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I was originally drawn to this game because it was marketed as a spyro-like.

Unfortunately, upon playing it, I discovered that it WAS like a Spyro game, but not the ones I liked. Aside from a few small aesthetic choices, this game follows the path of the Spyro remake - rather than being a comedic platformer collection/puzzle game (as the original spyros were), this is a combat based action-platformer (akin to Legend of Spyro). Everything has health bars, and you have to button mash out combos of attacks to whittle down enemies.

And even if I had been interested in an action fighter, the actual combat is really bad. There doesn't seem to be any particular aiming or guidance system for attacks, so you have to fight with the camera and controls to even hit an enemy with your combos, many of which are direction based. The number of times I tried to do a combo that whiffed past an enemy got really annoying.

The voice acting was also a bit tepid. It's my understanding that a number of people worked together to provide voice acting for this game, and it's clear a lot of them were not exactly the most skilled at voice acting. Many lines come off very clearly as read off a script, and lack tonal context for the scene they are in. One of the dragons is voiced by the actor of Sly Cooper, and the writers were so excited about this they slipped in multiple references to this fact in the conversation, all but winking at the audience. It was very distracting.

Ultimately, I can't say that I recommend it, if you are looking for a classic Spyro experience. Those who liked Legend of Spyro might be into it, but I wasn't. I become bored of the monotonous combat and dull characterization a half hour in, but maybe I will try again another time.

It seems like the creator of the game released this as a standalone prequel game, since the original team and project was cancelled due to his inability to properly manage it (though I will give him points for doing this before he took the kickstarter money, rather than after...) There was talk about redoing the game in Unreal 5, but who knows if that will actually ever happen, or when.

I have mixed feelings on this game, but I'm going to downvote it because my overall impression was negative.

However, I will provide as complete a review as possible, good and bad.

From a technical standpoint, this game does some interesting new things I haven't seen before in other graphic novels. While I can't say I've read every one, this is the first one I've seen that implements narrative asides - both conversations that happen between your party members without you participating, and a sort of 'meanwhile' mechanic where you see things that happen far away from you between people you may not have met yet in game. It's an interesting way to tell the story, but the 'Parallel Chronicles" does somewhat suffer from a few limitations. For instance, all of them are bound to a specific location on the world map, and sometimes you have to backtrack to find chronicles you haven't seen before. You only find out because they are conveniently numbed to let you know you missed one when you see a new one available. It would have been much more elegant to simply have a screen where they are all shown and unlock as you progress the game.

They also sometimes undercut the narrative - there was one instance where the shadowy villain visits me in a dream to try and 'sow doubt' in me, only for me to shortly after see a scene where they congratulate themselves on doing so. You can't trick the reader and tell the reader about the trick after, that's like wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

There is also a 'book' system, where some locations will have a little bit of flavor narration about the world in the form of a 2 page entry that someone in the world wrote. They contribute very little to the plot, but are useful for expanding a bit more on the world you're in. It would be nice if there was a little more meat to them, but I guess they're sufficient as an exposition medium. What I do not like is having to pixel hunt for them. You know how many of them are on a given screen, and how many you have found, but not where they are. That is annoying, and distracts from the game's flow. Pixel hunts were not fun when were first conceived, they still aren't.

Let's move on to aesthetics. The art in the game clearly has some effort put into it, and many of the scenes can be quite pretty. However, the character design is something I find severely lacking. As far as I can tell, there are only two kinds of men in this word - skinny boys, and musclebound warrior men. There is no middle ground or variation beyond these two body types. No one is ever old, or fat, or infirm, or sick. No one has scars or missing teeth (but there is one pirate with an eyepatch. A pirate with an eyepatch, how exotic). At least half of them have exposed torsos and chests, so you can see their hot bods. There is only like 3 female characters in the game, so there isn't enough of a spread for me to make analysis on there.

