dud
BACKER
2018
I would have enjoyed this game twice as much if I'd known I could enable a fast forward setting through the main menu.
1992
This was the first game I ever beat, so when I saw a copy I bought it for nostalgia's sake. Turns out I hate this fucking game.
2023
This review contains spoilers
I wish I'd wandered away from this game 10-15 hours earlier so I could remember it fondly and think about circling back and beating it someday. All I'm left with now is how frustrated I am. The story falls apart the longer the game goes on, and the combat isn't complex enough to stay compelling for the duration of a "true ending" playthrough. That's especially true because the true ending requires beating a series of additional bosses, and completing those sidequests in quick succession along with the game's final bosses really strips bare how little variety there is from fight to fight. (I'm pretty sure the Elder Mist's automatic counter was the only thing in the entire game that made me think about my approach beyond "break locks and manage healing.")
I was really disappointed to find out after the fact that so many of the elements that felt out of place or incomplete to me are actually threads connecting Sea of Stars to The Messenger. I would have just played that first if they'd been upfront about how heavily intertwined the stories are instead of calling Sea of Stars self-contained. Love to close on a shot of a giant bowl and think "what the hell is that" only to find out from the internet that it's a reference to a different game.
This is minor but I think it's a good example of an undeniable pattern in this game where I wish they'd reworked small elements or tightened things up - why on earth do you cash in conches in Docarri? It's like they just thought "water + conches" with no consideration for how it would affect gameplay. First, you can be thirty conches deep before you even know what they're for, which means that finding them quickly stops feeling like any kind of reward. Second, cashing in conches after the first batch is a nightmare. Why do I have to make a special trip to Watcher Island and go through Jungle Path TWICE every time I want to trade in more? Just put it in Brisk! You go there early, you return there plenty of times for story reasons, and it's quick to access directly from the world map!
Similar to that, the game unnecessarily wasted my time in a lot of ways that might have been small on their own, but caused mounting frustration over time. The coded tablet in Moraine's office just being a list of Discord handles...the absolute nightmare of trying to backtrack any time before the very end of the game...forcing the player into the "lesser" ending even if all sidequests are complete and all conches are collected, when there's no story reason why the true ending couldn't be the first (and only) ending you encounter.
Garl's death and later return could have been handled so much better. With Wraith Island in the mix it was just one too many "Garl in mortal peril" stories, and while the story leading up to his death is a standout, it also went on long enough that I started thinking "if they're dedicating this much time to Garl dying, it's really going to feel like a copout if they manage to cure him or bring him back later." So of course...they did bring him back. Which is fine! I love Garl! But the balance, like so much in this game, just wasn't right, and that's exacerbated by the pointlessness of gating his resurrection behind the first roll of the credits.
There's a good stretch of this game that's really fun even if it's not transcendent, but I wish the whole thing came together more compellingly than it does.
I was really disappointed to find out after the fact that so many of the elements that felt out of place or incomplete to me are actually threads connecting Sea of Stars to The Messenger. I would have just played that first if they'd been upfront about how heavily intertwined the stories are instead of calling Sea of Stars self-contained. Love to close on a shot of a giant bowl and think "what the hell is that" only to find out from the internet that it's a reference to a different game.
This is minor but I think it's a good example of an undeniable pattern in this game where I wish they'd reworked small elements or tightened things up - why on earth do you cash in conches in Docarri? It's like they just thought "water + conches" with no consideration for how it would affect gameplay. First, you can be thirty conches deep before you even know what they're for, which means that finding them quickly stops feeling like any kind of reward. Second, cashing in conches after the first batch is a nightmare. Why do I have to make a special trip to Watcher Island and go through Jungle Path TWICE every time I want to trade in more? Just put it in Brisk! You go there early, you return there plenty of times for story reasons, and it's quick to access directly from the world map!
Similar to that, the game unnecessarily wasted my time in a lot of ways that might have been small on their own, but caused mounting frustration over time. The coded tablet in Moraine's office just being a list of Discord handles...the absolute nightmare of trying to backtrack any time before the very end of the game...forcing the player into the "lesser" ending even if all sidequests are complete and all conches are collected, when there's no story reason why the true ending couldn't be the first (and only) ending you encounter.
Garl's death and later return could have been handled so much better. With Wraith Island in the mix it was just one too many "Garl in mortal peril" stories, and while the story leading up to his death is a standout, it also went on long enough that I started thinking "if they're dedicating this much time to Garl dying, it's really going to feel like a copout if they manage to cure him or bring him back later." So of course...they did bring him back. Which is fine! I love Garl! But the balance, like so much in this game, just wasn't right, and that's exacerbated by the pointlessness of gating his resurrection behind the first roll of the credits.
