Recent reviews by Owlbeardo

As much as I would love to give this game a positive review I can't bring myself to it. I will list the positives and the negatives in 2 parts, but unfortunately the negatives outweighed the positives for me. I'd like to also point out that I am heavily comparing it to the first (previous) chapter of Divinity (Enchanced edition).

Positives:
Beautiful graphics. Really polished the looks and the artstyle is vibrant and interesting to look at.
Quests. Captivating, interesting and not that linear in most cases.

Negatives:
Mechanics. From the level-up to learning skills with memory slots the game feels busted. The progression is way too slow, the lack of overlap of Attributes and skills is just no fun and the amount of EXP to level up proportionally to what you get upon a level up is obnoxious. I barely feel progression and all that changes are numbers, however my charachters still are having trouble persuading traders or other NPCs and keep dying to stuff that is terribly scaled. Overall the game quickly turns into cheesing and savescumming unless you go with actual guides on levelups to minmax as hard as you can. Unfortunately at this point it doesn't matter how interesting the quests are because every other moment you are going to spend a lot of time and thought to beat a challenge that is way too high for you and get a miniscule reward.

Autosaves. Not much to say here: autosaves that happen AFTER the fight began are stupid. A game like that in which you have to load back every other minute just HAS to have a timed autosave feature, like "Autosave every 3-5-10 minutes". If I have to have my finger on F5 at all times and think about not f-ing up at all times I can't get engrossed with a story.

Random loot stats that make little sense. A 2 handed sword with a finesse bonus? A wizard hat with Warfare bonus? A bow with Necromancy bonus? Please, get it together!

Ruined crafting. Weirdly enough, while crafting in the first part was not very good, when Larian tried to expand the system in this chapter they ruined it even more. Now I can't craft most things I need to before I get to at least middle of the game and the ones I can scale not with my crafter level, but with charachter level, meaning I can't even profit from it. I've picked up every single thing I could lay my eyes upon and there's barely any way to use it, so now I haul an inventory with a weight of 100 for basically no purpose.

Stealing. It was broken before, I admit, when a rogue charachter could steal everything from invisibility, but it was broken in a way that benefitted the player and I didn't have much objection to that. Now it's broken in a way that severely punishes the player even when the player is at least somewhat clever about it: the traders and NPC's will chase the party and demand a search through half the map and the consequence of that is that now you have to fight the entire city. Even "civilians" enter the fray and start using deadly spells, including Sourcery??? right in front of the Magisters.

Story and characters. This is a big point. While the quests are interesting, the story line is just dreary and there may be just 2 characters in the entire hero roster that are at least somewhat sympathetic. Fane is an a-hole, Red Prince is even more so. None of the NPC-s make me want to help them or the Gods, who might just be the biggest ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ there are. If that was up to me I'd let them f off and do nothing because they treat the protagonists like crap. More so, everyone is one or another kind of nazi to each other and the "big bad void" feels like a justified ending to all of that bs going on. I say: let the chaos take the world.

I played for 54 hours and I don't think I am going to finish it, the Driftwood is going to be my heroes' resting place. I hope BG3 is going to be better on all of these points.

Dark, sometimes just for shock value. Artstyle's cute. The characters are pretty flat, but fun to watch for the most part. They really should've doubled down on incest and lower the degree of cannibalism though.

Leyley is very sexy, that's a crime to make a character so twisted and so sexy at the same time.
Nuff said.

It's a good game that I didn't particularly enjoy.
Lemme explain.

I can see how much w-ork went into it and it's details are of very high quality: the effects, the art, the skill systems, the ambience and the backgrounds. Unfortunately, all of these elements are not very well tied together with a gameplay loop, that is kind of bland. Most of the time games of this sort, rogue-lites in general, fantasy even more so, rely on a solid story, lore and completion compels to go again and again to see the different aspects of the game, feel the difficulty spike not onlyb because enemies get stronger, but also because there are bigger reprocussions for loss, you care about not losing, whereas in this title I just don't really care about the villain and his success. I don't think I am going to continue playing it, even though I like the artistic direction and the idea of it a lot. I recommend it to people, who enjoy exploration and genre in general, but I wouldn't get my expectations too high or you are likely going to be disappointed as I was. However I don't think I am going to refund it. Probably.

Art, music, effects, UI -- 9/10
Gameplay loop, balance -- 5/10
Story, engagement -- 3/10

A fun and colorful bullet-hell rogulike, drive and fun. Good music, atmospheric. A perfect time killer.

A few things that I didn't like:
Gameplay loop is a bit too repetetive and non-stop. You are getting shot during the day and during the night, where the farming could've been a nice reprieve from a night-time massacre I usually die during the day to these dumbass moles and flowers, that are just simply non-stop and do not die fast enough even with the better weapons. Nonsensical price balance for weapons. It's basically impossible to go through all 8 biomes with the time given if you want to win. Final boss is the same every year, could be more imaginative, kinda dull when you are at year 5. Beds/Propagators could be made smoother.

