Recent reviews by Calypso Benthos

This game has so much heart, there's so much to enjoy and experience! The writing is witty, the mechanics are fulfilling, and the fights are rad!!!

This game is incredible please don't let it die this time

Once again Fromsoft has made a game that has incredible depth and loads of repeatability. Would definitely recommend to everyone looking for an engaging game to play.

The game has a lot of quality level design, with my only gripes with the game being some of the enemy designs, but i got through that more quickly than I thought I would. The story was great and had a lot of fun dialogue and a great soundtrack to boot. A lot of the Cybervoid puzzles were fun too and well thought out in how they would play. To side note, I'm a Buddhist, so hearing about stuff such as Mara being the villain, the setting being Dharma Tower/City, and a company being involved with the story known as Samsara Corporation, I knew that a lot of symbolism from my practice as a buddhist would come into play in the narrative and it showed. The following will contain spoilers for the game so PLEASE keep that in mind if you continue to read further.

Samsara is the concept of Reincarnation and suffering that all life goes through, the mundane existence that is driven by desire and ignorance and the karma that comes from it. In the description of one of the collectibles in the game, the company started off as a mining company, which can be viewed as the work being arduous and brought suffering to the workers, with the desire to bring about something greater, and needing the tag everytime to come back could be seen as something akin to the cycle of reincarnation, with some interpretive liberties of course. Mara is basically the buddhist devil who tried to stop Siddhartha from attaining Enlightenment. He would try to obscure the truth from the buddha like the villain is hiding the truth and information from the people in the tower to suppress them. She ended up knowing the truth about the ai helping you on your journey, and how in the end he was going to turn against you, which leads to the final "boss fight" after he reveals he wants to take over your body to enact his plan to keep people in the tower against their own will and stuff. She didnt have a better plan either though, wanting to mutate people into something more to be able to withstand the outside world. You decide against what they want for you and decide the middle path of neither extreme and take them both out to liberate the people and give them the freedom to choose their destinies. Dharma tower/city is interesting, since the Dharma is seen as the truth, or the ultimate reality of "the way that things really are". This could mean that the city is simply represents how they are meant to live in order to survive as a species, since it was built to save the remnants of mankind.

Overall it was quite fun and I would recommend the game to anyone who enjoys fast paced action that keeps you on your toes at all times, with some fun puzzles soundtrack and a great narrative.

Despite the launch issues, the innovation and creativity behind this game and the drive to improve is welcomed after the disappointment of Pokemon SwSh.