First of all, I never played the previous games by this developer, Passing Pineview Forest and Pineview Drive. Both these games seem to have some kind of fanbase on Steam, and said fanbase seems to have moved on to Obscuritas. If you're coming into the series for the first time, though, the game just seems unfinished. Laughable graphics, no "adaptive fear mechanic" at all, despite what they claim, puzzles that range from too cryptic to too easy, loads of bugs and crashes. Very lazy game developing: it seems like the devs only used preset Unity assets and threw all horror tropes at the players' faces in hopes that *one* will scare us. If you're a fan of horror games, stay away from this one. Heck, if you're a fan of whatever genre, stay away from this game. It's *that* bad. In my honest opinion, GOG shouldn't be selling this, considering their digital boutique approach and the curating they always do with the games they sell. This is not good enough a game to be sold in here. Period.
First of all, I no longer own this game: I asked a refund from GOG after having tried it for an hour, and they were nice enough to give me Store Credit with which I got another game. I pre-ordered Cornerstone because I'm a huge Zelda fan and the game looked like it was going to be similar to Wind Waker. It was my fault not to look more into the game when I pre-ordered: apparently, there was a demo on Steam that I could have downloaded, and this is what I recommend people to do -- just download that demo and decide whether this is a game for you, or not. For Zelda fans, though, steer away from this game. It's a broken mess that actually looks really bad if you're not trying to capture that perfect (misleading) screenshot, which apparently is all the devs did when they submitted screenshots and trailers for the GOG game page. The characters are oddly animated, lacking all of the charm of the ultra polished ones in Wind Waker. Everything looks and feels clunky, and it is way more focused on crafting than what we were initially led to believe. This is no Zelda clone, it's a Minecraft clone dressed up as a poor man's Wind Waker. Crafting is EVERYTHING in this game, not platforming, not exploring, not fighting: crafting. Want to fight? Craft a weapon. Want to jump on that ledge? Craft a crate. Want to burn a spider web? Craft a torch. Keep collecting crafting materials or you'll have trouble soon enough. Combat (like everything else) feels delayed and clunky; Tyrim controls like a brick in everything he does. I left my one hour of gameplay feeling like I had bought one of those cheap counterfeit action figures. Instead of a Batman original action figure, we're getting a Taiwanese knockoff, "Ultraman", or something. That's how I feel about Cornerstone. It was supposed to be Wind Waker, but it's just a counterfeit Minecraft. As for the Dark Souls inspiration the devs mention, I fail to see where it is completely.
To those of you who haven't played the game at its original release date, think twice before buying it. Outcast is an amazing piece of video game history, a "what could have been" landmark, and it's great for that. For everything else, it falls short, especially since it tries to tackle too many genres at once, not managing to excel at a single one of them. It's a decent enough action-adventure that tried to bite more than it could chew. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely understand why hardcore fans love it, but when you look at it without nostalgia rose-tinted glasses, you realize the game is full of flaws, some of them quite blatant and not that small. It's a pure Belgian-made game that attempts to be a poor man's Planet of the Apes mixed with Stargate and the more post-colonial racist Tintin comics you can imagine. Appalling writing, horrible voice acting, clunky gameplay mechanics, all make this game a lot worse than what fans say it is. The truth is, there are way better action-adventure titles out there. Pick any one of the Legend of Kain series, to see how to make an action-adventure right; pick Beyond Good & Evil, arguably the last great pure action-adventure ever made. Outcast may have been one of the first true open-world games, but don't let that fool you: whatever it did good, games released after it perfected the formula. If you want an open world game, you'd be better off just buying Assassin's Creed, Saints Row 2, Saints Row 4 or the great Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, all of which do the open-world thing better than Outcast, all available on GOG. Now, I can't bring myself to give the game a negative rating, as much as I personally dislike it, because I do value its place in the history of video games. It does feature an amazing NPC AI (for its time), the voxel engine looks impressive (for its time) and the open-world is superbly done (for its time). If you didn't play it when it came out, though, you're better off picking a different, better game.