Some times, their designs barely make sense for their role in the story. The 'elder' in your home village looks like he's in his mid 20's, and wears this sort of overcoat that covers his arms but leave his torso on full display. The high inquisitor villain only wears a couple of straps, walking around looking like he is naked except for the rare times you can see enough of his model to show that he is wearing pants. The prisoner character is somehow allowed to be dressed at all times in hotboy soldier armor that only covers his chest and shoulders and leaves his slim midsection open for you to oogle. At one point, a skinny character talks about how he 'used to be fat', and how he 'fixed himself', so I suspect there's a bit of body shape bias coming into the writing and design here.

These design aesthetics come off as powerfully horny to me, and it distracts from what is evidently supposed to be a serious story about war, tyranny, and deception. There is even one section where a side conversation between two characters drags the reader through a bit about one of them handling the other's sword in way that is clearly supposed to imply that he is touching their ♥♥♥♥. The joke is extremely unsubtle and played out at this point, we've all seen this gag by now. Is this a dating sim, or a story about war and rebellion? Maybe the lines are simply more blurred than I personally feel comfortable with.

So, that brings us to the characters themselves. They're... competently written, I suppose, if a cast of cardboard cutouts of different kinds of sexy men (and the 3 ladies) is something you find interesting to read about. They all have an archetype and stick with it, even if it isn't clear what the archtype is at first. Even the main antagonist goes through a pretty standard 'my evil masters betrayed me so I join the good guys' arc. There were a few surprises, I admit, but I dunno if there were enough to make this cast feel really fleshed out.

This appears to be one of those games where every cast member is a potential romantic interest, but given that two of them are questionably underage (people mention they look too young to drink at one point) I'm a little uncomfortable with some of those options. At least the two romance paths I did poke at seemed alright. Kinda felt like an afterthought more than a romance plot, though.

As for the story... the world exists as a series of flat paintings that a small cast people inform you about. This it difficult to feel empathy when they begin bemoaning the terrible things happening in the world. As an example, my two 'friends' often lapse into sad diatribes about how sad it is that our village is going to be destroyed but to me, the village in question is simply 5 or so background scene artworks and 3 people. I am supposed to feel sad, because they feel sad, and are informing me that now is the time to feel sad, about people that exist only in the narration. So much of what happens in this game you are simply informed of, rather than shown, and the game seems breathlessly eager to repeat and over-explain plot points as if it is worried you will miss them if it doesn't hold your hand the entire way.

This is really disappointing, because there is the skeleton of an interesting plot in here, about breaking eternal cycles of life and death and a conflict between ultimate evil and life. It's just buried under layers of meaningless padding.

But in the end, the most frustrating aspect of the writing of this game is probably that it refuses to let you make a single meaningful choice. Not one choice in the game ever lets you actually do what you wanted to and live with consequences. It frequently PRETENDS that it does, encouraging you to agonize about your choices, only to shortly after reveal some as yet unforeseen plot twist that means the entire binary option was meaningless, and everything returns to the status quo. There are SO many fake out deaths in this game, it's exhausting. SPOILERS FOLLOW:

The only time when characters actually start to die is at the very end of the game, and after fiddling around a little, I determined whether they die or not appears to be based on decisions you make, many shortly before the Final Battle. At yet, even with that single instance of allowing real consequences to occur, they ultimately take your final decision in the game away from you, making it meaningless. You are presented with a choice of ultimate sacrifice or self preservation, but don't be fooled - no matter which one you pick, after the epilogue there is yet another scene that completely robs the expected consequences of your supposed choice of any real impact.

The amount of time I have in this game is very small at the time of writing this review, but I feel like now is when I want to give my initial thoughts because I am already so fed up with this game that I can't have it open anymore. I received this game as a gift, mostly because I was anxious about actually purchasing this game due to the things I heard about it making me nervous I would not enjoy it. My anxiety has been founded so far.

There are positives to Settlemoon. It's got a cute art style, simple and pixellated, and given that I've met the artist for the game I know that's their strength, design wise. However, sometimes the designs can b a little varied in quality. I saw a really cute anteater holding a letter with a little hat and backpack, and it just about melted my heart. The vast majority of the sprites in the game are of somewhat less quality though. Many of them are just grainy pixel shapes that might be bugs or something, but I couldn't precisely tell you what kind. The scenery in the background is pretty, and there are some very pretty moths.

