Recent reviews by Cidah

Fantastic game: story, gameplay, exploration, customization. The rumors of GOTY material for E33 are accurate! The story is interesting and makes choices that were fantastic; characters have depth and goals; I cannot recommend this game enough. If you're like me and struggled with certain aspects of the game (gameplay/combat for me early on), it's worth it very much!

Nitpicks do include learning parries/dodges, learning QTE (I think the HUD can be improved), learning party members' shticks (each member can have multiple strategies/builds/etc.). That being said, got through these and my enjoyment grew as a result.

200% recommend for all ages. Just enough cheesiness, heartfelt moments, action, and pure fun. This game is an arcade mashup and fun, accessible adventure. It has its moments with difficulty too; don't expect to go into this game for a hardcore experience, but enjoy the fun and you'll see why this is GOTY material.

Hazelight, amazing job!

A bit shorter than I would have liked, but 5/5 for horror and fishing, and a great price!

Do you like translating languages?
Do you like stylized point-and-click adventure?
Do you like good music and good art in your video game?

Then I recommend Chants of Sennaar! Very fun, challenging point-and-click adventure game where you have to figure out for yourself what people are literally saying, what they mean, and where you need to get to. Incredibly rewarding to solve yourself.

The bad:
While not strictly linear, the game has points where you need to complete X or you're stuck (there were times I consulted the internet for help). CoS could use a map feature, especially when certain environments room-to-room get very confusing. If you skip a puzzle or a point of interaction, chances are you need to complete that area, so do it now or do it later.

The game does reward mastery of its puzzle systems, and does have a great learning curve that I felt challenged the player appropriately. I wish it was longer, and I wish certain puzzles took less time. I also wish there was more language, and there are certain words that I hated translating. A mixed bag of mostly good; go get your journal, your quill, and get translating!

Short review:
Great game! The combination of good setting and lore with a boss-fight-centric combat system is a ton of fun. I played the game on medium survival (cold/hunger/fatigue buff/debuff) with the HP regeneration. I’m not great at combat, so I enjoyed these settings very much. The game definitely shines when you’re exploring between bosses/between POIs – there’s not much direction to do so, so I recommend wandering a bit before anything else.



Long review: [SPOILERS]
As a gift from a friend for the holidays, I really enjoyed the game. That being said, I have a lot of feelings and opinions on the game as a whole:

Inspiration:
Whether intended to or not, Praey for the God’s (PftG’s) inspiration is pretty obvious.

It takes Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild (LoZ:BotW) mechanics almost copy paste: health and stamina bars unlocked with 3 tokens (both of which are displayed as rings center-HUD); climb *nearly*anything; weapon durability; basic cooking; find & upgrade armor; slow time with bow; glider/sailcloth; grapple/hookshot. It was enough copy-paste that it feels ripped off – I think the mechanics really shine in PftG but they need to look and feel unique. The sailcloth and hookshot were especially egregious and felt stolen. This in turn made other environmental puzzles (like lighting statues for health/stamina upgrades) feel stolen even if they were not (like BotW Korok seed puzzles).

In the vein of the ubiquitous Dark Souls mechanics, PftG has a “die and die again” approach to the bosses. I don’t care much for the Souls formula so I may be pre-biased, but this kind of “die and learn” strategy only works when the game is setup to do so. For puzzles (e.g., armor items) and bosses, there were no loading zones or cutscene skipping when the player dies and returns to the area/boss. For one cave puzzle requiring shooting flaming arrows on a moving platform, having to run back and try again was a pain that made me leave the puzzle and come back only when I had way too many resources to share; for the yeti boss (boss 5), reentering the boss chamber triggers a cutscene that is incredibly boring to rewatch. A mechanic to respawn the player at the chamber door would be much appreciated.

Per Shadow of the Colossus (SotC), which PftG takes most of the formula, there was a disconnect between killing bosses and the rest of the narrative. The player is given no indication as to why they need to defeat these bosses (defeat the old gods?); there is no reward. SotC used its narrative to imply that killing the colossi was something the player should feel badly about – a somber tone that was spurred on by SotC’s Wander’s wish to save Mono. More plot direction here would be greatly needed.


Pacing:
I had a pretty big issue with pacing. When starting a new game, in the first 10 minutes the player is expected to grasp hunger, fatigue, and cold exposure with enough understanding to not die. On what I assume is standard difficulty, where these conditions can kill you, I would expect an average player to die a handful of times before they understood what was going on. The game’s tutorial on movement and fighting was fantastic, I must emphasize. But the survival aspect was not. That being said, I loved the game’s survival elements – please expand on these, rather than remove them.