There's a good stretch of this game that's really fun even if it's not transcendent, but I wish the whole thing came together more compellingly than it does.
At no point in the second half of this game did I have the slightest clue what was going on with the story, but I had a great time regardless!
260 hours, two months of near-daily play, and last night I finally decided it was time to go destroy Ganondorf.
God, what a game. I don't know that anything will ever match up to the nonstop awe of playing BOTW for the first time, but this didn't need to be that because it was something else entirely. Hyrule feels so much more alive and full and engaging here. My first BOTW playthrough was 175 hours, and it ended because I felt done: I'd completed everything I wanted to complete and had been farming ingredients for armor upgrades I didn't need just to give myself a reason to stay in Hyrule a little longer. 260 hours into TOTK, and it's only this week that I had the thought "hmm, I'll probably hit that same point in the next 100 hours or so."
I'm shifting out of daily play at this point - it's time to come up for air. But there's still so much I haven't done, still so much that I want to do, and 175+ map markers I dropped saying "what's over there? I'll have to come back to it" that I need to check out. I don't know if I'll ever get to them all, but even if I don't I'm glad there's still so much waiting for me.
God, what a game. I don't know that anything will ever match up to the nonstop awe of playing BOTW for the first time, but this didn't need to be that because it was something else entirely. Hyrule feels so much more alive and full and engaging here. My first BOTW playthrough was 175 hours, and it ended because I felt done: I'd completed everything I wanted to complete and had been farming ingredients for armor upgrades I didn't need just to give myself a reason to stay in Hyrule a little longer. 260 hours into TOTK, and it's only this week that I had the thought "hmm, I'll probably hit that same point in the next 100 hours or so."
I'm shifting out of daily play at this point - it's time to come up for air. But there's still so much I haven't done, still so much that I want to do, and 175+ map markers I dropped saying "what's over there? I'll have to come back to it" that I need to check out. I don't know if I'll ever get to them all, but even if I don't I'm glad there's still so much waiting for me.
2015
I feel terrible but like in a good way
2021
This was a great, engaging little story with a fascinating sense of inevitability. I was sobbing at one point towards the end of the game, and then I misread the final set of instructions and spent a solid five minutes flinging items around the kitchen thinking I had to place them on the table very precisely and was just terrible at the janky controls, only to realize after WAY too long that it was actually the dining room table I was supposed to put them on. So uh...that kind of blunted the ending for me.
I don't understand why this is a roguelite. It's maybe interesting enough to play through to the end with save points, but there just isn't enough here to make it worth going back to the start every time you die. The story isn't enough reason for me to keep going because I always feel less like I'm piecing together what's become of Desta's relationships and more like the game has just neglected to give me context. There's no reason for this much dialogue to repeat verbatim when there's no telling how many times the player will sit through it.
Playing on a phone the controls feel extremely finicky, it might be better on a tablet but I don't think that would fix everything.
It usually takes a lot for me to abandon a game, but I just don't have it in me to start this from scratch yet again.
Playing on a phone the controls feel extremely finicky, it might be better on a tablet but I don't think that would fix everything.
It usually takes a lot for me to abandon a game, but I just don't have it in me to start this from scratch yet again.
2021
This was short and sweet and I cracked the "perfect" ending just when I was starting to lose patience with it - perfect timing. There are just enough moving parts to give you plenty to figure out, without there being so much going on that it becomes unwieldy. It's a quick play by design but I had a great time going through my loops either trying to get it perfect or just saying fuck it, this time I'm stalking a specific character the whole time so I can figure out their deal.
I really appreciated the way the game lets you fast forward through conversations while it auto-selects your previous dialogue/action choices. For the actions I tried to take almost every single loop, it really made it better to just be able to fast forward through and know all my previous inputs were carrying over.
anders i love you
I really appreciated the way the game lets you fast forward through conversations while it auto-selects your previous dialogue/action choices. For the actions I tried to take almost every single loop, it really made it better to just be able to fast forward through and know all my previous inputs were carrying over.
anders i love you
2021
This didn't really click with me, but it's a really interesting concept and I enjoyed spending some time with it. I might have been better immersed in it if I'd played on PC; it could be that having to be so conscious of how I was holding my phone kept me from fully engaging.