However, the real killer for me is the lack of player feedback and direction. I can handle a game that leave you to explore and puzzle out the world you are placed into in a diagetic way, sure. But the creator of this game has taken it upon themselves to make the game non-diagetically confusing, with even the UI elements being only partially explained. There is almost no text in this game with nearly all UI elements being presented as only buttons with images on them, and the tutorial section dispenses with text entirely directs you to what things to press by having a moth flutter around and land on buttons.

It's certainly a creative approach to a text free tutorial, but I did not find it sufficient. I am not the kind of person who enjoys being constantly confused and feeling lost. I would draw a comparison between this game and Tunic, a game which also plays with non-diagetic obfuscation of gameplay elements, but the problem is that unlike Tunic, which is an active game which provides you with something to do by capturing the drive to explore that Zelda games mastered, Settlemoon has made the choice to be an idle game, where the primary gameplay loop is waiting around for stuff to happen.

As such, after playing this game 10 minutes, and reaching the end of the bare bones tutorial, I know barely anything about how to play this game. I don't understand the UI, I don't understand the time frames I'm supposed to be sinking into this game or how often I should be checking back, and I'm left staring at a bunch of pixellated bugs clustered around a tiny house I made, doing bugger all. Did I do it right? Am I supposed to be something else, or just waiting? What is the purpose of the green stuff I put into a cup? Am I serving some kind of drinks? Is the tiny house a tavern?

The fact that I don't know anything about what is going on is a problem for me. I do not like being confused and uncertain of what I am supposed to be doing. To enjoy something, I need to be able to intuit a direction to go in, not just stare blankly at the screen in total bewilderment for minutes on end. If I was in Tunic right now, I would be hunting around for some hidden tunnel or chest I must have missed. But this is Settlemoon, and I don't even have pages from a game manual written in a made up language to try and decipher here.

There are clearly people that like this game, but it stresses me the hell out. I might poke at it later, to see if waiting changed anything, but I feel like it won't have.

I received this game as part of a humble bundle, so did not pay for it directly. Given that it's value was significantly discounted for me, I am inclined to be a little more generous to it than I would have been had I paid the retail price.

There's an interesting game in here, no doubt. Or rather, there are 5 smaller games with wildly different tones and themes stitched together as part of an overall narrative about the SCP foundation. One of them managed to make me sad cry, and I happen to be the kind of person who likes to sad cry in response to media I consume.

However, it must be said that my experience with the gameplay itself was less than stellar. There are several 'chase sequences' in the game, and none of them are done very well. Every time felt like it was trial and error figuring out the right way to run so the [redacted] didn't get me, and sometimes they seem to move faster than others, like their AI behavior is inconsistent and you just have to fail again and again until they go slow enough to let you escape. The game never supplies any context clues upon being caught by the [redacted] in question that could indicate the changes in movement speed are intentional or part of a behavior I'm misinterpreting, just a game over screen that 'helpfully' reminds you to run away when something is chasing you. THANKS, I DIDN'T KNOW THAT.

Over 4 times I was also forced to quit the game and start over due to bugs or performance issues such as falling through the floor into a grey void instead starting a cutscene, the game failing to load a new area and sitting eternally on black screen, and one part near the end where I was forced to abandon the game entirely, unfinished, because a room the game takes place in makes the game chug so badly that it grinds to a standstill and softlocks, reducing to less than a frame per second, with the audio jumping all over itself and skipping.

I honestly can't fathom what about that room was causing the issue. It was a fairly small, dark room with no complex animations inside it, all that was visible were two doors with a red and blue light over them (because they were making a tired matrix reference. Not even exaggerating, the phrase 'go through the blue door, and you'll stay in wonderland, and I'll show you how deep the rabbithole goes' is uttered by a voice actor in the game at this point). I tried rebooting the game twice to load that area, and both times the game just ground to a halt, unable to load the area, and had to be closed via task manager.

I guess 25 year old movie references were simply too much for this game to process, sad.