The player is given the hookshot/grapple item very early on. Because of its awkward placing, I assume it is meant to be acquired later. I want to emphasize that this needs to be introduced (again I am hoping there is a plan to do so). I didn’t use the grapple until after the 2nd or 3rd boss – when I started to mess with it, it became a great way to travel quickly. I had too much to learn and figured I could learn it later once I was able to survive.

While on the topic of traversal, I want to make quick mention of climbing. The game takes the BotW approach to “climb anything anywhere” (except the unclimbable blue ice) except in boss fights, where it takes the SotC approach “climb only the boss’ fur”. I got really annoyed at this disconnect (but I don’t know a fix). I also want to mention the grapple points (red/black targets) – it would be very helpful to have them glow (similar to how the boss weakpoint sigils do) as they can be hard to spot, and the grapple chain is cancelled if anything gets between the player and the target (e.g., the boss turns or flails an arm).

The ability to cook items wasn’t really introduced until I killed wild game (I think a rabbit) and then sought a fireplace to cook it. This intuitive explanation is great; I only worry about players who cannot figure it out. Being able to cook plants (e.g., the cave fungi) was also unclear, and some plants (the green seeds) cannot be cooked – these inconsistencies made things a bit frustrating.

Cooking (and sleeping, until you find a sleeping bag) are tied to locations (mostly caves) with firepits and sleeping bags. This generally means gameplay revolves around finding one of these locations, getting gear and healthy levels of hunger/exhaustion/cold, then venturing out to the next one (or boss). There is no way to really “know” where these are – there are the cave entrances on the map which are helpful, but they seemed spread out in a way that was unhelpful. And caves that had two entrances were not marked, so I wouldn’t know where the nearest cave (and therefore fire/bedroll) was to me. These can be solved a number of ways: allow the player to mark the map; mark both entrances to caves; mark bedrolls/firepits after they’re discovered. The fires the player makes on-the-go cannot be cooked with, a design choice I like. The consumable bedrolls I tend to like less; perhaps give the player a permanent bedroll they can pick up and put down, and put it somewhere (e.g. after boss 2 or 3) to have it act like an upgrade.

Here’s a good place to mention saving. I like how we are given the choice to manual save, and I think it’s a good idea to allow easy difficulty playthroughs of the game to manual save. But for normal or hard difficulty, I think it is okay to restrict saving to say fireplace/bedrolls, and just before boss & puzzle chambers. It adds difficulty to the game’s survival aspects, which I think are already great mechanics.

In terms of pacing & progression, I think it’s very important to note resource management. Early and late game, I became resource constricted only on cloth, which drops from breaking weapons/items or from crates. There was no other way I could figure out to get cloth, which I needed to upgrade my equipment or to repair/upgrade weapons/tools. Though the dust ghosts/banshees drop and metal from undead are also limited in their number (e.g., wood grows back), I only had this problem with cloth.


Bosses:
I want to go through each of the bosses. At time of writing I have beaten all of the main bosses and fought a few through the optional Echo mode fights. I did NOT fight two minibosses (see below). I think it’s important to note that maxing the player’s stamina seems far more useful than health; with enough stamina the player can jump on to a boss, destroy a sigil/piston, and then stand up on a flat surface to regenerate stamina and proceed to the next sigil.

(I have more thoughts on each of the bosses, but cannot add them here.)

This game is great! A great idea and mechanic around destroying stuff and heist'ing your way out. The voxels are beautiful, the art very tasteful, and the environments amazing. I watched a friend play and was immediately hooked; I bought it and we laughed for a great time.

That being said, it crashes like hell. I have a computer with above-required specs, and implemented many of the suggested "work-arounds", but it keeps crashing.

This was all the final straw, of course, when I was completing an objective (yeet 6 cars into the ocean) that I had been working at for 2+ hours, and my game crashed on a looking-successful run.

Fix the bugs and I'll play the game again (and give it two thumbs up!)

At first, I loved Civ: BE because it felt totally unlike previous Civ games. The idea of space, the progress, everything is awesome.
Then I realized the game is old Civ - Civ mechanics, cities, war, techs, buildings, improvements, a LOT - with a new space skin. Didn't like it
Then I got better at the game and realized this is perfect.

Civ: BE is awesome. I love the series because of the "turn-based, chill out for ten minutes plotting your war moves" aspect to it, plus the empire-owning, people-developing bit. Add in the new stuff in BE (quests, Affinities - I don't want to spoil it) and you have a game that really makes you as the player feel influential for these people you're leading

And please, don't ever, ever, EVER forget to name your Leader (you), your Civ, and your cities. Otherwise you lose de facto haha.