Luncaid is a clear as day passion project, a game that wears its heart on it's sleeve; a game full of great ideas that means well, but ultimately isn't the strongest in it's execution of them. While the game excels in the presentation department, captivating you with its rich atmosphere, immersing you with the fantastic sound design and soundtrack, nailing the aesthetic and vibes of older games like King's Field/Shadow Tower; everything else was kinda mixed.

While the environments are beautiful and exploration is wonderful, the nature of finding secrets stopped me from fully appreciating the level design or the locales. With a lot of obtuse secrets hidden behind secret walls, which are very inconsistent in how they look with some normal looking walls being secret walls while ones with misaligned textures are normal walls, I was just going from room to room hugging walls and mashing 'E' as my first thought, rinse and repeat. Getting 100% without a guide is really tedious too, if you want all weapons/spells you'll spend an awful lot of time going back and forth between user made maps.

The game's balance just completely shits the bed as early as 2-3 hours in depending on your class and what you allocate your points into. Starting as Shinobi, I was already faster than everything in the first two areas and there were generally no threats. Put some points into speed, and in no time you're comfortably faster than the majority of the mobs in the game and combat poses no threat to you anymore. Likewise, I put some points into dex to increase my jump height for exploration, and decided to try ranged weapons since they also scale with dex; only to find out they're absolutely broken alongside magic, making you an untouchable killing machine and giving you no reason to even bother with melee weapons unless you really want to. The tension and horror elements that had me spooked out in the first 2 hours vanished with the realization I could zoom past anything and use my magic and ranged weapons to nuke them with ease. The gameplay just became really dull with the broken balance and stat allocation, realizing enemies were stuck in KF with their movement speed and animations while I was running laps around them enacting knockoff Skyrim dungeon gameplay.

It's still a fantastic homage and love letter to the genre of older dungeon crawlers and worth trying out definitely; just personally, I wish it wasn't so easy to break which resulted in a dull gameplay experience and that the secret hunting wasn't so tedious towards the end.

Prey is one of the greatest love letters conceived towards the immersive sim genre, and a masterclass in environmental storytelling.

Talos I is one of the best and most fully realized locations I've visited in any game. Each environment is hand crafted to tell a story. From the sleek and modernist design of the game's living quarters that tell you about the person lives of each member, to the claustrophobic and eerie feel of the maintenance tunnels; every aspect of the station feels meticulously planned and executed.

The sense of scale is mind-blowing, exploring the interconnected station with it's different areas that boast open ended level design is already amazing; it's when you take your first spacewalk, however, that you realize the true size of the Talos I.

The freedom to explore this world and tackle challenges in many ways, in any order is where it shines. Whether it's setting up turrets and traps, using stealth to avoid detection, or engaging in direct combat, the player is given the freedom to choose their preferred approach. You want to get to that locked room? You can turn into a cup and roll under the gap in the window, you can shoot the security lock with a dart gun, you can explore and find the code somewhere around the station, you can hack the panel. Or maybe you make use of the game's fantastic implementation of verticality and build yourself an alternative path into the room with the GLOO cannon! Exploration is fun, enticing and rewarding in Prey.

Admittedly though, the game balance is questionable at times, Combat Focus + Shotgun is enough to make even the terrifying Nightmare melt in a few seconds. It didn't kill my enjoyment, but having a clear cut option for 99% of combat encounters is a bit of a downer. Typhon neuromods are also pretty damn strong, and the downsides to installing typhon neuromods is pretty easily worked around too that there's really no reason not to take them. It's still a great time despite these small shortcomings though.