This is a very good 20 hour game, is the short of it.

Gameplay is incredibly crisp and I fell in love with it instantly. As many have pointed out, the free demo will very quickly let you will even like it. The demo allows like 2 hours of content, and the save is even loadable by the full game.

While playing this game you will feel very damn cool. You will also feel like a massive fool at times. It's amazing when those two feelings are mere seconds apart, because despite having just killed a mob of enemies and successfully reloaded every single weapon, you have face-planted into the ground. Only demerit here with gameplay is the boss fights are a bit... underwhelming? They're not bad, but they are not very hard nor mechanically intense. A bit of a blessing and a curse, as on one hand I wanted a bit more, but on the other I'm also terrible at boss fights in most games. The only boss I had trouble with I figured out was the easiest with a silly cheese strat that made me feel like I was morphing into a cheese wedge.

The music is beautiful. The only issue I have with the music is some locations use their own forced... not even soundtrack, but more like ambiance. Considering how long I was in some those areas, it can get kinda dull. However when in areas the cassette player is available, there's a total of like 1 hour of music when they're all unlocked. The music has found its way into my Spotify playlists, it's just beautiful.

Visually, game is quite lovely. The artstyle is very pretty, and I at no point thought that something didn't look great. (Note my experience with the demo did have a strange graphical bug, but the full game didn't have it.) The only gripe I have here is the camera. Some places the camera will move to give a specific view of a zone, which is great most the time. However when backtracking, it can result in enemies you can't see. The atmosphere of all the locations is amazing. Characters can also get quite expressive too.

Technically the game is quite sound. I got stuck in the ground only twice, and the second time was entirely my fault. I only encountered maybe a handful of bugs, with only one of them I could consistently cause. Besides the one I could cause every single time I wanted it, I encountered 5 gameplay bugs and a harmless UI bug. In total I got stuck in the ground twice, left the camera behind twice, and had the weird progression lock. (I did something very strange and I can easily see how that broke the game, exiting and loading fixed it.) The UI bug is sometimes a quest will be in the logbook twice, but it fixes itself and doesn't cause any instability nor loss of function.

Progression wise the game is decent. There are massive jumps in capability spread throughout the game, and they all feel great. Only thing I wish is the game either was like 2 hours longer after reaching peak capability, or gave the capability a bit earlier. A New Game+ might also help this, as I would love to replay the game with all the tools at my disposal to see how cracked it would be. I only went grinding for resources once, but that's because I wanted to do it all at once. Normal gameplay provides an adequate amount of resources, especially if you don't want to upgrade weapons you don't use.

Now the story. The story is terrible. No, not the quality, the content. The quality is immaculate, but this game is the only piece of media that's put me on the verge of crying. I will shamelessly admit that there was a point where I had to lie down because I couldn't see from teary eyes. It's a shame that the story will be such a small part of this review, because to me this was pretty big plus. It's terribly great, 10/10.

Quests. There's a lot of fetch quests and running around the world. There is a fast travel system, but it isn't convenient all the time. I didn't find that awful as I liked moving through the environment, but I can see how players won't like backtracking and going to places they have been before for simple fetch quests. The rewards are also not great, but eh. I mostly did them for the world building and it making me plan routes through the map.

Now, with being only a 20 hour game for doing most of the game's content (I am at time of writing missing just playing more blackjack and cooking more buffs... and dying a lot), the big question is replayability. The story isn't going to hit as hard, but the gameplay will still be crisp. I'm pretty sure runs could be done with a specific playstyle/weapon/goal in mind.

I doubt it would ever happen, but if the developers came back to this game I would buy a DLC without any hesitation. A New Game+ would be welcome as well, as I mentioned with being able to play the whole game again with all the bells and whistles. I don't see the need for a boss rush, since the bosses are more of a story telling element than a gameplay one, but I wouldn't be against it as it would probably have wicked speedruns.

It's a wonderful game of a coyote mom just trying her best. It's not a perfect game, but the things that make it wonderful easily outshine the bad.

In short, this game is good.

In long, this game is good this game is good this game is good this game is good this game is good this game is good

One of the greatest, most satisfying games to play in the last year for me. It has a way of making the player immediately empathize with the characters, especially Laika herself. I like how the backstory is told naturally through dialogue and quest prompts instead of through exposition dumps. I love all the songs in this game, and I really like the fact that almost all the music is diegetic. Beícoli quickly became my most listened to artist in Spotify, just because of the soundtrack. Having songs with lyrics is really different for this kind of game, but you as Laika can select what you want to hear through her tape player, and there's enough songs to last the entire playtime and not be bored of them.

Laika is a story about people suffering in a war, and touches on some very heavy topics. I think some players may not buy into the fiction or connect with the characters, and this may lead them to see the violence depicted in the game as overly exagerated, but I see it as much part of the story and setting as the characters themselves. The narrative does a really good job at representing how its characters are affected by living in such a world, and the story itself is great.

While the game kind of looks like a souls-like and was definitely inspired by some, it doesn't play as one. Unlike with games of that genre, checkpoints are absolutely plentiful and the money you lose for dying is easy to recover (tip: you can aways just shoot the bag instead of grabbing it, since Laika atracts viscera). Also, there's no Boss Runs, as Laika respawns at the start of the boss encounter if you die during one. Because of that, although there are some pretty hard parts, the game overal is not that hard. It encourages you to experiment since dying is not a big deal, and you barely even leave the action when it happens.

There were also very few bugs. I died maybe three times due to a bug that made collectible materials suddenly throw me around when they were pulled to me. The bug would aways vanish after I respawned anyway, so it was no big deal due to what I mentioned in the paragraph above

On the critical side, the tutorial could have been better. There's a few quick things it doesn't mention, like where on the screen the deflect counter is, or the fact that you can dodge bullets even if you are out of deflect uses. I also personaly believe it should have taken longer for it to give us the pistol to force players to get a better hang of the deflect mechanic. I've seen people do two or three successful deflects in the tutorial, then grab the gun and rely solely on it, never learning how to properly time deflects. Practice deflects, folk, they're very useful.

The only thing that really got on my nerves was how you can only change weapons with your mouse wheel, if you play on mouse and keyboard. It should give us the option to use buttons instead. The mouse wheel of most common computer mice are imprecise, sometimes not detecting a turn, and sometimes detecting more than one. It makes it really hard to quickly change weapons mid-stunt, and because of that playing with a fully upgraded bag with 4 weapon slots felt harder to me than just keeping the bag with only 3 or 2 slots.

Overall, this is a great game, easely 10/10 for me despite the negative above. The art is great, the narrative is great, the characters are great, there are very few relevant bugs, the music is amazing, the gameplay is deeply satisfying, it allows you to pull very creative stunts, and the difficulty I cited above was more of an inconvenience more than a roadblock to me.