Alder's Blood: Definitive Edition

Hello, First of all, the art direction and story are really interesting. The game is dark, the drawings are great, and the corruption mechanic sort of serves the narrative (there are no heroes here). Secondly, this game can be played by its "frustrating" side : you never reload, and getting a sudden change of wind direction, a buggy pathfinding when you click too fast (seriously, walk dot by dot to avoid surprises) are just part of the difficulty; or you save and reload as necessary to play "perfectly" (it's what i do, and this way i've avoided to kill or sacrifice any hunter). The game is absolutely playable and reasonably polished, but of course i found unpleasing things : the pathfinding for characters sometimes send you straigth through enemy lines, so you are often forced to walk dot by dot, i sometimes have enough info to be encouraged to do a decision, but not enought to know if it's good or bad (like, how much corruption do i have ? Is rising bad or is it still ok ? some ressource is plentiful here, but how much is it?) Recommended, definitely. You should also play the prologue, as this shows you the mechanics, and how you should play (don't kill anything you don't have to)

First off, this is a very good game. While it might not be fair to just call it "Turn based Bloodborne", it certainly captures the feel of it. The game mechanics are solid, if not too deep, and clearly a lot of thought has been put into them. The wind and smell mechanic is my favourite, it adds a lot of nuance to the game. Some choices will not apeal to everyone: combat is highly stealth based, random chance can wreck your scavengers (your main source of income), and you will have to put down your own men (imagine a Darkest Dungeon were stress grows much slower but can't be lost). Combat is a slow grind and you WILL cheese your way out every time you can (which reminds me of the first XCOM's overwatch spam). Graphics-wise, backgrounds and "intermission" art is great, but the sprites, the ones of the hunters in particular, are drab and boring. A bit more detail and customization would have been great. Monster design goes from awe-inspiring to meh, but if you have a hate for werewolves after watching Twilight (you need to get over it, it's been almost 10 years ago) you are going to have a chance to exact your revenge. Sound design and music is good, nothing amazing, not a fan of the voice acting (the single lines they say during dialogue, like "huh" "yes" "chief" take me right out of immersion every single time). Character progression is kinda boring, since abilities are unlocked through equipment progression rather than level progression (but maybe higher character levels get more intresting stuff? not there yet). All in all, if you enjoy at least two of the following, and don't mind that your guys are disposable nobodies, you are going to enjoy this game: -turn based stealth, lots of it -resource management (time, money, food, crafting materials, political influence, health) -bleak victorian postapocalyptic scenario -you want to play Bloodborne, but don't want to break a controller against the wall

This game has an atmosphere of Bloodborne, nice gameplay mechanic and has a potential. But overall it lacks diversity, you simply play one and the same (sometimes too similar) missions again and again, thought terrain can change. Still, even with a good stealth mechanic it has, game cannot amuse only by the change of landscapes. I hoped for new interactions (in-mission dialogs at least) and gameplay variety till the final mission. Game needs more enemy types, more mission variety, more characters, perhaps playable characters to really tell the story of a peculiar world of the Cradle.

The aura of this game is wonderful, Gritty, you feel your character's pain. But it plays and feels like an early release. Early choice game, that actually do matter later in game, don't because somehow the trigger didn't write to the save. The inconsistent application of the stamina mechanic, which is core gameplay, is painful. I bought the game because the prologue showed some issues, but I incorrectly assumed those were fixed. I will probably come back to this game later, maybe in 6-8 months, let the team regroup, read these reviews and hopefully improve their work.

I completed the game just now, and I can say that it could be really great, but... - A LOT OF BUGS. It was like playing some kind of beta. Wrong animations, not working interface buttons, cloning of the same hunter at base. Really frustrating sometimes. - Unbalanced gameplay system. Too easy to farm a lot of resouses. Too many days for research new tech and mostly all the reasearch is pointless. Most of the weapons pointless too and you will never use them, just like expendable items (only thing that you need is medkit). Too complicated resistance/weakness system, which can be just overrided via instant monster kill ability or big concentration reserve. Almost every core gameplay aspect of the game need some tuning and improvement. - It is almost impossible to go in stealth mode because of total randomness of creatures movement and big quantity of them (before they notice you and attack all together). So for me the only way to finish missions was to kill almost every creature in my way. - No choices in the story at all. Some RPG elements would be great, but you will not meet them in this game, unfortunately... - Same soundtrack in every battle is annoying. This game need more background music. - Ending is just miserable. No final story words at all. On the other side: - Great stylish visual art. It is really amazing - Interesting core gameplay idea with noise area, smell, concentration points, that can be used either on movement or attacks.