I've heard that people better remember the beginning and end of a story moreso than the middle. Perhaps that explains a lot of the mixed reviews. Well, honestly I think the middle of this game's story feels like where it's the strongest. That's where you get a real sense of how close to the brink of destruction this world is. I noticed something VERY interesting here, something I don't think I see very often, and other writers should take note of: The characters talk at length and passionately about the problems facing the world and the problems its inhabitants have created, yet it's never an allegory for anything happening in ours. The voice acting really carries it. Getting all the worldbuilding requires doing sidequests. But they dropped the ball on the ending. It's like they had to cut out answering all the questions they bought up to meet a deadline, and hoped they could put that information into a sequel. And a thing happens that just comes off as "No? He wouldn't act like that". And the game makes a big deal about getting a certain item, but when you equip it it apparently has no special effect. Oh the gameplay? Yeah it's fine. There are some spots where it feels a bit grindy, and it kind of starts boring, but it picks up a bit once you start getting more magic rocks and moreso once you get your mount, and then more than two characters in your party. The optional objectives keep fights from getting too repetitive. There's a few spells/skills that just seem useless, and translation issues regarding "nexus/case" and some of the subtitles. You really have to take care with gem/equipment buffs, because otherwise Selene will just be way too slow compared to everyone else. The game also has that problem where people act like the world is bigger than it feels sometimes. There's a feeling of being unrealistically walled in by cliff faces, and the "continent" can't be bigger than 10,000km across...and most of it is apparently impassable mountains.
Okay, so under all this stuff I'm going to point out is a basically competent puzzle platformer collect-a-thon that once you finish you basically won't have any motivation to pick up again. I guess I wanted to keep playing to see how (for lack of a better word) deranged the story and setting got. Okay so even though the PC is supposedly the equivalent of 10, I doubt I'd let a 10 year old play this. There's a few little details sprinkled around that might give a kid as stupid as I once was bad ideas, and it just kinda comes off as weird that these guys are allegedly demons, although I guess it's a handwave for all of Beebz's weird powers and the weirder mix of characters. There's a few places the story could have gone that I'm grateful it didn't and a few I'm kinda surprised it didn't. No one's motivation is really discernible except Beebz (an indestructible jerk wants to take over the world! 'cause she's a demon, therefore a jerk!) and the DK (it's pretty stupid!), and it's kinda ambiguous just how "evil" a demon in this setting is supposed to be, and while I think I would prefer the story actually STAY light on a lot of details, Luce's reaction's to everything Beebz does still kinda didn't make sense. The way she was going I was actually expecting to fight Luce before the DK, but no. And everyone seems to overlook how the changes Beebz takeovers make to a zone aren't exactly constructive. The soundtrack is pretty nice, in that it's as kinda deranged as everything else. I wouldn't listen to it in the car but it fits the game. Making every character a 2d drawing was interesting, and for the most part the game pulls it off, but many of the NPCs are really kinda off-putting. It also seems like the game is kinda badly optimized for its style. I couldn't get above 20FPS on WINE with a 1080, but it usually ran at 60 in windows...on a 2080ti. Usually, except for one spot. I'm glad I didn't have to use the time stop the whole game. Those puzzles weren't very fun.
But the game is creepy as hell. As in, it makes you look creepy as hell, more than you probably deserve in a saner world, but in this one, you do NOT want to let your female co-workers know you played this; they'll start looking for ways to get you fired. Heck, you probably don't want anyone to know you bought this. I only did because it had a "basically okay" rating on Zero Punctuation. I would have dropped it down to two stars for creepiness, because figuring out what you're supposed to do can be really frustrating your first playthrough. So basically the challenge can be summed up in two parts: learn what combination of items is best for a given area, and figure out boss patterns. The right combinations of items can trivialize situations that the wrong combination can make unwinnable. In fact you'll be switching out items so often it really made me wish there were more slots just so I didn't have to go into the menu every few screens. There's not a lot of variety in your attacks, and you're going to be really hesitant to use magic or consumables, possibly more than you should be. That all changes once you unlock Boss and Witch Modes. In boss modes you switch out between 3 sets of attacks on the fly, something I wish the base mode had, and it feels like you just have more variety in what you can do in any moment (also, the dialogue is actually entertaining). In Witch Mode, you start out somewhat stronger than in base modes and end by just blasting away anything in your way with total ease. Assassin mode is a lot like the base mode and I kinda got bored with the game after trying that out.
