This game has a grand opening. Atmosphere is opressing and foreboding. But the game has about a 50/50 success rate. So 4 chapters. 2 are pretty great. 1 has the makings of something pretty scary. And the one. The one is so awful and mundane that the game never recovered. For me everything that is wrong about this game is in that hospital. This is where all of the atmosphere goes away and the game is trying to emulate Outlast, but it is just so bad. I mean one shot kills and the worst AI. If you get unlucky and this is your first level, then you will have seen the worst of this game. The other parts are better. Slightly. Yes this game has all the elements that made PT into a convoluted mess. And there are some great and horryfying moments here. But mostly there are not. So the insanity meter from Amnesia, the chase sequences from Outlast, a horrible menu, ghost and contact AI that is only bad or horrible or glitchy. So picture it. A chase sequence. The music is amped up. The creaking and screaming and rambling of someone unhinged. A glass breaks. A door slams. And this is my 5th minute running through the level. I'm trying to find some door. All the sounds are still here but there is nothing chasing me. So i reload. The same thing, only now i looked up where the door was. Next section. 200 meters of hallways. 20 monsters. One mistake and a one hit kill with an unskippable death sequence. Now picture another scene. You are walking at the grocery store. Your family is calling you a worthless drunk. All the shelves fill with cases of beer. You can't leave with an empty cart. And this is what the experience is. Constant frustration because they crammed in some gameplay mechanisms from other more famous games and they forgot their own tale. And when that central story comes back then it's pretty great. And now the most controversial statement. This game deserves a safe mode like SOMA. This horror game would be a horror game of the decade, if it played like a Edith Finch
The first thing that I noticed was the Disco Elysium scrolling text. The second thing was all of the exposition that was always on screen. The third thing was the lack of any meaningful things to say and your just born character having three-word snarky remarks or opinions about this new world that I was supposed to be exited for. Yet my character seemed completely unfazed like a teenager trying to tell everyone that nothing surprised it. So, the story was trying to destroy itself before I had even gotten a grasp of the terrible save system in this game. Simply put, on the world map you move like this were Fallout, with random encounters to avoid and settlements to visit, but you can only save the game at certain spots on the map called Mirrors, which are like towns on the map that you need to load in and move to and load out of and then your save is anchored there. Or you autosave when a mission ends. If this were the save system in Fallout, you would hate that game too. So how much do you die in this game. Well it depends. The first shield that you get to buy is seemingly the most useful one. It can null out 3 attacks before you need to create a shield wall again. Why is this the best shield? Because the combat is objectively against you. The more time in an encounter is more time for your enemies to heal and they never debuff. How do they gain a buff? Every time an enemy hits you, they get a star over their head. One star gives them a 100 percent damage boost, up to 5 stars. So this is a world where a shotgun is the strongest weapon and are dodging with a stamina bar. A quick example of how broken this system is. One shotgun bullet does 50 damage but each bullet gives the next bullet in the spread double the damage as it is flying towards you. Strangely this reminds me of KCD, where if you get hit once, then you might as well run and hide and try again later. Only in Undungeon the encounters happen in rooms, and these are locked until you kill every enemy there.
A Souls fan wondering what I would have thought about this game in 2001. So this game taught me that Dark Souls has sumerian mythology. Kings and kingdoms that fell to a creeping darkness and somewhere a furtive pygmy and giant serpent. It also taught me that, a shield breaks after 3 hits and that poise is an important system to get right. This game has 4 characters to choose from. Each one has a favorite weapon class and differing agility. You level up automatically when you kill enough enemies. You will always have enough, but you won't always feel like you're really that strong or stronger because of a new level. Levels raise your health and stamine bar. Both of these are big enough around level 10, that it is very hard to actually run out of either. You get stronger by learning combos. I think you learn combos by button mashing like in a fighting game. There are also runes, i don't know how to use them. The game has levels. Around 12 and 2 last levels. You usually get a choice between 2. It doesn't really matter which on eyou pick, as you will be of a high enough level. Weapons carry over. But I kept to the strongest weapon with the least defence debuff because the movesets were always the same, or almost the same. I never felt stronger with a new weapon. That is because in souls terms the enemies have unlimited poise and unless your weapon has a bigger damage output than their shield's defence, then they will block you every time, causing you to stagger and be very open to attacks. Do this in a mob and you will lose all of your health. So you get the mob to kill itself. Bait an attack and they AOE each other.Almost necessary sometimes. There is sadly little variety to the bosses. The game does have breakable walls, but these are sometimes also the main path forward, so you will run through a level three or more times, looking for the only key or door forward. It does get tedious and the last levels do get a massive difficulty spike. But it's a good game.