That experience being the end of my playthrough, I still can't say I disdain this game. There was some real effort put into creating these stories, and at times the art direction in the game is breathtaking... they pick an interesting medley of SCP entries ranging from mysterious existential dread, to scary horror, to goofy (but still deadly), to sad and whimsical. It's a real rollercoaster!

But they really, really needed someone more experienced in coding to go over this game and iron out the many awkward kinks and jankiness that's in it. It's definitely one of those games where there were great artists and writers involved but not the best coding team.

It seems like the producers broke up for unclear (and probably personal) reasons though, and this game is unlikely to get any further patches or content. Who knows, though. It's at least worth looking at as a piece of SCP gaming history.

In many ways, Dwarf Fortress is the Ur-example of an entire genre of games that may not have existed without its creation. We have this game to thank for excellent titles like Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, and I suppose more average but not necessarily terrible titles like Gnomoria, Clanfolk and Caves of Qud (though I haven't really played either of those last two, so your own mileage may vary).

However, it must be said that being the primeval version of an entire genre of gaming does not necessarily mean it is the best version in all ways. Older is not always better, and in many ways, Dwarf Fortress has been left behind by modern iterations of its genre. The graphical edition on steam has made great strides to improving the UI of the game and make things more readable, but the underlying jank of the game is inescapable. Playing this game after playing Rimworld unavoidably brings to mind minor frustrations that the Dwarf Fortress game engine has baked in - why is it impossible to build flooring unless there is nothing currently in that space? Even a chair or door in the way will result in the game refusing to let you lay down flooring, and sometimes even dwarves (or kobolds, if you are using the mod) standing in the way can make construction plans suspend themselves. Construction is also impossible in diagonals, so many times your fortress will build around a corner and then be unable to finish the wall because the corner piece of blocked off, requiring you to disassemble a wall, finish the corner, then rebuild a new wall.

These are just small examples of QoL improvements that were added into newer iterations of the genre, but still haven't quite made it into Dwarf Fortress. Selecting building materials is another such hassle, as there are DOZENS of types of wood and stone in the game, and each one appears on a list of material options. Or you can just select 'pick nearest material' and watch a patchwork ugly floor and wall be constructed of 6+ different colored materials. I don't necessarily blame the dev for this - as I understand, Tarn was a solo dev for over a decade on this game. And it was the first of it's kind, so props to that.

However, I suspect that trying to comprehend and fix all the spaghetti contained within the code of this game would be enough to drive another poor soul mad. Mad!! What Tarn did wrong people were able to see and build better in later games, though.

That being said, if you can work around the jank of the clumsy systems in the game, in many ways it has more complexity and depth than anything else the newer games manage. What it lacks in polished systems and UI it more than makes up with in the scope of what is possible.

Where else can I build a fortress on the side of a volcano, dig deep underground and create a machine that, with the flip of a switch, floods the overworld with lava, melting those damn goblin raiders into slag? And should a forgotten monstrosity try to crawl from the depths into my fortress, they'll have to slither over half dozen fully armed traps stuffed with steel giant serrated blades. More like forgotten lunchmeat, am I right?

And there are many other delightful things you can discover hidden within the mechanics of the game. Do you want your fortress to become a bastion of learning, where scholars and sages come from afar to peruse your vast library and pen their own tomes within it? You can do that! Do you want to capture a dragon in a cage and use it to burn anyone who tries to enter your fortress? I wouldn't recommend it, it will very likely go horribly, but technically it's possible!

And that's really the core of the fun of Dwarf Fortress. There are so many creative ways to manipulate this vastly complex game engine to see and do things you wouldn't have expected. But the learning curve is very steep! You will fail very often, and in ways that are more esoteric and frustrating that anything you would see in Rimworld. Just wait until you have to deal with a werecreature plague that gets worse every full moon, an attacking bronze titan, or a loyalty cascade. Or you're going to discover what lies in store if you dig too deep!

You're going to ♥♥♥♥ up and everyone is going to die, multiple times! Over and over! But every time you will learn from the experience, and the next time, you'll do better. Unlike modern games, there is no difficulty settings. The only gameplay setting is Dwarf Fortress (I mean, you can edit the world settings during generation I guess, but that's not going to do a lot to change the overall gameplay).

