As a disclaimer, I only played the GOG out-of-the-box version. I see people mentioning community patches and mods, which I did not install. My impressions below are solely of the unmodified Sacred 2 Gold that you get upon purchase. With that said, I dropped the game after about an hour, and even that's because I felt I should give it a chance. The first game was a decent Diablo clone, nothing special but a decent time kill if you've already played through Diablo 1 and 2 a bunch of times and are looking for something different but that also scratches the same itch. This game, however, only scratches the itch of being something to make fun of for how janky it is. Could just be an issue on my end, but I kept running into weird camera glitches (I fiddled around with the camera settings to try to offset this a bit, but nothing seemed to help get it to feel right). Apart from the camera issues, I also encountered geometry/collision issues more often than I would care to within an hour of playing. The UI and controls are also somehow even more confusing than in the first game, which was arguably the biggest problem with the original Sacred, so it didn't feel good to play, either. On one positive note, the music in the game (what little I've had the chance to listen to) was pretty good, and out of the box, the overall sound design and mixing is better than in the first game, where I had to play around with the audio settings for a few minutes to get everything to a comfortable level. Overall, I don't see myself going back to this to give it another shot. It's pretty cheap and seems to be discounted pretty frequently, so if you have a few coins to spare on it and you already went through your backlog, you can give it a try if you have a lot of patience and are a big fan of Diablo - or more specifically, inferior Diablo clones. I realize there is a community for this game that likes it a lot but I just couldn't see the appeal.
If you're familiar with Mateusz Skutnik's previous work, you'll feel right at home playing Slice of Sea. The game is a puzzle platformer, though it's pretty much 90% puzzle and 10% platformer. Although the setting is Daymare, that of Skutnik's Daymare Town series, the overall ambiance and puzzle design is very reminiscent of his Submachine series as well. Amazing art, great ambient music and an overall sense of atmosphere that is deeply immersive. The only flaw is that towards the end of the game remembering where some objects in the world are can be a bit overwhelming, and you will sometimes find items or solutions to puzzles much earlier in the game then you may expect, so keeping track of everything can be a bit of hassle. Even so, the game is very much worth checking out, and given how calming it is, you won't have time to get frustrated over a puzzle as you'll be too busy walking around and taking in the gorgeous scenery.
For those unaware, the Submachine series originated as Flash games back in 2005 onwards. Legacy is a neat collection of all the mainline and side games all thrown into one with HD updates, flowing from one to another via "chapters". There are a few changes to the base games so that series veterans can't rely entirely on muscle memory to go through them, but it's still the games you love and remember, with a fresh coat of paint. Newcomers may not entirely appreciate the sheer amount of shout outs and lore fanservice scattered through the game, but it should be enjoyable for most all the same. The sense of atmosphere in the games is uncanny. A recommendation to any and all fans of point and click games, puzzle games, escape the room type games and unsettling vibes in general. Really glad to see this come to GoG as I already had it on Steam, and was glad to buy it again.
