Pray Game

Nice things: 1. Having two actions per turn makes fighting groups substantially less of a chore. The first dungeon looked pretty nice, too. 2. Having started the first boyfriend questline in the second dungeon it is refreshing to have some wholesome relationship for a protagonist. The writing in general seems to be more like Rebecca and Garo from Colette and less Colette and whatever the main dudes name was. 3. There are options to turn of content that might be too much. Even with the patch there is still a middle ground if you want that. 4. In general there are a lot of options. The movement speed can be increased to a degree that is unplayable if you want to. There are a lot of meta equipments that change core mechanics. Multiple difficulties. Second highest has bosses take ten turns what is totally fine for me. Not so great things: 1. The interface has some issues. You cannot load the game without going to the title and the title is missing a quit the game button. The button for fast travel was not mapped to any button on a controller. 2. The questlog does not tell you how far the quest has progressed. In the first quest one of the five items you are supposed to collect gets stolen from you and it does not tell you if you need to find another one or somehow figure out how to get the stolen one back. 3. The tutorial has weird pacing. I got the introduction to the romancing thing when talking to a npc who I guess will be one of the options later. It was not the first one though who I met two hours later. The combat tutorial dumps all possible icons on you at the start and you wont see half of them for a while. You can miss picking up the spells before the first fight and you get a five minute explanation what the spells you do not have would do. I am off to the second dungeon. Game is still new. Hoping for some bugfixes.

Not as good as Ste-Emiliana, but it worth the detour

Honestly, either they were very skilled in how they designed this, or they by accident hit on some design elements that worked very well. Parts of the game *can* be dark. parts of it can be punishing... and yes, it has at least one state akin to a deadlock that you *can* make saves from, to then never finish the game from that save. So ... not perfect. ...but on the otherhand, newgame+ lets you keep levels, awards bonus gear for specific actions, and the story, if you pay attention it, offers insights that can be useful or just plain educational about people in general What I liked most about the game is that the different parts of the game sometimes interacted in ways to create extra tension as the player, adding to the stakes for one dungeon dive, where an extra debuff was thrown into the mix and couldn't be removed until after a fight the debff was critical for - that wasn't a scenario forced by the game, it's just a debuff I landed at the exact wrong time.

I'm really enjoying this game.