In a world filled with deceptive trash, a tiny team makes an absolute monolith. Lovingly crafted with the highest quality ingredients, that fit together beautifully to create the atmosphere of a good "dark fantasy" novel. The art, the music, the design, the writing: everything comes together into a keen, glinting knifepoint. A game that will make you think a little bit, and entertain you a lot.
The elements we have seen before - except now we care about them. The voice acting in particular, makes you want to really listen to every character - it is not just filler - it is what we came here for, right? To have a story? Just like at the core of cyberpunk there's a transcendence of humanity over technological omnipotence - here I think also, the creators take existing themes but give them a flow and authenticity that reaches the player and makes them care. You can tell the writer is using his own thoughts and ideas - not just repeating tropes. I can't come up with anything more accurate than to say this game really has a pulse
I didn't mind at all the bugs - it was fine, the game looked amazing at realease. But I could barely stand it. The WRITING. It is SOY all the way to the core. It is not adult: rather a teenage girls attempt at sounding adult. Or a 30-something-year-old female liberal arts graduate's idea of "hard-boiled". Endless posturing and emotional validation. After the incredible experienceds of the Witcher. After the morally shattering realizations of Blood and Wine and Hearts of Stone. AFter so much depth and genuinely mind-blowing structure, after all these years crafting a truly magical futuristic city... I played the game through, and that is that. In the end, I am left only with a feeling of sadness at another great and inspiring beacon crumbling into the ocean of predictable mediocrity.
The puzzles are simple trial and error, which is just as well because there is no logic to them or none that I can see. That being the case, the experience relies on the mystique of its aesthetic and its narrative content, which I take no pleasure in saying did not provide to me the kind of thrill and insight that I was hoping for. Also, I think the gameplay does not really match the theme of the game: the mechanics are mundane and do not reinforce the emotional content of the events, so the gameplay is divorced from the psychological significance of the story, so while what is happening is puzzling and disconcerting, what the player is doing is a moderately tedious connect-the-dots logical routine so you are kind of taking the story in separately from the gameplay. And like I said, I dont want to beat this point ot death but the story is trying to be deeper than it really is in my estimation. Still I would say a very nicely put-together game especially for one guy to have made it. Very few people are amazing right away so knowing how to finish something is a huge thing to have in the long run so respect for that.
