By-the-numbers classic JRPG. Absolutely herculean, monumental effort for a mostly solo-dev project! 2022 has been a big year for the indie JRPG between this and Crystal Project.

Rich soundtrack and gorgeous art, but I didn't find anything to love in the characters. The combat has a few slight twists to enjoy, but the skills are painfully boring while encounters and enemy design are dead simple. The UI has a lot of friction in its map, inventory, and character management. Still had a nice time exploring the world, finding treasure, and loved its area-based quest board for leveling up.

Worth mentioning that I had to slog through serious bugs. I experienced softlocks or crashes about once per hour, seemingly at random. The autosave wasn't always recent, so I found myself habitually saving every minute to avoid losing progress. My 100% playthrough was about 50 hours, so this was a real tax on my patience.

Beautiful-looking movement that somehow felt obtuse for how simple its mechanics are.

Points of interest are pretty far apart, so you're expected to glide along the landscape picking up speed boosts. There's no challenge to it, yet it's easy to hit a dead zone and find yourself waiting a few seconds until you can hit the next boost. In that little pocket of time, you feel like a dipshit walking on the side of the road because your car ran out of gas. It sounds like a nitpick, but this is the majority of the gameplay.

It's otherwise a pretty simple Journey-like exploration experience that doesn't ask too much of you, but I didn't find the story or aesthetics compelling.

Incredible storytelling and characterization, gorgeous environments, but...

The gameplay is lifeless. The movement and combat feels both too simple and underbaked. The sound design is rough, with lots of dialogue overlapping or cutting early. The cues often aren't lined up and the music often felt inappropriate to the moment. Everywhere I went, I was stubbing my toe on tiny pieces of jank.

If you just want the story and characters, that's here and the gameplay won't stop you from enjoying that. But personally, I need the gameplay to connect with the world.

At first glance this game might look silly or brainless, but Sakuna punches way above its weight. It's a strange, fascinating, easy-going experience, but peppered with pleasant challenge. It somehow scratches the itch for a comfy and intimate colony farming sim, while also operating as a satisfying platforming beat-em-up.

The farming consists of seasonal minigames, each with their own rituals for optimization. New systems get introduced with each harvest that keep the cycle feeling fresh. There's always just enough to remember and monitor that I never found myself doing everything perfectly - letting the water out soon enough, waiting for the right temperature to hull, bringing the ducks back inside when it sprouts. It feels great to see your character get buff when you do it all correctly.

The combat centers around this grapple hook that doubles as a generous dodge. You constantly sling back and forth throughout fights, set up combos in the air, and blast enemies into each other for big aoe damage. The tutorials aren't great and it might take a while to make sense of its quirks - some core mechanics don't get any explanation until 20 hours in. But it's worth the trouble - the loop is satisfying and reminiscent of Dragon's Crown or Odin Sphere.

There ends up being quite a bit of platforming in the level design, again centered on this grapple-dodge. It feels good to zip around the environments, but this is probably the jankiest mechanic of the game; there's too much guesswork involved in figuring out where you can latch on. Still, I was surprised at how much fun I was having even though I would often struggle to accurately attach onto ledges.

There's a million other tiny quirks and unpolished elements, but what's really holding this game back most is its size. Sakuna is begging for more than a 4-hut village and an archipelago of isolated combat zones. I want to survey the vast rice fields at the end of the game and watch my allies till the fields. As is, it just feels a little bit too small, too claustrophobic. My runner-up complaint is its resource variety and distribution; there's too much inventory noise for little meaningful impact.

I was surprised to realize I actually learned something about rice. Ten hours in I was getting excited for each new tutorial about the phases of growth, when to flood the fields, what type of fertilizer to use. It got me thinking about how important rice is - so many lives have been spent studying this one crop, thinking up new ways to cook and prepare it. There's so much cultural depth behind this one little grain. This game cares about rice, and it wants you to care, too.

five hours in, i was really scratching my head as to how this has captured so much love. expectations are hard to control; i went into this knowing it's a lot of people's favorite game, or at least their favorite metroidvania. i pushed through because i'm tired of ten year-old kids looking sad when i tell them i haven't played this game.

it just doesn't feel good to move or interact, especially for the first 5-10 hours without upgrades. the default iframe window makes it possible to get full-combod between enemies and hazards. there is no parry, counter, or escape tool; the shitty dodge doesn't come until lategame. enemy attack animations generally lack unique telegraphs, and since most patterns lean heavily on RNG. you will die many times to unfortunate and unavoidable sequences. ironically, most of the bosses have the same set of attacks! in the end, most combat boils down to rapid zipping back and forth or the occasional pogo cheese for all the enemies that weren't given any vertical awareness.

navigating through the environment is clunky and the map is not polished to support rapid traversal. it's difficult to identify rooms from each other, and there are few landmarks to go by. you'll be checking the map constantly, which often means opening up the full menu to see other neighboring zones. this makes backtracking - the cornerstone of this whole genre - a chore, rather than a satisfying mastery of the environment. meanwhile, movement itself mostly boils down to spam dashing ad nauseum. dashing has a loud, poofy sound effect that quickly wears out its welcome when you're running from one end of a zone to another. after experiencing the pure delight of traversal in Ori 2, this was not a good time.

i love metroidvanias because they're one of the few genres that make you want to poke into every nook and cranny. i love looking at the map and seeing a little sliver of a room i haven't reached yet and scouring all the possible entrance areas. i love using all the late game tools to blast through the early zones that had given me trouble ten hours prior. Hollow Knight just doesn't have enough mastery over its own mechanics or design to provide that experience.

it's not bad. it's pretty decent! it's fine. really. it's. fine. the bugs-all-the-way-down theme is great and the NPCs all have excellent flavor. i'm being a little harsh because on this site, Hollow Knight is in the top 100 highest-rated games of all time - twice. but this genre has been done better before and since.

first-person platforming will always be controversial - but this is such a gratifying exploration of the concept. the movement feels exciting, rapid, and dangerous, especially as the game progresses into wider and taller spaces. by the end, there's all these tools and tricks at your disposal that make you feel like a badass, zipping back and forth through the sky. it's not easy, and the puzzles could be a little more attuned to the strengths of the movement. for me, that didn't diminish the massive adrenaline rush from its peak moments.