TayBeltane
BACKER
This game was a perfect choice for the beginning of spooky season! This was a fun, short and utterly terrifying experience to say the least. This went from playing hide and seek with cute little gnomes to swimming through piles of rotting meat real fast. The story itself was incredible , something that I will be thinking about a lot and looking more into. The environment, soundtrack, and monster design are this games strengths. Where this game falls short, is the animation, frame rate, and wonky controls. At some points, it ran completely fine but there were multiple instances where the frame rate just couldn’t keep up with the action and caused me to mess up what I was doing. But the frequent checkpoints made this not a huge issue. While some might be turned off by the gameplay, I personally think it’s worth pushing through it simply because of the wonderful narrative and visuals this game has to offer.
2018
Alright, so I tried this game years ago, played for a few hours and then put it down because I was really turned off by it being a roguelike game. Just picked it up again after all this time and I’m so glad I did. The characters are so likeable and the art style is absolutely gorgeous. Took me a little while to get hooked at first because I really don’t like the idea of roguelikes (just personal preference, just not my style of game) but I pushed through and started finding my build and once I figured out something that worked for me, I absolutely loved it. I found the gameplay frustratingly addicting and the story was such an incredible use of the game style. The dialogue was hilarious at times, I found myself saving videos of interactions all the time. I know to fully “beat” the game you have to complete it 10 times and I MIGHT do that in the future but right now, I don’t have any urge to. I beat it once and that was enough for me, but the story does make me want to see more eventually.
2023
First of all, fuck J.K Rowling.
This game was super ambitious and had a lot going for it. I remember the general public being pumped for this, even non-Harry Potter fans. When it came out I was disappointed to learn switch users were gonna have to wait longer and for the most part, it was worth the wait. The open world is beautiful with a lot of exploration to do with secrets around every corner. I was hooked to the story from the beginning but I soon found myself putting the main quest on the backburner for a long time because of the amount of side content. But I pulled through and finished the main quest and I was very happy with it.
This game has many faults though and it wasn't stuff I could overlook most of the time. This game has TOO much content first and foremost. As a completionist, this game hurt me. There are way too many collections, for example; landing pads, balloons, demiguise statues, field guide pages, Merlin Trials, collection chests, SOOOO MANY COLLECTION CHESTS. And for the outcome and lack of new "treasure" it felt like a chore to do it do I chose not to (and that's unusual for me). The only thing I 100% completed was the challenges and there was no reward for completing all of that (just saying), but it didn't bother me too much as by that point in my playthrough I was SO READY to put this game down. The Room of Requirement was fun in theory and I'm sure it could have been better if I messed around with it but it just wasn't worth it in my opinion, the creature care was actually one of the strong points of this game and could have been a lot more fun if they had the offsprings grow up instead of them staying little forever. It doesn't give you any reason to come back to it. Combining genetics to get different creatures after generations and generations could have been super fun and satisfying but they just.... didn't? It felt like a dead end and kind of annoyed me.
The voice lines also get super repetitive because there just isn't a lot of variants. Every enemy camp you came across had the same voice lines, it just got annoying after awhile. I did enjoy the combat and I after I realized that you can set 4 different spell sets, it was even better. The Ancient magic meter was super fun to use and I loved the variety of different attacks.
I had heard horror stories about how laggy this game is and I found it to run surprisingly well on the switch, but one of my complaints that was hard to ignore (and I'm not sure if it's like this on other platforms, let me know) is the fact that there are so many loading screens, I don't mind if it needs to buffer a second while you're walking through the door but Hogsmeade was especially super annoying to navigate because every single building had a loading screen, it made it hard to collect pages or finding treasure because Revelio wouldn't show what was inside buildings behind loading screens. Hamlets and Hogwarts didn't have this problem but I hated going to Hogsmeade for this reason.
The last point I'm going to talk about is the MC being insufferable, I wish they had different varieties or points of personality that you build up with your reputation over time but I know this was a large game and there was a lot going into it, I just wish they made them feel less stuck-up.
