mention the obvious, the game is absolutely gorgeous in its presentation, from music to especially the visuals. It picked a very unique main theme of astral visuals with strong and super obvious uses of the sun and moon, but also constantly played with it to have areas with fully distinct feels and themes, and it works absolutely perfectly in every area.

The gameplay, to me, went from prretty simplified but interesting in the earlygame to very basic and uninteresting in the midgame and to very dynamic and fun in the lategame. While the earlygame remains pretty simple, it took me long enough to be familiarized with the timing system and the more strategy-based aspects of the game like live mana for the gameplay to keep me hooked. Unfortunately, the game doesn't give you any meaningful options throughout the midgame. With characters only having 3 non-ultimate skills throughout their entire moveset, zale and valere's third skills being given fairly deep into the game, and there not being enough playable characters yet for the swap and combo systems to really shine, I felt like I didn't really have any meaningful gameplay decisions to make in the midgame, which is a pretty large issue when it comes to turn-based rpg gameplay that relies entirely on decision making and variety in approach. This, however, almost entirely goes away later into the game once you have access to 5 playable characters. This ends up making combat extremely dynamic, with you needing to constantly switch party members around to break locks and use more specialized skills, and amps the decision making very highly with a bunch of ways to use the combo gauge being available. Thankfully, the game has a ton of late/post-game side content where you can fully play around with the flexibility you get.

Without going into spoilers, the narrative sadly felt like a lot of unused potential. I absolutely understand why it ended up being like this, as the game's sheer scale is already extremely large for an indie team, but a lot of it sadly fell flat. Nearly none of the larger conflicts got a satisfying enough resolution, and most of the characterization, especially zale and valere's, felt pretty empty. At times, it honestly felt like Garl gave the cast its personality and charm by himself (which isn't necessarily a bad thing because Garl is incredible and every scene with him is peak by default), but I left wishing there was more dialogue between the cast.

Overall, Sea of Stars is an incredible accomplishment as an indie game, does many things very right, and oozes with love and personality. It has some issues, sure, but honestly I'm perfectly alright with that as the sheer passion at every corner of the game, in my opinion, more than makes up for that.

When I first heard about Deathloop, I was quickly hooked because it seemed like such a unique concept, which is why I hate to say this is probably the most disappointing game I've played in a good while.

My main issue with this game is that it didn't commit to its concept and use the unique mechanics timeloop games come with, leaving it with every negative that comes with timeloops with none of the benefits. I generally understand why they ended up doing it this way, especially because most people tend to not finish AAA games if they get even slightly confused once, but as a whole it makes me wonder why they even made a timeloop game in the first place.

The main goal of the game is to kill all visionary targets in a single loop, which presents the chance to really allow for creativity. I was really looking forward to going through the island, learning about the world and the visionaries, and how to get them in different places in time and kill them using different approaches, but this is not how it went.

There is a single linear assassination method for every single target that are presented as quests packed with markers and fetch quests that you're forced follow one-to-one. They even give animations detailing every step you have to take for each target. It's straight up impossible to finish the game without following and completing all of these methods, the final quest to kill all the targets in one loop doesn't even get unlocked if you don't. To make a comparison, this ends up making the game feel like modern hitman games if every target had a single mandatory story mission and using any other assassination method locked you out of progressing.

The use of the time loop is also kinda lame at best and just terrible at worst. Each loop is split into 4 parts of the day, morning, noon, afternoon, and evening. Outside of a few specific questlines and visionary kills, these times are completely isolated and don't interact at all. Nothing you do in updaam in the morning will carry over to updaam in the afternoon. I get why they did it this way since it would be hell to actually make all that stuff carry over and it's not really my biggest issue at all, but it really makes me wonder why they made a timeloop game.
Unlike the previous problem which was just mildly annoying, the infusion system is actually awful. While you normally lose your gear at the end of a loop, you can infuse them with a currency called residuum you can gather, which makes them permanently stay in your arsenal. This defeats the entire point of the timeloop in the first place. Once you infuse a decent weapon and two powers, you're set and you never have to look for gear or improvise.

As if that wasn't enough, the game makes it extremely easy to optimize the fun out of it by giving you access to silenced pistols super early depending on how lucky you get. I found one after the third time I killed a visionary and had no reason to use anything else for the rest of the game. This also applies to powers. Sure, the game has a bunch of powers, but once you find the one that you like the most, there's never any reason to use anything else. You can only bring two powers to missions, meaning it almost feels like the game asks you to find two things you like and use nothing else.

With all of these choices, the game just ends up being a repetitive grind where you start a loop, equip the same broken weapon and powers, and do tedious quests until the game is satisfied and lets you do the final loop. This repetitiveness is not helped by the fact that each loop is the exact same. This wouldn't be a problem on its own, hell, it probably would have been a strength if there was anything to learn and master, but with everything else involved it makes the game feel even more boring. Loop stress is technically a mechanic apparently, but I didn't notice a single effect of it my entire playthrough.

I would be lying if I said the game had no positives though. The writing is pretty shaky at the beginning because the dialogue wasn't great, but it does get better. I started enjoying Juliana and Colt's banter later into the game, but it took a while to hook me. Some of the visionaries are actually pretty interesting. The quality of their writing varies a lot, but it can be neat now and again. The gunplay was also decently fun as well, though I really wish I had any reason to use guns other than the same 3 ones.

The game does have a single really cool mechanic though, in the form of Juliana. Other players being able to invade your world as her and the fact that they can hunt you in so many unique ways from setting traps to just rushing in and beating you to death is great. I am still conflicted by the fact that the only good mechanic of the game requires online, though. Juliana's AI is terrible so it feels like a ticking time bomb waiting to go off and be a mechanic you never really see once people move on from the game.

Overall, I wasn't hating the game my entire time through it, with some good narrative moments and the occasional fun gunplay, but almost the entire game was boring samey questing with all of the repetitiveness of a timeloop and none of the creativity they allow in playstyles and experimentation. To make another comparison, it almost made me feel like I was playing a roguelike with no random generation or build variety with a full linear questline.