You have to talk with other gamers to learn that you get locked out of the best ending upon opening any one of numerous treasure chests scattered throughout the dungeon. What kind of horrible design decision is that? There IS a character who you meet who assigns you the ascetic achievement of not opening any "golden chests," but the treasure chests throughout the environment look cream-colored, not golden at all, and there is no indication that upholding this achievement should be done by anyone other than veteran players just looking for an optional challenge. Whoever decided that this parody of a quest should actually play a crucial role in the story should have been fired, especially given how the chests bear game-changing items like a tool that grants passive MP regen while equipped, a poisoned dagger, and an HP vampirism spell. Other than that, the art is decent, although the idle animation of the protagonist looks awkward, if its silky smoothness wasn't so fascinating. The music and sounds are fine. I do like how there are zero experience points and that everything is based on equipment. It surprised me how much the game is focused on status effects; for example, there's a literal Toilet Paper item whose sole purpose is to wipe yourself of oil and water. If you're about to face a fire-element enemy, then you want to be wet, but not in a situation involving electricity. As a result, there's a lot of menu-paging to go through your consumables per encounter; melee is tricky with slow, un-cancel-able swings/stabs, but item drops are generous, so the game teaches you to not be stingy with what you've got. While the save points don't recover your HP/MP, some non-chest items also do provide HP regen, though one requires you to be wet. Sadly, the game is ruined by teenage-level writing. The Heroine's only trait is gullibility, some characters are overly and needlessly sadistic, and the plot is nonsensical, if not entirely trope-derived. I'd just watch it on YT.
Thanks for the Prime inclusion, Amazon! Anyway, we all know Playdead's LIMBO and INSIDE were standards-setters in the suspenseful puzzle-platformer subgenre, so it is massively impressive to see another stylized take coming well after them. LIMBO was too abstract for me to connect with, but while parts of PoL were really confusing to me at first, it was the story hypotheses in /r/PlanetOfLana that made me realize what a similarly incredible amount of planning went into the lore before the gameplay begins (especially because I had somehow only found 2/10 murals, ha). MAJOR PLOT SPOILERS BELOW: Aside from the unrealistic lack of sensors on the bots' backs (ha), the realistic fiction that I best understood it as (in being a too-aggressive rescue mission of human descendants by the robots that you eventually foil to stay on the planet instead of leaving) made the game absolutely fascinating. The mother ship construction, the genocide of alien lifeforms, the baby care... it was a grim, intriguing take on the Three Laws of Robotics at out-of-control work. The nature-overtaken spacecraft and the humans' forgotten past in the murals made me think of the plot to the RTS Homeworld. 1. I kinda wish we found more than one Mui as the murals suggest! 2. I wish the laser blast from the hover drones was shown to be a taser-like weapon instead. I thought they were killing you, especially seeing your ragdoll body simply fall off entire platforms with them not caring (unless they ARE killing you and some plot speculation has been inaccurate). 3. I totally couldn't figure out that pipe tower puzzle... It was the only time when I needed to whip out a guide. 4. I wish the Mui commands to stay and follow were two separate buttons. I often mixed them up... 5. There were slightly too many segments involving the same kind of robot detection; it got a bit stale at those times. I kinda wondered if the devs ran out of ideas or something. Despite these issues, it's still an excellent game!
