I bought this game on another store years ago and it looked dead then, I'm surprised it's on gog now. The idea they had was good. As in many RPGs, we create our custom char and here we also create on the same way our companion. I love playing singleplay with companion. Then we publish our companion on the server and other players may take her and play with her while we're not playing, and we can also take other players' companions to form a party to play with. And there's a special section to select friends companions. When somebody plays with our companion, she earns XP. To sum it up, it's marketed that companions learn enemies weakness and learn how to beat them, and when they do so by playing with another player - specially a player stronger than us who took our companion to places we haven't gone yet - then they teach it to us and other companions on the party. That seemed great, very original. But the game is horrendous. It's not open world neither we have multiple areas to explore, the game is a wide linear corridor. Quests are very scarse and control where we go. I remember there was a shady forest I wanted to explore, but there was no quest for it, all quests led to the next city. Then I kept getting quests that made me keep wasting time going back and forth both cities and no quest yet for the forest. Of course I could just go there and explore with no quest, but I kept expecting that some quest would popup and was waiting for it. Enemies are very few in variety. That's bad in any game, but here it's worse, because of the companion learning system. In practice it's just a matter of knowing that in example wolf is weak to fire and skeleton is weak to ice. Extremely simple, which we'd learn on a couple attempts. Then, companions keep repeating the same phrase "it's weak to fire!!!!" to exhaustion, always talking as if it was a great discovery, for the same enemy we're bored to know about and fight to.
This is a very nice small FMV game. Without spoiling, we're looking on the footages of police interviews made almost 3 decades ago, related to a murder that happened at that time. Sadly, the digitalization of the footage was done on very old tech and is tough to handle, but that's what we've got. We have to use keywords to search for videos on the database and the listing results is very limited. This creates a very unique and original way of story telling, because the story is told in different order for each player and we gotta put the pieces together to figure it. It remembered me a lot of Nolan's Memento, but here it's much more complicated to put the pieces together! Make sure to play it with no spoiler. Don't worry on what u're doing, there's no best order to do it.
Endling was written and developed with kindness. The graph is nicely designed. The whole game has no dialog, even from humans, and designers relied on characters expressions to tell the story. We play as a mother fox who does her best to care and grow her 4 cups. By controlling her we're faced with some struggles and challenges that a wild animal mother might have, from the forest too but the game focuses on showing how humans are killing environments and making almost impossible for animals to survive. At first she must find food and bring back to her den to feed her cups, but soon they grow enough to follow her. We then gotta protect them, keep them fed and teach them abilities they'll need to survive and which also helps during the game. We have to deal with wild animals, hunters, pollution and... other challenges. It brings a sad feeling. As the last adult fox, their extinction is certain, but they still do their best to survive. Be ready to watch tense scenes of violence, suffering and death. But the game also has its down sides. The gameplay sometimes broke the immersion, remembering me of the game mechanics. Yes, it's a much better experience to control her and face her challenges than if it was a movie that we'd just watch, but gameplay could be more polished. In example, in most threats the cups are invisible to it, and the threat ignores them who are closer and keeps focused on the mother. Yeah, I understand it'd be much tougher if she had to rush them as we try to control them more directly, but it still breaks immersion when it remembers us they aren't there gameplay-wise. The game was getting repetitive. It was even annoying on some parts, that I kept dying after having almost finished the night and had to restart it. I end up knowing where to go and it gets very boring trying to do the same night over and over. Sometimes I was even preferring if I could give up a cup and move on the game instead of dying and have to repeat the whole night.
I'm not exaggerating, this is one of the best plots I had ever played in a game! I just finished it on ending 2 in 8h gameplay. Time loop stories are always fun, and here we have the interactivity to look around on the city and talk to ppl to find clues. There's the main quest of trying to break the loop and get back home, and also side quests to help ppl and solve mysteries. Ending 2 isn't the shortest and I still left leaving many mysteries behind! This is clearly an indie game. Having the game fully voiced adds a lot to immersion and allows us to feel characters emotions, but it also shows how it limits on game size. Specially on a game like this, where dialogs are most important, it's tough to have all the dialogs and responses planned before voices start being recorded. I had played a couple time loop games and the most troubling part is not letting the game become repetitive and boring. This was handled nicely here, because the game is long so we do a lot of stuff and don't keep restarting, and we also don't need to keep repeating the same actions. Plot flows nicely and I just kept wanting to play to learn more! I hope they profit from this game and are able to create the next one, I'll for sure buy it to have another great experience! This is the type of game we just have to give us the pleasure to experience! The only down is on the badly optimized graph. It's visually good, better than most games and impressive for a game created by 3 core guys, but it has huge frame drops. The last 3h I played were almost unplayable, and if the game had battle it'd be for sure impossible.
Well I had read the bad reviews and decided to give it a try. I had played less than 2h and didn't advance much, but I see it's worse than most reviews. The story from what I had watched is full of cliches. Without spoiler, it mixes the house by the lake with the book writer with no inspiration. What's annoying me is that after the prologue, which is nice considering the cliches, nothing is happening. We just keep walking on a narrow linear path from one place to the next while seldom the same shadowy figures appear in our way. Gameplay is among the worst I had experienced. Camera keeps losing direction, which makes us lose reference and character walk on wrong path. Battle is always the same and boring, we gotta point the flashlight on them until they become mortal than shoot without needing to aim. The awful camera makes us miss direction and harder than it should. When we die, we go back to last checkpoint. It's always the same kind of scenario, fighting the same enemy model, with no story progressing. I'm just gonna use a trainer to have unlimited HP, because I just died after finding 2 collectibles and while I was trying to activate yet another electricity generator. It takes a few seconds to activate and the figures came again, and instead of going fight them the character stayed stuck on the generator. Scenarios are awesome, they're still beautiful to this day, except for the narrow corridors clearly rushed to add more fights and prolong the game. If they were unable to develop a good 3rd person shooter gameplay, they should have dropped all battles. Instead they made them longer!
The game starts by pointing that war isn't its thing, this is a game about living as a countryman, fleeing from the suffering of war. We must start with noting, survive, get a house, a job, form a family. It's promised we can start from nothing and build an empire. Sadly, we're not there yet. I had played for a few hours and it was fun at most part, I'm gonna keep watch while they keep developing it. We have some villages around, and their NPCs are all named, have their houses, their jobs. That's awesome, I'm done with games that create random NPCs just to make the city look full. Each NPC have their own disposition towards us, based on talks and actions we do to them. Some have quests so we can help them. Talks still need a lot of work. We have just a couple of subjects to choose, and it's hard to tell if an NPC will like that subject or not. All subjects and possible answers are the same, they aren't specific to any NPC. I wonder if each NPC has subjects they like and dislike and if I'd need to remember what to talk to each NPC, but I didn't take the time to note their answers and try again later. Difficulty also is weak now. The field has a lot of resources to collect, which we can sell for money and some of them are food we can eat. We're not dying of starvation at all. For now it's better to sell food gathered on the field then buy from NPCs, because their food weights much less and are much more nutritious. We can buy animals to raise, but I don't see the need for that, or manufacture food, as selling gathered food provide enough money to just buy it. I think the ideal is that we'd barely survive and make profit from gathering, sufficient to start our business. There are a lot of stuff to craft and build, but as I visited the 2nd village it got too repetitive and boring, so I'm just stopping for now. Graph is great, it's created using UE. Water is bugged and keeps flickering, but nothing that breaks gameplay.
