unfortunately, for me, this ... felt pretty shallow. another reviewer (eccol here on backloggd) put it perfectly: this game is clinical. it's very removed from the issue at hand, and its portrayal of abuse reads like a text book. i didn't find the experience of playing this satisfying or cathartic or even really that enjoyable. the experience is too linear and sort of obtuse, and the writing degrades pretty rapidly from the start to when it's being "revealed" to you that ben is abusive. i wish i had a better review for this, but i don't.

This review was originally going to go on Steam (hence some wording that I'm too lazy to change), but due to the fact I don't own it and played it through library share, I was unable to post it there. So it goes here. Forgive the text wall.

Ah, man. I wish I could recommend this because there are aspects of this game I do like, but overall I found it obtuse and unpleasant to play. I breezed through the first half of the game and then there's a difficulty spike in the second half so extreme I found myself spending upwards of 30 minutes on each battle and quite frequently having to restart just because RNG fucked me. I believe my issues were build-related, but that's still not good game design, in my opinion, especially since the game's skill system is ... not easy to understand. To be completely transparent, I have not played the original Shadowrun TTRPG; maybe it would be easier to grasp if I had?

One thing I found infuriating is that unlike other isometric RPGs with turn-based systems that I've played, in this game, if your player character goes down, you immediately fail the mission. Considering that whoever gets targeted and how much damage they receive seems to be completely random, this aspect of the game is utterly agonising to deal with. I found myself having to micromanage my PC and making sure he had enough health kits to not take lethal amounts of damage just so I could maybe get through another physically painful fight ten times more difficult than anything from the first act and he still went down quite frequently.

Again, for the record, I have seen people online have wildly different experiences with this wherein they continued to have zero difficulty upon the difficulty spike, but like ... If you get several hours into a game and then the difficulty suddenly and without warning shoots up and you're spending significant amounts of time pulling your hair out over it, that sucks, in my opinion. It's been long enough that I can't remember if this game has a respec, so if it does, my bad. I believe I was also playing on normal/medium difficulty and cannot recall if it was possible to lower it.

Either way, I don't think "your build isn't very good" should completely fuck over an entire playthrough of a game, especially since there's ALWAYS the potential that someone is brand new to the genre. I am not and I struggled.

The story is fine and I really wanted to finish this game because I did find myself engaged, but every time I think about going back to this, I feel my soul withering. If you do decide to get this game, make sure your PC has a metric shit ton of health, because fights will be an absolute slog otherwise.

EARLY ACCESS REVIEW

i like the gameplay a lot and how tactile things feel, but the writing is just not for me personally. it's extremely cutesy, to the point where i'm struggling to figure out who this game is targeted towards? if it's children, it's patronising; if it's adults, it's tiring. there are a lot of made up words (humans are 'oobin'), deliberately misspelled words (reconstitooter), or things are bizarrely renamed (drippy can instead of watering can, dirt scraper instead of hoe). this is fine, but not for me.

also, currently, there's not much to do, due to it being in early access. i'd stave off on this one for a little while. my 3 stars will hold even for future updates, though, unfortunately.

i enjoyed playing this game a lot. it runs beautifully on my modern rig, and the gameplay holds up pretty damn well for a shooter from 2006, especially since the game was in development for 11 years. it looks good too; you can tell it's old, and there are some places it hasn't aged well, but overall it looks great.

i do commend them for hiring actual native american voice actors, and michael greyeyes is great as the lead. the writing of tommy's dialogue is also very funny and entertaining.

i will say that i am not native american (i'm asian-canadian), so i can't really speak on that aspect of the game? HOWEVER, in doing research i found that prey 2006 seems to have employed cultural consultants and sensitivity readers, and that everything has basis in real cherokee oral traditions. i also haven't really found major complaints about its portrayal of cherokee people, just points about minor inaccuracies. to me, it feels as though the game was really trying to do what it was doing respectfully, although again i am not native so i'm not the authority on that.

all in all, i think it's a really enjoyable game. i was pretty surprised at how much i liked it.