I grew up a Jehovah's Witness, after dedicating my life to this faith I was subjected to just about every type of religious abuse you can imagine save being molested or raped. That is usually relegated to the female witnesses in the cult who are second class citizens. I know many victims of this cult who suffered personally. This does not even go into doctrine in which witnesses are just wrong, or into their shunning policy that destroys families or the nonsensical blood doctrine that has killed children that they proudly display on the covers of magazines which is disgusting. There is an ocean of abuse that has been perpetrated by this cult for about 100 years now, I can go at length about this but there are a ton of resources I will link below for those curious.

I need you to understand this about the cult that I used to be a part of so you can also understand how the story of this game, which is very much about religion and cults, affected me on a deep personal level which I will get into at the bottom of this review.

Now onto the game itself, I didn't actually know what the game was about, I just knew it was made by one of my favorite developers. I finally decided to complete this game and wow, it was just the game I needed to play right now. I will summarize the good/bad/neutral points of the game below:

• Fantastic story and characters
  
• Fantastic player agency, lots of great quests. Many solutions to quests that trust the player's intelligence and don't hand hold too much which was awesome
  
• Lots of dialogue skill checks and role play opportunities
  
• Satisfying almost Diablo-like combat (although very chaotic)
  
• Great music, a lot of tracks stick in my head, the battle track can get really annoying though
  
• Creating builds for different classes and gearing them out is very fun, you can retrain your character pretty much whenever you want for relatively cheap
  
• Upgrading the stronghold is just simple enough to be addicting
  
• You can choose how active you want to be in combat, the AI is pretty decent and I did use that through most of the game switching parameters for different fights but you can be as meticulous as you want which is great
  
• The gibs are so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ satisfying, I cannot describe the quality of dopamine rush you get from literally punching an enemy so hard they ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ explode into bloody chunks

• Combat was chaotic which was very entertaining but very frustrating as well. Never enough to get genuinely angry but 90% of the fights came down to positioning. The games health mechanics and cheap camping supplies balance this out so while it is messy it is still satisfying
  
• Woedica is a really funny name to say if you say it super loud like a producer tag, I stimmed hard on yelling that name in my apartment over and over again and I laughed my ass off every ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ time
  
• The game didn't really need any crafting or alchemy, I managed just fine barely touching these mechanics at all, but they are there for those that want to partake
  
• Exploration is just fine

• Pathfinding and positioning can be a struggle, there were many times when a character would circle the battlefield doing nothing or get stuck behind a teammate. Sometimes I would have to reposition by literally randomly clicking around until all the characters could reach an enemy
  
• I would have appreciated easier access to unique loot or just more of it, this seemed sparse in my playthrough. The prices for unique items are prohibitively expensive for early-mid game, especially if you have a full roster. It becomes very easy to amass money as you progress but by the time you have enough money to splurge on these items a lot of them are useless.
  
• I ran into some bugs in the late game, nothing game breaking but annoying nonetheless. At one point I was able to walk through a wall and trigger a story event and I had to reload my save but that was as intrusive as it got
  
• There were so many spells and damage types that didn't seem necessary for the length of the game and depth of battle BUT this might be something that flourishes under harder difficulties, I just played the game on normal
  
• Though I ended up absolutely loving the story, it is a slow start, I had a hard time caring about what was going on until a few hours in.
  
• Traversing the world can be a gigantic pain in the ass, you can only fast travel out of an area when you reach the edge of the map so there is a lot of pointless walking around. This is fine for the first trip to a location but when you're jumping between places rapidly for quest reasons, etc. it gets infuriating having to drag the map to the edge and clicking on the compass to fast travel and then just waiting for an entire two minutes for the characters to make their way there every single time. There isn't enough content density in the world to justify the amount of walking around.
  
• There needs to be a way to turn off the Kickstarter pledge content as I would sometimes forget and running into it would frequently ruin the immersion. The Kickstarter pledge NPCs were fun for flavor but it got extremely annoying to run into them at almost every corner of every populated area when I was just looking for quests.

If I had to come up with a score without involving personal bias about the themes of the story that really connected with me, I'd say it's like a B- at its best and a C- at its worst.

Like I mentioned before I could probably go for hours about how this game parallels the things I am currently going through as I recover from the hell that was being a Jehovah's Witness. This game's narrative delves into these topics, the nature of consciousness, the fate of the dead, the moral limits of religion and science. It made me think about how I want to progress in my life and who I am capable of forgiving, and ultimately what to do with this grief and rage. It reached a deep part of me and has helped me understand the depth of trauma I faced. It also provided something of an outlet for that rage. I cannot say that about every game I have played, this one really reached deep. I won't go into specifics as, this review is long enough, but if you have faced the same trails in life and love CRPGs and want to unpack those questions then this game will surely help you process those feelings. Thank you Obsidian from the bottom of my heart for making this wonderful video game. If you are curious about the controversies surrounding this cult, I recommend the following links for research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfulfilled_Watch_Tower_Society_predictions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehovah%27s_Witnesses_congregational_discipline
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Jehovah%27s_Witnesses
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_abuse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehovah%27s_Witnesses%27_handling_of_child_sexual_abuse
https://jwfacts.com/
https://watchtowerdocuments.org/
https://jwwatch.org/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiDYzrIdlw0&ab_channel=NavSangha
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k0g7jL7Ums&ab_channel=InfoHub
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDwHdj7plWo&t=1s&ab_channel=ABCNewsIn-depth

You can find many victims/activists on youtube telling their stories, I recommend delving into them. Any religion that covers up the rape and abuse of innocent people is no religion at all, it is a cult.

This game is one of the few I can truly say is nearly perfect. In every aspect, this game excels. The story, while whimsical at first, will catch you by surprise by the end and certainly make you feel something. The music is enchanting and peaceful like a cool breeze on a hot day, and when the combat ramps up it becomes a thunderous, powerful symphony of drums. The graphics, while simple, are purposefully done in that way to propel the very japanese aesthetic to another level. The game is like a living sumi-e painting. The combat is extremely engaging, there are a bunch of weapons with different properties that you can upgrade and combine to get crazy combos, not to mention all the crazy stuff you can do with the brush mechanic. The depth of combat gets close to Devil May Cry levels of CUH-RAAAZY. There are TONS of locations to explore with many memorable characters, from a frozen wasteland to a dense forest to a pristine beach. Even the most minor characters will stick in your mind for a while. The only things I can really criticize about it would be that it's a little too easy so more seasoned gamers might want to turn up the difficulty and that the pacing at the beginning of the game is abysmally slow, the tutorials can be annoying as well. On the technical aspect, the game runs like a hot knife through butter, I never came across a bug or graphical hiccup thoughout my time playing. As far as controls go, it's almost as if this game was made for KB+M, using the brush with a mouse is a million times easier than using a control, I'm even better at the game now then when I played it on the PS2. You will have to exhibit patience when the game starts but besides that this game is masterfully crafted and I highly recommend the game to anyone. If you like the Legend of Zelda it is pretty much guaranteed that you will love this game, it is a pinnacle of the adventure genre.
This and Godhand are really what sold me on Clover Studios at the time. Clover Studios would later become PlatinumGames which is a household name for fans of action games and has made a ton of modern classics such as Bayonetta 1&2, METAL GEAR RISING: REVEANGANCE, Nier: Automata, Vanquish, and The Wonderful 101. If you loved any of their games you owe yourself to play this masterpiece.