2022
I love this game. I want to take a semester-long course devoted to discussing this game. I am at most six months out from wishing I could Eternal Sunshine this game out of my head so I could discover it all over again.
It's incredible how well this story unfolds given that it's split into hundreds of pieces that no two players will experience in the same order. I never felt like One Big Question was the only thing driving me; I chased my curiosity in dozens of directions and the more I did, the more my understanding of the overall geography of the story formed without me even having to try. Pieces of the story would rearrange themselves in my mind and fall into place even when I wasn't playing. More than once I'd be going about my day and suddenly make a connection between two clips I'd seen the night before, and that would inform what I went looking for the next time I sat down to play.
I hit credits about five hours in, and by seven or eight I was pretty confident I'd uncovered all of the game's major secrets, but I'm a completionist at heart and I kept wanting to do more and more. I chased down every clip, I unlocked every achievement, and then I rewatched all the game's footage in chronological order. And honestly, even being the kind of person who would do that, I was surprised by how much that paid off. I'd understood the broad strokes of the story before, but so many smaller moments came into focus that it was like discovering them all over again. Completionism usually involves diminishing returns, but the closer I looked the more Immortality rewarded me for it. I'll be thinking about this one for a long time.
It's incredible how well this story unfolds given that it's split into hundreds of pieces that no two players will experience in the same order. I never felt like One Big Question was the only thing driving me; I chased my curiosity in dozens of directions and the more I did, the more my understanding of the overall geography of the story formed without me even having to try. Pieces of the story would rearrange themselves in my mind and fall into place even when I wasn't playing. More than once I'd be going about my day and suddenly make a connection between two clips I'd seen the night before, and that would inform what I went looking for the next time I sat down to play.
I hit credits about five hours in, and by seven or eight I was pretty confident I'd uncovered all of the game's major secrets, but I'm a completionist at heart and I kept wanting to do more and more. I chased down every clip, I unlocked every achievement, and then I rewatched all the game's footage in chronological order. And honestly, even being the kind of person who would do that, I was surprised by how much that paid off. I'd understood the broad strokes of the story before, but so many smaller moments came into focus that it was like discovering them all over again. Completionism usually involves diminishing returns, but the closer I looked the more Immortality rewarded me for it. I'll be thinking about this one for a long time.
2021
I really enjoyed this! Short and sweet, keeps up decent momentum for a handful of hours and doesn't overstay its welcome. Tying relationship progression to combat progression worked really well; the two systems played off each other without making it feel overly grindy trying to max out every relationship (the whetsone is invaluable here, it was great planning on the devs' part to make that available when they did).
I'm curious what a 20-hour version of this game might look like. I was expecting four dunjes (dunji?) based on the plushie cabinet, and at the very least I think it could have used a third. Higher difficulty, or maybe less generosity with XP, would have forced me to me more thoughtful about combat. As it was, there was a lot going on with zines/abilities/items that I barely ever looked at.
But like I said, it's a nice breezy play as is, and resources are finite so I get why the scope is what it is. The only real pain point for me was the text messages. I'm not the most patient person, and it was frustrating to wait for series of messages to come in, particularly when multiple people were texting me at once.
I'm curious what a 20-hour version of this game might look like. I was expecting four dunjes (dunji?) based on the plushie cabinet, and at the very least I think it could have used a third. Higher difficulty, or maybe less generosity with XP, would have forced me to me more thoughtful about combat. As it was, there was a lot going on with zines/abilities/items that I barely ever looked at.
But like I said, it's a nice breezy play as is, and resources are finite so I get why the scope is what it is. The only real pain point for me was the text messages. I'm not the most patient person, and it was frustrating to wait for series of messages to come in, particularly when multiple people were texting me at once.
I understand that the point of this game is for it to be a miserable experience. And they did a great job executing that! It was a miserable experience!
2022
This review contains spoilers
Tunic feels like two separate games to me - in one, I'm a little fox roaming around, swinging my sword, trying to do something heroic. In the other, I'm myself, on the couch, zooming in on symbols, scribbling things down in a notebook, trying to crack a code or solve a puzzle.
I wish those two games were either better integrated with each other or distanced from each other a little more, because I feel like I hit the seam between them at exactly the wrong angle. There was a solid 5-6 hours in here where Tunic was expertly scratching the handheld Zelda itch, and I was thrilled by the "turns out just unlocking a bunch of ancient seals willy nilly when you can't read anything inscribed on them might not have been a good idea" twist. I loved that experience and I feel like it never really got the resolution it deserved.
