Recent reviews by Zara

A cute, casual game that is good for relaxing. Flying feels nice most of the time, but sometimes it is janky. I liked all the designs, the sounds of all the creatures and the soundtrack are fitting for this game. The charming mechanic can be a bit clunky sometimes, but it does the job. Grinding all the achievements isn't too hard, but maxing out Drupes and Skyfish is a bit annoying. Also, I find the full price to be asking a bit much for this game, sale price feels more appropriate. I have no major complaints though, the game delivers on what it sets out to do and I enjoyed playing it.

I'll try to keep it short and only mention the issues with this game that I can remember after not playing it for a week or two:

- first time playing the game ended in it freaking out and giving me the very first quest a dozen times, finishing the quest would not close the one dozen duplicates of the quest. i had to restart the game.... this was literally the first 2 minutes of the game
- the NPCs in general are useless, they give you nothing interesting, don't do anything, all they do is chill at your base and be pointless
- speaking of your base, god forbid you try and have all the NPCs at one central location. be prepared for the game trying to load them all in every single time you walk past it. the game consistently bricks for a minute when I walk a little bit away from the base and then return. it's awful
- bosses are often a visual cluster♥♥♥♥, too much stuff going on at once, it's very hard to tell what is even going on. the bosses also drop blueprints for equipment that get consumed when you craft them, which means you have to grind them a lot to get all the equipment for more than one person. basically, multiplayer is less fun because you have to split all resources and the blueprints sometimes have really low chances to drop. some blueprints i have never even laid my eyes on because they just won't drop after dozens of attempts
- inventory management sucks, stacks of items cap at 99 but you can't quick-transfer stacks or anything, if you have one stack with 94 items and one with 63, you have to manually pick up 5 items from the 63 stack to make the stack with 94 have 99. this is annoying and i have no clue why anyone would ever design it that way. speaking of weird inventory stuff, you will constantly run into the problem that you can still interact with objects like other chests while you are going through the items on a chest. so you will try to pick up an item from one chest and by trying to do so, you will accidentally open another chest.... how do you mess this up?
- dungeons etc reset once you leave them, so this makes it frustrating in case you die, because you will drop items on death and can't get them back because you spawn outside the dungeon. more than once was i killed by a projectile that a boss spawned after it died, killing me and making me drop most of my stuff and having to start the whole thing over
- you get tons of absolutely useless key items. most of them don't seem to do anything except take up space
- most quests are boring "collect x amount of this item" quests and they give you nothing of note anyways. as mentioned, NPCs are useless and it's a waste of time to bother doing any quests for them
- there's no story or lore of note, you don't have any clear idea of why you exist, wtf you are doing and why. a wizard tells you to do stuff for some reason and you do it because it's a game i guess. this also means that the game ends suddenly at some arbitrary point because there's nothing you aim for anyways. me and my friend weren't even aware that we defeated the last available boss because none of it is communicated anyways. go place, kill boss because why not idk. Are you having fun?

If I booted the game up again I would probably remember even more frustrating things. I didn't even mention yet that I can't get all achievements because the last one is impossible to get from what I can tell.

Save your money, don't buy this. It's a waste of your time to play this game. It's a frustrating, buggy, unsatisfying game that fails even at the little things it attempts to do. Nothing in this game is really worth experiencing, except for maybe parts of the soundtrack that I liked. But really, the only reason I played this game for more than 10 minutes is because me and my friend had nothing better to do at the time.

had tons of fun with this game playing with friends, 10/10 would kill more lootbugs

Seasons After Fall is certainly a beautiful game on the surface, the visuals are really good as can be seen in the promotional material. The soundtrack is mostly ambient but it fits very well, though I wish it was slightly more present because often it's holding back too much. The story is short but overall okay, nothing incredibly deep but servicable for a platformer.

The problems with the game start when you actually... well, play it. It is a puzzle platformer but the puzzles are not well done. 90% of the time they are incredibly easy, which is a shame because the main mechanic of changing seasons could have been used to make for some good puzzles. What doesn't help is that the main thing you do is jumping, but the platforming aspects of the game are very poorly designed and the controls are not tight enough to be fun. A lot of the time you will find yourself missing a jump because of the bad jumping mechanics and then you have to walk back a good distance, change seasons a few times and finally end up at the spot you started at to get another try at a simple jump that isn't challenging in itself.

It really feels like the visual style was more important than the gameplay. And the world often consists of long stretches of nothingness where you just walk from one side to the other, confusing layouts that are frustrating to navigate without a map and barely anything worth exploring. A puzzle platformer should have good controls and a densely designed world with interesting puzzles to solve, things to discover etc, all of which is lacking from this game. So all you are left with is a good looking game with a short cute story that just isn't fun to actually play.

The game is okay for a few hours of relaxing gameplay. It looks neat, the soundtrack is nice and flying around is a lot of fun.

However, I think it fails in making you care even remotely about what's going on, the world is boring to look at and lacks variety of landscapes, the lore is only presented in tablets you find around the world but they aren't interesting to read and only take you out of the experience. Also the story itself is just kind of boring even if you read it, I didn't find myself engaged at any time, which makes the ending even more frustrating because it isn't satisfying in the least.

The gameplay is also lackluster, apart from the flying there is nothing interesting to do at all. All the puzzles hardly even count as puzzles, it is almost always just you hitting a switch to progress through a door that was locked.... and i guess a few times you have to maybe think for a minute to arrange things in a certain order.

I would describe the game as a failed attempt to recreate "Journey" from 2012, it has a very similiar artstyle and concept. But Journey does absolutely everything better that AER tries to do. If you have a PS and want a game that is superior in any way to AER and actually makes you feel engaged, then try out Journey instead, it's cheaper (iirc) and offers way more satisfying experience.

There isn't that much to say about Hollow Knight that hasn't been said already, so I'll keep this short: a very nice and challenging Metroidvania that doesn't take you by the hand. It still needs some more polishing, but I'm certain this will come with future DLC's.

I would definitely recommend it to everyone who has some experience with Metroidvanias, but beginners should probably choose something else to play as they will easily be overwhelmed by the difficulty and open structure of Hollow Knight.

I really wanted to like this DLC as I loved the base game, but I just can't. "Pulsars" combine radars and distortion (so calling it a "brand new object" is kinda stretching imo), my two least favourite features of Waveform. And as if this wasn't enough, the newly added levels are also very poorly designed and frustrating. To be honest, I think Eris is the worst set of levels in the entire game, so I personally can't recommend it at all.

Even though this game is free, I see no reason to recommend it. As the look and music are kinda bad and the gameplay is mediocre, it has nothing else to offer but it's story. And I think it's a badly written one, concepts like this have been done to death and there is nothing unique about this one in particular. So I see no reason to play this game except if you're after some easy achievements.

It's okay I guess, for a free game at least. The visuals are nice and the music is cool while the gameplay itself is kind of boring. It doesn't really do any harm to play it once, but that's about it. When it comes to the overall story/message, I've seen similiar things being done better before, so don't expect too much and don't read too much into it.

Best Game I've ever played, deep and complex mechanics. Definitely not bugged or anything.

10 out of 10 people would recommend it to friends they don't like