I bought this game after seeing the gameplay videos. It's about as fun as it looks, which is to say, pretty fun. If you like exploration and a lot of pretty environments, you'll like Itorah. I'm playing this on Ubuntu 20.04. It works almost perfectly under WINE. Even picked up my steam controller through sc-controller. It also ran on Debian 11 but that particular box just can't handle the graphics. Since this is a 1.0.0.0 release, I'll write down some suggestions in case the developer feels like working on this some more, which would improve the experience about as much as it could be improved. First off, it's fine that Itorah doesn't talk, but she IS still expressive, so the spots where it looks like she should be but isn't kinda stick out. It'd feel better if she would turn away from the camera and wave at the people you "talk to" instead of just standing there, not looking at them. I think her animation when being suspended by air or water could use more than one frame of animation, too. It also feels a little weird when she should be looking at something but isn't. These details might not be noticeable on smaller screens, but if you're playing on a large 4k screen (and if you have one, why not use it, the art is gorgeous), and she's usually well-animated, they kinda stick out. I ran into some small graphical bugs in a couple of spots, but they weren't anything besides amusing. The story isn't much, but it doesn't need to be. The final boss, though, well, I don't want to spoil it, but its appearance kinda creeped me out in a way the other bosses didn't. And there was a tiny bit of backstory in a flashback that no characters could have plausibly remembered, and I think was better left to the imagination, or maybe described by someone reading a book instead of flashing back. I'd give this 4.6 stars. Rounds up to 5. I don't necessarily think it's worth $20 thinking about some other games I've played and how long they were, but I'm also kind of cheap.
Yes, I bought this because I got emotionally invested in the story. Sue me. Again, playing on Debian 11. No major problems after the update, although there's still a chest in the Wheel Passage that I can't get because the hourglass bubble accelerates your shot instead of slowing it. If you liked Crosscode's gameplay, you'll like this. If you liked Crosscode's story, you'll like this. If you were bothered by all the pop culture references, you'll be bothered by them here, too. I'm starting to think the sidequests were written by somebody other than the main story writers, since their tone, and level of originality is completely different. Okay, so I know that after a couple thousand years MAYBE all those things will be public domain, but the tone just...doesn't feel right after everything that happened at the end of Crosscode, which was mere days ago for Lea. I think the worst offender was probably that "teleporting car", did it really have to be the time machine from that one movie series, especially when you'd already made a bunch of decent looking future hovercars? Despite all my complaining I still really liked this game's story, and the expansion finishes it about as well as it could have. I don't think I've ever had to say "please don't make me make this decision" about a dialog box owing to ambiguous morality. I just don't want people to think that even though they're getting loads of praise, it was the pop culture references that made the product interesting. It was that, in a world where everything seems to copy everything else, because it's scared to experiment with new or uncommon ideas (when it's not being outraged), Crosscode shows you new things. Oh. And there was one thing that bothered me, but you're obliged to have that or else lose your job, and you're obliged to not be bothered by it or else lose your job. But I'm pretty sure that the same forces that compel you to have it, also compel you to be a lot less subtle about it.
And I don't say that lightly. It's rare that I'll openly praise something, since I'm always worried it'll embarrass me later. Technical details first. The Linux version freezes on the initial load screen on but works perfectly on Debian 11. There are a couple bugs on version 1.4.1.2 (don't want to install a later version if the current one is working) which might've been fixed, but they don't break the game. I also ran into the controller bug other people talked about, using a USB xbox controller. The game is actually playable but it'd be too much of a challenge having to hold LT at the halfway point all the time. The solution turned out to be using a Steam Controller and using the SC-Controller appimage in xbox emulation mode, just manually run the suggested commands when it complains about uinput. Okay, so this game is really, really, fun. I bought it after viewing the gameplay videos, and for no other reason. Playing it, it's obvious the devs paid a lot of attention to detail in the gameplay to make it as fun as possible without feeling like you're fighting with the controls. Switching to keyboard and mouse works seamlessly if you want it. If there's one thing I could suggest, it would be to allow LB to just be a dedicated dash button, since using B to guard works fine, and it's hard to pull off Dash Arts when holding the button at any point past a dash makes Lea guard and stop moving. The game is never too easy, and never too hard either. Don't touch the difficulty sliders. I thought the game within a game concept was fun and interesting, but could get played out quick if too many other games started copying it. And I wish they would tone down on the pop culture references more, the game can stand on its original content alone, they're just holding it back. The characters are fun, and it's nice that you can interpret them in a few different ways (hope the DLC didn't screw that up, I liked this game enough to buy that at full price).
I kinda got the general impression from other people that this game was kind of a letdown compared to Human Revolution, but I really don't see it that way, and I started playing this shortly after I finished Human Revolution. I think both games were interesting and fun in their own way, and you should play this one. Note: if you've got lots of processor cores, open the launcher, then open task manager, and set CPU affinity to cores 0-7. That solved the crash on loading screen problem, that was the only technical issue I had. That's all I really care to say about it, other reviews have discussed gameplay and parts of the story in more detail, but something I think worth mentioning now...not that anyone's going to read this, but...is that I don't think they could get away with releasing this game in 2021. Two certain Picus News blurbs would be more controversial than the central theme (common to video games) of resolving problems with (varying amounts of) violence. Then there's the whole divided society based on certain personal choices theme, which they could probably do in 2021, if they had more characters describe augs as a "new breed" or something and got rid of a certain line suggesting otherwise. And then there's the theme of "don't trust the institutions" common to all Deus Ex games. All of these would cause more controversy now than 5 years ago. Without these things though, the story wouldn't be what it is, and I hope that more games will still be able to use them in the future without requiring more courage and sacrifice than the writers of this game needed at the time. Perhaps they could go out of their way to say "none of this is analogous to the real world, and something is wrong with you if you can relate anything to anything", but the repeatability is what makes the game's story interesting. Or maybe I'm just thinking too much.