That's why the mantra of this game has long been: Losing is Fun!

Buy it now and experience it for yourself. Do it. And get the kobold mod, it's really cute.

11/2/2024:

Review is being revised to include the latest DLC.

This review will contain minor spoilers, as I will circumspectly describe some events that happen without giving the full details.


This game shows a lot of promise but is bogged down with an assortment of small frustrations that individually could be overlooked, but on the whole create a generally negative gameplay experience.

Perhaps the thing that has been most annoying is how poorly optimized this game is for lower end PCs like mine. Even on minimal graphical settings, this game chugs. There are frequently times when it takes over 5 seconds for a dialogue interaction to start, and many times when I enter a new area, it can take more than 10-15 seconds for the environment to finish loading in. Similar short but noticeable delays occur before and/or after nearly every game action, including in combat.

I have heard that the game's release to consoles has been delayed due to simply being unrunnable in an acceptable state, and I am not surprised. I have played their previous game, Divinity Original Sin 2, just fine on my computer, so whatever they did with that, they need to do to this game.

Even if I set aside the hardware parts of the game, there's other things that bog it down. The limit of 4 members in the party can cause issues when you are in multiplayer games, because only one person can actually participate in any dialogue, and often it's the person who wandered into the NPC's talking radius first who controls the choices, which can become infuriating when someone wants to play the game a different way than you. Or if someone else is better suited to make the skill check you need. Also, the more people you have, the more you're going to miss out on the plots of the secondary characters, since you have to squeeze them into the increasingly smaller number of extra spots.

Not that there seems to be much to them past about 2-3 hours of gameplay in. NPC plots seem to be very frontloaded, comprising up to a half dozen campground interactions at most, not including the circumstances of how you meet them in the first place, and then they just stop having an impact on the plot, remaining silent members of your party unless you specifically speak to them. Sometimes, if an NPC has something important to do or say at a specific point in the main plot, and you didn't have them in your party, they'll just show up without warning or explanation to do their thing. Perhaps this is mostly a problem that I have to finish the first act before they have anything else interesting to say.

Which brings us to the next problem. There's way too much ♥♥♥♥ to do in this game, and very little guidance on how, when, or why you would be doing it. Too much content is not normally a bad thing, but the problem is the way in which it is presented. This is not a game you can casually enjoy, with or without your friends, it is a perplexing slog where you are frequently presented with choices, both environmental and dialogue based, and essentially expected to 'figure it out yourself'. You have to be constantly paying attention to your surroundings, and actively scanning every corner, or you are going to miss things that seem unimportant but turn out to not be. This doesn't even need to come in the form of quest markers, there were many cases where a few extra lines of dialogue for helpful context could been added to an NPC conversation, or some sort of environmental storytelling like a scrap of paper or book that contains important information relevant to what you are trying to figure out.

The most hair pulling example that comes to mind is finding an adamantine forge at one point, which has no instructions included, but rather than requiring adamantine, which you find in the same path that leads to said forge, it requires a nugget of mithril, which you can only find by noticing that there is a big silvery blue rock off the main path that looks like background scenery, and requires teleportation magic or a leg breaking jump to reach. You are supposed to break this rock for a nugget of mithril that the game doesn't even tell you that you need. I only found this out because I used a guide. If a game is making me look up a guide, it has failed at conveying its desired plot.

Oh, and then there's a surprise difficult boss fight as a reward for going through all that effort to activate the forge. I hope you weren't low on HP and resources! And heaven help you if you didn't have the foresight to bring equipment that deals the single damage type that works against this boss you didn't know you were going to fight.

This is not the first or only circumstance where you will run yourself ragged trying to complete a poorly explained challenge only to be 'rewarded' with a surprise difficult boss fight. This may be based on a modern tabletop gaming system, but they have designed the game like one of the old, frustrating CRPGs where save scumming is all but a requirement to complete the game. Many bosses can be figured out after dying to them several times and figuring out their behavior, yes, but that just pads out the play time and makes everyone involved feel frustrated. And you can't just long rest any time you like in this game, unlike previous baldur's gate entries, because you need to expend finite resources to long rest, so many times you'll enter a boss fight not at your best condition.

