Finally started this up again to give it a second go. My initial experience with this was my wife and I laughing at how absurd the "lore dump" is at the beginning of the game, where they just throw out fantasy terms left and right and expect the player to just somehow remember all these terms for later like we've got a notebook on-hand or something. Coupled with the atrocious voice acting from Viola and Terrence's feathered companion, it was already off to a bad start.
Combat felt very basic, but otherwise fine. The real crime is the dodge mechanic -- backwards is fine, as it gives you good coverage overall. Forward, though...it's this awful hop that's miserable and does nothing for covering distance if you want to try and go past an enemy. You would actually be better served trying to dodge an enemy by turning away from them and then just rolling backwards twice. It's really that awful.
The bloom effect from sanity loss is annoying, especially since it becomes even more difficult to see over time with the tendrils of darkness that outline the bloom.
For some strange reason, even though the game gives you tutorial screens for stuff that you have to read through, it has "Hold (A) to Skip" at the bottom of the screen...but since the tutorial screens are just a screen popping up and nothing else, there's literally nothing to skip, which equates to a really silly design decision.
There hasn't been much music outside of cutscenes and it's all way louder than you'd expect for settings. Attacks don't feel like they have proper impact from their sounds (from you or against you).
Level design is actually pretty good, with some looping multi-leveled areas that allow for shortcutting while also making a smaller area feel larger than it really is. The Lunatic system for sanity is a nice touch for making bosses more difficult, but it leaves me wondering if you can just cheese bosses by getting enough sanity potions and bringing them with you to a boss fight. Without using a single one, I took the first boss down to half health before hitting zero sanity and activating Lunatic state.
Beyond that, there are some other notable things worth mentioning:
-- multiple characters (your mileage may vary on this, especially with the knowledge that your starting character is also the character you use for the final boss, which means upgrading other characters doesn't impact your final game state)
-- craftable relics-of-sorts that you can place on your character to gain stat increases
-- health and sanity potions are crafted (or sometimes found)
-- there's a skill system for each character that you can use certain items to acquire...skills can range from stat boosts (like sanity increases) to potion functionality (better potion results from your crafted items) to combat (backstabbing, different kinds of special attacks that use your Rage gauge), and so on.
Is it worth it? On sale, it might be worth a check if you're a fan of Souls games. I don't think it's as terrible looking as everyone seems to suggest, but that voice-acting really is A-W-F-U-L for some characters and forget about the dodge command.
Combat felt very basic, but otherwise fine. The real crime is the dodge mechanic -- backwards is fine, as it gives you good coverage overall. Forward, though...it's this awful hop that's miserable and does nothing for covering distance if you want to try and go past an enemy. You would actually be better served trying to dodge an enemy by turning away from them and then just rolling backwards twice. It's really that awful.
The bloom effect from sanity loss is annoying, especially since it becomes even more difficult to see over time with the tendrils of darkness that outline the bloom.
For some strange reason, even though the game gives you tutorial screens for stuff that you have to read through, it has "Hold (A) to Skip" at the bottom of the screen...but since the tutorial screens are just a screen popping up and nothing else, there's literally nothing to skip, which equates to a really silly design decision.
There hasn't been much music outside of cutscenes and it's all way louder than you'd expect for settings. Attacks don't feel like they have proper impact from their sounds (from you or against you).
Level design is actually pretty good, with some looping multi-leveled areas that allow for shortcutting while also making a smaller area feel larger than it really is. The Lunatic system for sanity is a nice touch for making bosses more difficult, but it leaves me wondering if you can just cheese bosses by getting enough sanity potions and bringing them with you to a boss fight. Without using a single one, I took the first boss down to half health before hitting zero sanity and activating Lunatic state.
Beyond that, there are some other notable things worth mentioning:
-- multiple characters (your mileage may vary on this, especially with the knowledge that your starting character is also the character you use for the final boss, which means upgrading other characters doesn't impact your final game state)
-- craftable relics-of-sorts that you can place on your character to gain stat increases
-- health and sanity potions are crafted (or sometimes found)
-- there's a skill system for each character that you can use certain items to acquire...skills can range from stat boosts (like sanity increases) to potion functionality (better potion results from your crafted items) to combat (backstabbing, different kinds of special attacks that use your Rage gauge), and so on.
Is it worth it? On sale, it might be worth a check if you're a fan of Souls games. I don't think it's as terrible looking as everyone seems to suggest, but that voice-acting really is A-W-F-U-L for some characters and forget about the dodge command.