Unfortunately, I dropped the game half-way through. I got hooked by Vampyr vibes, good voice cast and an interesting premise, but I just can't for the life of me find the strength to deal with even one more fight with 3 drunks who think it's a good idea to fight a dude who can control literal demons. Granted, I hate JRPGs explicitly because of repetitive drawn out fights, so I'm biased here. But Jesus Christ, there's SO. MANY. BORING. FIGHTS. It's just padding, wherever your quest leads you - be sure you WILL get interrupted with "hey! what are you doing here!!! this is our place, we don't take kindly to yer kind 'round 'ere!!!!!" followed by a fight with 3 drunk dudes. I guess I'll never know how the story ends.
I'm not even sure what to say about it. From the first two chapters I was wary that it wasn't going anywhere interesting. Unfortunately, after beating it, that proved to be true. The plot will fall apart if you ask too many questions, individual stories are not super engaging, and main characters have very strange reasons for behaving the way they do. The music is good and the background art is nice enough (but the rotoscoped animation looks VERY wonky). Voice acting itself is mostly good, but the quality of the sound varies by quite a bit, some voice actors sound way better than others (and the main actress could really use some de-esser on her lines). It's still a cozy adventure you can beat in 3-4 evenings... if you've beaten every other adventure and have nothing else in your backlog. I honestly don't understand other reviews saying that THIS is their favorite WGE game, but to each their own, I suppose. Maybe get it on sale.
The first thing that cought my eye when viewing the store page for this game was the fact that developer was stating, that this is "NOT a walking simulator", when it clearly seemed to be one. I decided to give it a go, since it was on sale. It's a walking simulator. It has a lot of puzzles, but it's not a first-person puzzler, I'm sorry. The Witness is an FPP, Portal is FPP, Talos Principle is FPP. This is not that. I've read the post-portem in dev's blog. They've said that at first it was meant to be a horror puzzler, but they've changed the genre mid-way, because there's no audience for that. I honestly think it would work better for this game, than what became of it. In the later part of the game I thought "are they going to go dark with this?", it had a lot of potential to suddenly become really interesting. Sadly, it hadn't. In the post-mortem the developers wondered why the game didn't shift enough copies. I believe it's because not much originality was left in the final product. It's a solid walking simulator with an alright puzzles, a somewhat interesting story and pretty graphics. But it's got no hook. You may play this game and think to yourself "well, that was nice" and move on. Or you can skip it and not really miss out on anything. Lastly, the minor gripes that I had with this game: the backtracking in the later parts is tedious and there isn't any good reason for it. Some puzzles are reused, but not really expanded on (puzzle boxes, music boxes, garden gates). The voice acting was.. weird. That's about it, really.
