Transistor

The mystery and atmosphere are spot on. With great voice acting, character design, and the always great super giants games art style. Reason I'm giving it a 3/5 is mainly the combat. I just can't get to into it. To me the super heavy reliance on the time stop mechanic kinda forces me into a specific style instead of experimenting which is something I like to do in an rpg. Now some will like it now doubt about it. Its more of a niche kind of combat that some will like and others like me won't.

This may be the most gorgeous game I've ever played. It looks like a cross between the best of Bastion and Shadowrun HK with the stellar voice work and music you'd expect from Supergiant Games. I find the mechanics irritating: either you play it as an incredibly clunky hack 'n' slash with insanely long, immobilising windups OR you play it as a turn-based tactics game where you need to run around helplessly avoiding damage between turns. All of that would be fine if the narrative was resonant... and it really, really isn't. Like Bastion, there's both a personal narrative and a world narrative, however this time there's no common theme tying them together (like loss/grief in Bastion). The world narrative never does justice to the ideas it toys with. It presents a jumble of cyberpunk clichés implying relevance to discussions of class and elitism and political power but they're so vague and its metaphors are so garbled that they ultimately mean nothing. The personal narrative is needlessly obtuse and the under-explained virtual nature of the world makes it hard to grasp the stakes. Finally, the ending jettisons the world narrative completely. We're left with a confusing personal narrative with little build-up and a shallow world narrative with no closure. I don't think I've ever wanted to love a game so much but couldn't. The best thing I can say is it's a nice interactive art book.

Superb at... story, sountrack, art style, graphics, characters (I love Red), voice acting, replay value... Is perfect.

Yes, it's truly beautiful in nearly all aspects, but as a game it felt lacking. Rhe playable aspects felt more like an excuse to tell the story, and show the awesome sound and art. Playable aspects are mostly combat and that was neither fun nor challenging. In the end, the Game felt much to short and didn't inspire me to replay it.

It would be much better if there were a difficulty level option and the game didn't throw the player between battle puzzles and action.