And D&D 5e, the game this is based on, is unfortunately a rather shallow mechanical system. It is designed for ease of play, not for depth or breadth of options. Translating this to an even more simplified CRPG format compounds the problem. Many character levels ups give you absolutely nothing to work with except for an increase in HP, and I'm pretty sure that casters are supposed to have more spell options and slots than this game allows them. Rogues in particular are absolutely awful about this, getting only HP and occasional passive buffs when they level up, with almost no active choices about your character's progression.

I constantly feel too weak to participate in what the game throws at me (even on 'Story' mode, the supposed easy difficulty) and end almost every serious fight at the end of my ropes, and that is not an experience that I would consider 'conductive to fun', any more than experiencing constant feelings of confusion and lack of direction.

You also can't path to areas using your map, or your minimap, you have to laboriously scroll the gameplay map over to a place, sometimes rotating it so you can properly target a place you want to go, because elevation and slopes abound in this game world, and hope it it's too far away because there's a maximum distance you can move from your party at any time.

So, congratulations Larian Studios for managing to recapture the awkward, frustrating vibes of the old Baldur's Gate games and their contemporaries of the 90s in this modern era. If you like dying a lot in ways that are nearly impossible to avoid without save scumming or foreknowledge and wandering in circles trying to figure out what to do next before giving up and looking up an online guide, you're in the right place!

But I'm not.

Let's just hope they work out the performance issues, at least, because the rest of this seems pretty unsalvageable to players like me, without serious changes. I do not think that this game has redefined the modern era of games in any way other than 'they obviously put real effort into it instead of halfassing the game and filling it with microtransactions.'. It saddens me that the bar is so low that this game represents a pinnacle of achievement.

I think that they really did work hard on this, and that they should be rewarded for their efforts, but I'd be more impressed if they had created something new instead of just channelling the spirit of 90's CRPG nostalgia with a fresh coat of paint.

I have a whole lot of DLCs purchased an installed, but today was the first time I've ever progressed far enough in a game to actually see some of the mid to late game content.

And I have to say that the way the Great Khan/Marauding Horde mechanic is implemented has got to be the most horrendously stilted way they could possibly have done it. I breaks a number of rules the game normally sets down about interstellar war. Here's what's wrong with it.

-Khan forces aren't treated as an actual side, they function more like marauding pirates so
--Any system they attack and destroy the station of considered 'unoccupied' after instead of 'captured' unless you beat them back, then it spawns a new outpost there and gives you the system back... for some reason? It uses entirely unique delete and respawn mechanics for territory outpost, instead of capture/recapture mechanics. This is bad, because,
-Any other side can claim it as if it was open territory, and if they do, the game pretends it was always theirs, even if they've swallowed up over half your empire by scavenging behind the horde like vultures after surrendering to them and agreeing to be a vassal. I lost fully half my territory to an empire whos fleet power was 'Pathetic' compared to mine while busy building ships and beating away horde fleets for 30+ years while the rest of the galaxy surrendered or sat on their ass doing nothing.
--At one point, my empire was split in half due to this, because this Satrapy kept stealing 'unclaimed land' from me mid war, (because, as a vassal state, he wasn't being attacked by the horde), and decided to close borders on me, preventing me from reaching the other side of my empire. I was forced to declare war on them, too, just for free movement to deal with the problem. Satrapy empires should NOT be able to close borders to you during an event like this, for this exact reason - they agreed to be tributary cowards, there is no reason you should be respecting their hyperlanes.
-The horde can build their own stations, but once they build there, it's considered part of their empire, and you don't get it back even after the khan dies, it's considered territory of the new standard empire that replaces the horde's turf. You can't even make a reclaim casus belli on it.