I got my body back, I went into the final battle, I defeated the Heir, and I got the "bad" ending. I wasn't surprised that there was more game to be had - I'd never figured out what that door in the mountains was about, or the area behind the waterfall north of the town ruins. Surely there was more to discover. And there was! It was just...all aimed me on my couch, not for me the fox.
I hit the bad ending with three pages left to find. And this is on me, the game didn't MAKE me rush to get those last three pages, but I felt like I was on a roll! Surely I'd just overlooked a couple of chests! I wanted to press on and see how the story really ended! So I was not in the mood to...slowly and painstakingly figure out how to find ten fairies just to get one of those pages. I googled the hell out of those fairies, I just didn't want to slow down like that. The Golden Path, though...that I figured out almost entirely on my own. And I was excited! I'd been wondering what was behind that mountain door all game! Obviously there'd be one last scrap of paper back there, but what ELSE? Something that could restore the destroyed world? Some kind of ability or item that would change the course of my fight with the Heir? (The ability could be like a cool sword attack but it could also just have been basic fox literacy.)
Yeah, no, it was just the cover of a video game instruction booklet. And then the "true" ending of that video game ended up being that my nemesis and I...looked at the instruction booklet together? I just feel like the game cast aside me-the-fox in favor of me-the-player earlier than I was ready for.
I would have loved a stronger and cleaner narrative ending, leaving me free to focus on puzzles in a more leisurely replay. Because that's what I did! I finished and I went right back in to find the secrets, decode the language, and make sure I wasn't missing any chests. But by that point I'd already hastily burned through a lot of puzzles out of a need to see an ending that didn't even feel like anything.
Being a fox in a throwback to handheld Zeldas felt great. Sitting on my couch figuring out the Golden Path, finding a hidden secret, or realizing I was starting to be able to read some symbols by sight felt great. I just wish the game had found a better balance between those two experiences.
I wish those two games were either better integrated with each other or distanced from each other a little more, because I feel like I hit the seam between them at exactly the wrong angle. There was a solid 5-6 hours in here where Tunic was expertly scratching the handheld Zelda itch, and I was thrilled by the "turns out just unlocking a bunch of ancient seals willy nilly when you can't read anything inscribed on them might not have been a good idea" twist. I loved that experience and I feel like it never really got the resolution it deserved.
I got my body back, I went into the final battle, I defeated the Heir, and I got the "bad" ending. I wasn't surprised that there was more game to be had - I'd never figured out what that door in the mountains was about, or the area behind the waterfall north of the town ruins. Surely there was more to discover. And there was! It was just...all aimed me on my couch, not for me the fox.
I hit the bad ending with three pages left to find. And this is on me, the game didn't MAKE me rush to get those last three pages, but I felt like I was on a roll! Surely I'd just overlooked a couple of chests! I wanted to press on and see how the story really ended! So I was not in the mood to...slowly and painstakingly figure out how to find ten fairies just to get one of those pages. I googled the hell out of those fairies, I just didn't want to slow down like that. The Golden Path, though...that I figured out almost entirely on my own. And I was excited! I'd been wondering what was behind that mountain door all game! Obviously there'd be one last scrap of paper back there, but what ELSE? Something that could restore the destroyed world? Some kind of ability or item that would change the course of my fight with the Heir? (The ability could be like a cool sword attack but it could also just have been basic fox literacy.)
Yeah, no, it was just the cover of a video game instruction booklet. And then the "true" ending of that video game ended up being that my nemesis and I...looked at the instruction booklet together? I just feel like the game cast aside me-the-fox in favor of me-the-player earlier than I was ready for.
I would have loved a stronger and cleaner narrative ending, leaving me free to focus on puzzles in a more leisurely replay. Because that's what I did! I finished and I went right back in to find the secrets, decode the language, and make sure I wasn't missing any chests. But by that point I'd already hastily burned through a lot of puzzles out of a need to see an ending that didn't even feel like anything.
Being a fox in a throwback to handheld Zeldas felt great. Sitting on my couch figuring out the Golden Path, finding a hidden secret, or realizing I was starting to be able to read some symbols by sight felt great. I just wish the game had found a better balance between those two experiences.
2020
I didn't manage to finish this before it left Game Pass (a map would have helped me make it to the finish line, but I understand why an eldritch horror doesn't carry a map), but I had a fun couple of hours with it. There's a weightlessness to the monster that is incredibly fun to start out, but over time it makes it hard to feel present in the game's world. Still, for the time I put into it I didn't really mind. Slithering around eating people is fun!