I think I got tired of waiting and jumped. I think the game looks great. It does not take 400 days, but it does take actual time waiting on the game. Does it really sound interesting to buy a game and leave it running in the background as you wait for a door to open or a puddle of water to fill. Or the musrooms. If you plant the wrong mushroom, then go away and wait for it to grow, or walk to your room and wait a little faster and then have the game walk back to try again. It works as an idea, but does a game about waiting really sound interesting. Philosophical? Yes but why. This game. It is a game, just not for very long. This game. It made me want to quit and start drawing. It made me want to quit and pick up my instrument. It made quit the game, get some of these books from gutenberg and just read them on a big screen. So if the point of this game was to get me to wake up and start with my other hobbies, then it worked. And yet I liked some parts of it enough, that I wanted to write down my thoughts and give it some stars.
It starts with the most horrifying mental hospital ever made. The game starts with the best atmosphere. The game goes on. It never stops being creepy or horrifying. If you ever wondered how horrible it was to have a mental illness or a history of abuse as a child just a few generations ago, then here you'll get a pretty accurate depiction. The story, makes sense. For the most part I understand the reasoning beghidn the images and the levels, but it very quickly drops downward after a few levels. I love most of this game. I hate hate most of the second half of this game. It just drags on and the puzzles just get obtuse. By the end i was just tired of playing it. And that was sad. Because I really really liked it. But some parts could have been cut and the game would have been better for it.
Full disclosure: I have not beaten the Flagship. I have gotten to the second phase, once to the final phase. I have some 40 to 60 runs. Some 20 to 40 hours. I think i got to the boss on my second run. And I am still tryng, because this is an amazing game. Praise: you can keep playin just unlocking ships and trying again. You can try both the old version or the advanced edition. It is quite stricking how much of a difference just 2 systems can have on the game. Lots of variations. Lots of potential challenge runs. The game is simple and yet no game has been able to replicate it. It is unique, it is great. You do not need to wait for a discount, because you will get so much out of this game. How to play: download it, try it, fail, lose a month just trying to win. Stop. Uninstall. Wait a year, try again. Fail. Uninstall. Wait a year. Try again. Ten years later: still love it.
If you don't like the narrator or find the story lacking, then the game is a fast and repetitive dungeon walker. Find the correct path, fight some samey looking boss that the narrator built up for you, unock some building, talk to the characters. Get bored. Repeat.
In this game you will reverse time, rewind some steps, try again, rewind and somehow move forward. There is a great story somewhere here, but I did not like any of the gameplay. And I am salty about about it, but i aint gonna praise it either. I will give props to the story and the twists and everything that you should at least look a video about. I'm just saying that getting to the story wasn't fun for me.
I hope they make a second game. I really want the option to move to Skalitz and become an actual apprentice of blacksmithing. I want to honor the legacy of my blacksmithing family and make the best swords. Sadly here you get a grindstone and the chance to destroy some expensive swords, because Henry was a drunk teenager who just wanted to have fun at the tavern. What it's all about: In this game there is very little blacksmithing. In this game, there is an achievement for picking up 20000 flowers, every flower has a 3 second animation. Optimization: This game takes less than a minute to load on my janky old PC with the settings all on low. It is still the prettiest game that I have seen. This game takes more than 6 minutes to load on my PS4. I have not had any bugs. It has crashed once due to overheating. Praise: I have more than 2 days of gameplay time on my PS4 and I stopped because I forgot what the story was and i accidentaly told the traitor monk that I was looking for a traitor monk. I love it. It is a great game. How to play: Find some treasure. Make some potions. Steal. Enjoy the patched up lockpicking mechanic. Do yourself a favor and get the bow reticule mod. There is no point in trying to aim without it. It is doable, it just isn’t necessary and it will not enchance your experience.
The first game had an unnecessarily open and empty playgrond. This game has an equally empty and pointless open world. There is nothing to do outside of the missions. Here are the missions. Drive somewhere. Shoot until everyone is dead. And this was clunky and intense in the first Mafia. And it is a red bar like in any modern game. This game has characters. They are overacted stereotypes but they are very forgettable. This game has nice set pieces. This game has a few actually interesting missions, but they only look nice, and then it's back to shooting. And I hate this game. I hate, that there is nothing to grab onto. I hate that there is no value to it. It is a mess of movie references and some jokes, but it's hard to joke, if the characters are bleh. There is a mission where your house is invaded and set on fire. You may run and evade or you may use your hands to fight the men with guns. Either way it will take about 20 attempts and nothing but luck. This game is pretty bad. But in a few years I will try it again, because I will remember nothing about this game, and I will end up here. Again. For the fourth or fifth time. Maybe then I'll remember that I already tossed it away, because there is nothing here. Except the magazines. Those are a nice touch.