So, by the design of this 'mid-game' crisis, you're better off ignoring the entire thing and just agreeing to be subjugated, or every weak empire around you will opportunistically gobble up your land, and then when the khan dies, you can't even make a claim on the territory, because it was never 'captured' from you, it was expanded into with outposts when the horde cleared it out. So, if you're a pacifist who can't do conquest (like I was) that's it. Basically game over for you, even if you survived the fight and have the strongest fleet in the game, because you're surrounded by people who own all your stuff and they weren't even the ones you were fighting

It's infuriating to have everything go this badly not because you failed to survive a crisis, but because the game was not designed to remember which territory used to be yours during it.

The easiest fixes I can think of for this are these:

-Block satrapy nations from expanding for the duration of the crisis
-Satrapy nations can't close borders to empires who aren't Satrapies or their khan overlords.
-Allow reclamation casus belli for stolen systems the Marauding Horde took.

But it's been 4 years since this came out so my hopes aren't up.

I received this game via a Humble Choice pack, and I have very mixed feelings. There are times like this when I wish that Steam had something more complicated than a binary review system. This game is fun, and I enjoy the mechanics and plot greatly, BUT. And this is a VERY IMPORTANT BUT.

The game requires a lot of patience to play and enjoy. This is not just because of the mechanics itself, which can be convoluted and easy to accidentally mess up, the most important of which is that you can only bring so many programs with you onto a mission, and sometimes you don't realize you've brought the wrong ones until it's too late and you have to start over with a new set up (which brings us to another issue, your inability to leave a mission early without irrevocably failing it. I assume this was to create stakes, but since closing and reopening the game starts you off from just before you begin the mission, it's kind of pointless)

The much larger and more frustrating problem with the game is not the mechanics, however, but it's tendency to softlock largely at random, forcing you to close and reboot the game entirely. I have played this game for 11 hours at the time of this review, and the game has softlocked no less than 5 times in that period.

There seem to be two recurring themes with the softlocks, and if the creators happen to see this review, maybe they can work on fixing them. The softlocks I have repeatedly experienced are as follows

-When downloading from a data node, the game locks up during the step where it ticks down your download progress. The game is not specifically frozen, but it hangs there without completing the download tick forever, preventing you from starting your turn or continuing.
-The exit command can sometimes completely cease to work, preventing you from leaving the mission either by inputting the command or hitting ESC (in essence, you get a message saying you are terminating the session, but nothing happens, no matter how many times you try, and the ESC key doesn't do anything) - this one is more insidious, as you don't often realize it's happened until you have completed the mission, and you are ready to leave, only to find that you have been softlocked for an unknown amount of time, thus wasting the entire effort you spent on the mission.

Assuming these two issues and any others I haven't found yet can be fixed, this is a great game. But tonight won't be the first time since I started playing that I closed the game in frustration and went off to do something else after another softlock incident.

Looks like this has been patched. :)

This game started out with such a fascinating premise, combining a card game with puzzles overlaid with a spooky creepypasta sort of vibe. Eventually the game expands beyond that focused premise to something much more broad and intricate in a way that requires me to not elaborate so I don't spoil the surprise.

However, it's excellent start soon gives way to an utterly unsatisfying ending where the game quite literally commits suicide and jumps off a cliff, leaving absolutely all outstanding plot threads unsolved. The ending was so arbitrary and stupid that I actually wondered if there was some kind of alternate ending I missed, and I had to look online for more information.

It turns out that there is not any alternate ending, at least not that is accessible within the game itself. You see, this game suffers from a deep and terminal case of it's makers thinking that they are being far more clever than is actually helpful to the average layman picking up this game. There are in fact some deeper secrets in the game, but they involve some extremely complicated ciphers that use meta-information (that is to say, context that is outside of the scope of the game itself, such as the previous works of the games designers and what the game was called at a point before it's release).

Not only is this impossible to solve without knowing all these things, but it does not actually unlock anything within the game itself - this simply directs you to a now closed down order website where you could request something be mailed to you.

Obviously, some people did know all this information and solved the cipher or this information about the ciphiers wouldn't be posted online, but to me it feels like nothing but a self-congratulatory metacontent back-patting on the part of the designers and does nothing to alleviate the abysmal ending to the game.

The game is good for about 10-20 hours of gameplay, I guess, but don't think you're going to walk away feeling fulfilled at the end.