No.
Positives:
- Great art style
- Dense atmosphere
- Nice soundtrack and sfx
- Suspensful
- Numerous "deep-dive" Lovecraft references
- Decent writing (albeit there are numerous spelling mistakes. Grammar mistakes are rare.
- Interesting, fleshed out companions
- Fun, lore-friendly itemization
- Multiple approaches to quest solutions.
- Mechanically encouraged roleplay (ie. filling sanity by roleplaying your belief system)
- Viability of different character builds/RP opportunities
Negatives:
- Numerous - some times game-breaking - bugs
- Loading-screen simulator.
- The game's UI is frequently unresponsive.
- Gated content. The game feels on-the-rails, with areas, NPCs, and quests only becoming available in very specific orders, connected to completion of other quests. I imagine this will greatly reduce the replayablity factor in the game, and this couples with...
- ...the game having very few outcomes for your choices. Sure there are multiple ways to handle a given scenario, but the outcomes are rarely different. If this is not "illusion of choice" then I don't know what is.
- Lack of dedicated save/load option. What's the point? The game already eliminates the only reason why this should ever be implemented in an RPG (to block save-scumming) by allowing for multiple auto-saves.
- Game mechanics are obscured to a fault.
- You cannot utilize your companions' skills outside of combat. Eg. you cannot get the Outsider to craft you drugs using his Medicine skill. This makes putting points in that skill nearly useless for said character (it's his tagged skill, no less).
- Game is Lovecraftian in appearance but not in 'spirit'. The "Cthulhu Elements" are so heavy-handed and gaudy that it completely throws out all of Lovecraft's subtlety and allegorical writing out the window.
- Slog-fest Turn-based combat. It's your run-of-the-mill indie-quality rendition of the system, and it sucks like every other one.
126 gamers found this review helpful