This is a good game with an interesting story. It feels like the developers put really much effort into it. Unfortunately, every chapter is just at least 20% too long and it feels often just like chore to play. Most of the riddles just consist of you having to guess what the game wants of you at the moment which makes it even more annoying to play through. Still, it was an interesting experience.
I can't remember having played a game like this before. It is less scary then previous amnesias because it revolves around understanding the monster's behavior and as you fail you are getting killed by it along the way multiple times. But I can't think of another game that offers an experience like this. Highly recommend.
It is essentially a high quality Blasphemous clone in a Bloodborne setting. With the pixel art being the most outstanding part. It is really beautiful and there is so much of it. Definitely en par with the first Blasphemous. Gameplay is a little rough. I found the controls a bit weird and hard to get into. There is a variety of different fight mechanics like the gun or magic which I found myself not using much because leveling them would have taken away from my main weapon. There was a variety of bosses but they were a little easy for my liking. I rarely needed more than two attempts for most of them. The low point was the story. It feels like the writers tried to make all texts and dialogue as vague as possible but there was not enough storyline behind it to make it mysterious. It was just completely generic and forgetable. It was still a very enjoyable experience for me. If you haven't played Blasphemous. Play it. If you enjoyed Blasphemous you will enjoy this game as well.
I enjoyed the first half of the game. It was immersive and had really scary moments. Like a much more polished experience of the first Amnesia. After some time the constant darkness just gets really really annoying. It is not scary when you can't see anything. The exploration part of the game is not fun or interesting when you are barely able to see anything. I hated the last third of the game. Boring alien ruins which I find hard to immerse myself into, and a lot of sneak-through-this-room-with-an-annoying-enemy scenes. The story felt rather shallow.
I really missed to have some kind of story to draws me in. But there is nothing. The only thing that makes it somewhat unique is that the weapon skins are staffs. There is a variety of different enemies, bosses, and levels but the gameplay is just too simplistic to really let me enjoy this.
Just when I felt like I got the hang of it again and started to enjoy myself it was over. It took me 5 hours to complete. I think it was a good thing that it does not integrate into the main story because the first quarter of the DLC where you start with bad equipment and struggle to survive is the better part of the experience. Figuring out the new enemies was enjoyable. It felt like the new world itself did not add anything interesting that was not already in the base game. Swamps, mines, and huts.
I was a little disappointed from the base game. It felt too big for the amount of content it provided. The DLC does a good job at filling everything out. I enjoyed the new boss fights although there are not that many of them. It is heavy on plattforming. Some of the new enemy types are more annoying than fun to fight against. Watching the new ending gave me a nice tingle. At the end it is more of the same. I enjoyed it. I don't really understand the hate it gets. It does not blow me away like the first game but I think that is just because it lost its novelty and the lack of the beautiful pixel-art videos.
It took me a few hours to get back into it but once I got there it felt just like playing it back in the days. If your game starts freezing during startup try out different compatibility modes for the gothic.exe, I think in my case it worked reliably with Windows Vista Service Pack 2 compatibility mode. After that I got through it with just some random crashes here and there. Sadly this version does not include the in game concert of In Extremo in a later chapter.
Crisp and fun gameplay, exploration feels very rewarding. The stealth system is very forgiving and when you mess up sneaking up on somebody you can usually save the situation at the cost of some hitpoints instead of having to start all over again. This makes it way less frustrating than every other stealth game I play. The gunplay feels very good. I feel like the atmosphere of the game would have benefitted a lot if the graphics would have been better but this is not the focus of the game. If you liked Elderborn you will like this too.