Overall, while I had a lot of fun with this game, it's not worth it to 100% it and I probably won't be going back to it ever.
This game was super ambitious and had a lot going for it. I remember the general public being pumped for this, even non-Harry Potter fans. When it came out I was disappointed to learn switch users were gonna have to wait longer and for the most part, it was worth the wait. The open world is beautiful with a lot of exploration to do with secrets around every corner. I was hooked to the story from the beginning but I soon found myself putting the main quest on the backburner for a long time because of the amount of side content. But I pulled through and finished the main quest and I was very happy with it.
This game has many faults though and it wasn't stuff I could overlook most of the time. This game has TOO much content first and foremost. As a completionist, this game hurt me. There are way too many collections, for example; landing pads, balloons, demiguise statues, field guide pages, Merlin Trials, collection chests, SOOOO MANY COLLECTION CHESTS. And for the outcome and lack of new "treasure" it felt like a chore to do it do I chose not to (and that's unusual for me). The only thing I 100% completed was the challenges and there was no reward for completing all of that (just saying), but it didn't bother me too much as by that point in my playthrough I was SO READY to put this game down. The Room of Requirement was fun in theory and I'm sure it could have been better if I messed around with it but it just wasn't worth it in my opinion, the creature care was actually one of the strong points of this game and could have been a lot more fun if they had the offsprings grow up instead of them staying little forever. It doesn't give you any reason to come back to it. Combining genetics to get different creatures after generations and generations could have been super fun and satisfying but they just.... didn't? It felt like a dead end and kind of annoyed me.
The voice lines also get super repetitive because there just isn't a lot of variants. Every enemy camp you came across had the same voice lines, it just got annoying after awhile. I did enjoy the combat and I after I realized that you can set 4 different spell sets, it was even better. The Ancient magic meter was super fun to use and I loved the variety of different attacks.
I had heard horror stories about how laggy this game is and I found it to run surprisingly well on the switch, but one of my complaints that was hard to ignore (and I'm not sure if it's like this on other platforms, let me know) is the fact that there are so many loading screens, I don't mind if it needs to buffer a second while you're walking through the door but Hogsmeade was especially super annoying to navigate because every single building had a loading screen, it made it hard to collect pages or finding treasure because Revelio wouldn't show what was inside buildings behind loading screens. Hamlets and Hogwarts didn't have this problem but I hated going to Hogsmeade for this reason.
The last point I'm going to talk about is the MC being insufferable, I wish they had different varieties or points of personality that you build up with your reputation over time but I know this was a large game and there was a lot going into it, I just wish they made them feel less stuck-up.
Overall, while I had a lot of fun with this game, it's not worth it to 100% it and I probably won't be going back to it ever.
This game took me A LONG TIME to get into. Having never played a game of this style, the game really didn't have a lot of instruction and most of it I figured out through trial and error (lots of error). I just felt like for a long time that I was just REALLY bad at this game and it was really discouraging to say the least. It felt clunky and I just couldn't get used to the controls for the life of me, but once I got them down and unlocked more useful shards and weapons, the whole game was easier to navigate. This game really isn't forgiving and save rooms are few and far between so when you fuck up, it feels worse than usual. Once I was about 50% done with the game I started to get hooked and had my own shard formula that worked very well for my playstyle. The bosses for the most part were very challenging and I had a lot of fun with them but I must admit, they were glitchy. The two bosses that my game glitched out for were the twin dragons and the doppelganger. For the twin dragons fight, I randomly fell through the walkway and fell 2 levels down and saw the dragons from behind (they don't have full tails by the way; fun fact) and the doppelganger got stuck in the wall at some point and wouldn't come out. It just felt like for the boss fights, there should be little room for glitches to happen and they still do. Overall this game doesn't have a lot of replay value (at least to me) but I do feel like I got a full experience and am able to form a solid opinion on it.