Summary: a really good game that clearly took inspiration from Gungeon in many aspects, but could not get to the heights of content of it, fun at first, but kind of getting repetetive at the point where you finally get to upgrades. Most items (or all) are unlocked from the beginning and there's barely a sense of progression while the grind is real. With all that said, it's fun 20-40 hours so buy it.

Kickstared the project in early bird and it's worth every penny and more. This is a fantastic tool that keeps growing and I can't recomment it enough. Get it, it's great.

It's powerful and beautiful, but not easy either to learn or to master. I feel like the professional mappers and 3D artists, architects specifically can achieve incredible things here, however for an average user it might be on the cusp of usability because the UI at times is unintuitive and it will squeeze your graphics card HARD if you're going for something bigger than 50x50x20 (and I've got rtx 3050).

However, it's on Steam, which makes it very convenient and it have had decent progress over the years and it seems like there's only more to come!

I personally seriously want Dungeon Alchemist integration though and maybe make navigation easier: planes make no sense to me and these sliders are very hard to use in building mode. A feature to be able to build the plan in 2D and then quickly transform it into 3D would've been amazing too.

I am a big fan of the original game, that came out in 2013 and all of the additional content: Demo versions, Rafael version... When I got the news that this game is going to come out I was extatic. I think I wasn't the only person salivating in the waiting for the Stanley Parable ULTRA DELUXE: The Hidden Octopus 5, Pocket Full of Content. But here it is.

Aaannnd... There could be more to it, I'd say. More WaCkY endings, more references, more gags and jokes. It could become a real Stanley Parable 2 even. But on the other hand -- it's great as is. It's liminal, sad, it literally the First Game with more CONTENT on top of it. I got the bucket and I was happy. Can't ask for more, really even though I kind of wanted to. I think I went through all of the content in 14 hours and several times too. Too bad the Confusion route doesn't allow you to take the Bucket with you to supress the confusion.

Some things are very subtle. Some thoughts and moments are touching. Most jokes land greatly with precise comedic timing (!) and I appreciate that. The work done by Kevin Bright and devs is very well done and the Narrator is as always in my heart, even though, it may have become less sensitive over the last 9 years. Thank you. 9 buckets out of 10 Endings.

A very solid good game: the music is emotional and nice, the art and writing are very well done, the combat is diverse and challenging enough to make you driven to beat it, but not too hard (honestly, some bosses could be harder, but at the same time: 2-4 tries is what I would call an average and well-balanced difficulty). I highly recommend it, 9/10 cute Crow-reapers. They did overdo on puzzles and grinding aspect just a tad bit. If you are a completionist, my advice: plant all the seeds, don't collect them at all, just plant every time you have an opportunity. And better even: play Titan Souls' by Acid Nerve prior to this game -- you will probably not regret doing it.

Raw as hell, not fun, refunding.

Died so many times to bullshi.t.

> Gather planks, hammer, nails
> No button to bar the window (not in rightclick, nowhere)
> Have 5 zombie yeeting itself through said window


> Walk for 3 days straight through the forest, taking naps, eating can food, all good
> Drink some rainwater collected into a pot
> Die from fever this very day

> Get everything you want: food, books, materials, weapons, decent clothing
> A couple wayward zombies attack you
> Die in one bite

This is just no fun. Either you go Godmode and have infinite molotovs or you just ♥♥♥♥♥♥ die all the bloody time with no actual chance of survival. Go to hell with your "realism", my dudes, game must be fun first and challenge must serve fun.

It's pretty cool. I've been binge playing this game and unlike many others I tried in last months it really makes you wanna play more. It reminds me of Slay the Spire stronly because of the way it's structured, but it is very different and way more detailed.

LORE is 5+
Many characters with intertwined stories and even some interaction between them. The story as a whole is engaging enough that you wanna beat the game numerous times and save everyone, but not just for "collecting", but because it's interesting, what is the story of these WYRD characters :D

Narration is 4+
Some actors sound a little stifled or not believable enough in some dialogs, but overall the VO (which I personally find very important) is very solid. Especially Hilde the Scientist and the Candlemaker's voices. I think the biggest problem was with presumably old characters who sound not old.

Graphics 5++
This game looks magnificent for it's genre. A perfect combination of Disciples, HoMM5, Vampyr, Diablo and Doom in terms of how monsters, characters and backgrounds and battlefield look and behave. The semi-free flow of camera takes some time (like a couple of hours?) to adjust, but the ability to watch at the battlefield and game world at different points of view is really cool and so is the look of monsters.

Music 5+++

Oh, baby, the only thing I'd want from this game from standpoint of music is more of it! The fight music with moutharp and throat singing? MOAR PLS!

My personal view on characters: archers suck, melee fighters are very descent, but vary from pathfinder (the worst one) to Berserker (the best one) (though, may take some time to figure out the style), and summoners are the most complex and have the best strategies (didn't try necromancer yet, but vanilla summoner works the best I think).

I recommend playing this game if you enjoy figuring out best strategies, don't like RNG too much (the balance in the game is really good) and want dark fantasy game to entertain you for quite some time.

Also the WOLF IS OP ON FIGHTER HOLY SHRIMP THE WOLF IS OP I LOVE THIS BOI WITH 1500% DMG POWER PET PET PET PET PET PET