After a bizarre bug that trapped me in scan mode after accidentally hitting shift and tab at the same time, I've noticed that game audio muffles itself outside of a select few sounds. This happens regardless of what else is happening and has more or less wrecked my ability to play. Good to see the bugfixes are ongoing.
great soundtrack, and theoretically ok gameplay, but there just wasn't enough juice to the gameplay to keep me coming back. DNF
Buy this game, buy your friends this game, go to town smashing and burning all that you see. Absolutely spectacular mecha tactics game.
Unfortunately, though the game seems extremely charming a few recurring technical issues have rendered it unplayable for me. There is a bug where certain cutscenes won't end properly, resulting in the game softlocking with no ability to interact or even pause the game. For example, upon feeding the fish in the hotel the cursor and UI disappear to let the fish swimming animation play, then the main character will just stand there gormless and vacant for eternity until I alt-F4 the game. Another more serious example is the radio puzzle, which upon completion of a less than stellar-controlling knob puzzle, also causes this same softlock freeze. To even pick the game up again I'm going to have to jiggle those knobs to the specific values, which done with a mouse is a bit irritating, and I'd rather not come back through that with yet another softlock. Very frustrating, I really want to like this game but I can't reccomend it as a result of this.
Cult of the Lamb has a lot of really excellent bones, but fails to add any meat to its experience. This is the best way I can think of to sum up my beef with this game. The art direction, visuals, music, and sound design are all wonderful and I have no complaints there, but the moment you step into the actual gameplay or writing, I found disappointment abound. For example, several of the melee weapon options are outright bad with the current game balancing. Trying to use combo-focused weapons is impossible without taking hits, as they don't put out enough dps to kill fast enough and enemies attack slightly too fast to get the full hit out. Cooking is a simple and very easy timing minigame, and fishing is just a variant on that same minigame. Most of managing your cult is just kind of boring busywork, to be blunt, and even on hard I had no difficulty maxing out my leveling in as little as an afternoon. The writing, meanwhile, is a severe disappointment. For a game about cults and religion, it fails to really commit to its theme and include the cultish flavor you'd expect. For example, you can choose your own doctrine, but it's just a description of stats. There's no flavor text or actual DOCTRINE in the menu. The intro text to most new dungeons is just the same text with names swapped. There's a stunning lack of fun being had with the theming on a writing front, and it definitely drags the whole experience down. Finally, I don't know if the developers just overcommit to a bad joke or what but a lot of the poop stuff comes off as an outright fetish. The only reference to sex I've seen in the ENTIRE GAME ABOUT A HIPPIE CULT COMMUNE is regarding the coprophiliac trait, which... makes your cultists love dirty toilets and poo. It's weird and kind of offputting instead of funny or distressing in a way that adds value. Overall, it's an 8/10 experience lowered to a 6 at best by lacking polish and missing elements.
This is a visual feast with very little else going on. They spent a lot of time polishing the visuals to a mirror sheen, and the historical accuracy is commendable. However, the writing is kind of dull, the gameplay is a complete snooze at the best of times, and you'd probably have a better time just watching a full playthrough than actually playing it. There's interesting visual tech and develoipment here, but it's wasted on a game that just isn't fun.
Disco Elysium is a choose your own adventure novel disguised as a video game. This is a fantastic thing, because the writer is absolutely incredible at writing. Funny, depressing, poignant, and surprisingly fair-handed to a number of outsider philosophies and political beliefs, you're going to find a lot to love here. It's not just the writing that makes DE great though, the game play ideas they've implemented are excellent. To name a few: -Your stats are your party members, and upgrading them makes them pipe up during conversations more often. So, if you upgrade authority, your inner monologue starts urging you at every turn to assert your authority.... even when that would be cruel or ill-advised. Upgrading your trivia stat will give your amnesiac hero more basic information about the state of the world... at the expense of drowning out conversations with un-necessary minutae. -Your choices actually have impacts, with various plot threads weaving in and out of each other throughout the game, and almost all of them connecting in some way to the main mystery. -Characters are dynamic, believable, and best of all _human._ Racists, Union goons, friendly dock-workers, drug-peddling techno-blasting teenagers... no two characters are alike, and they all add unique ways for your troubled detective to bounce off them. Give this game a go, it's absolutely stellar.
