Recent reviews by Sky Themself

Don't expect anything like Stanley's Parable.

You can finish it within the refund window, so no risk there.

The cake is a lie.

12/10, weird, experimental and psychological. Some obvious real-life facts makes the game a great thought provoking mystery.

The game offers visual censorship - believe me you want it on!!!!!! The first toggle about licensed songs made me believe it's just for streamers - no, it's for your sanity too...

first what I didn't like was controls, even in menu they felt unresponsive. Then after 5 clicks since the game booted it stopped responding, I didn't even check the settings, let alone start the game.
after reboot I continued into the game. I entered ##### and got some description I disliked (it collided with my views on the subject) and a game over screen. Then I tried #### and got some primitive and suggestive reaction but no game over. Obviously next I went for ### and the game crashed when giving her it. rebooted - crashed. It kept crashing after that, even with different words...

after 5th restart game stopped responding at all, just shows the content warning and that's all...

Steam deck review:

1) everything is too dark, you can't see beyond 3 meters in front of you. increasing brightness only reduces visibility.
2) maze on the way to store. you're not guided by light (or in any other way) and because you can't see sheet - you don't know where you are. flashlight stops existing beyond the 3 meters of visibility range, but otherwise it is completely black.
3) unguided progression. there's no indicators on how to progress most of the time, you end up just walking around till you trigger a transition.
4) bugs. if you do something the game doesn't expect - it will freak out. like if you check shells after picking up expired food it will remove the indicator from that shell but it won't count it towards progression.
5) run speed is the same as walking, just zoomed out.
6) endings are disappointing.
7) I missed the homeless guy.

clearly an earlier game, shows how far the developer has progressed since then.

Absolutely loving it from the very first hour. It's like final fantasy meets action rpg meets some ruined world anime (Seraph of the end, God eater, etc.). Amazing

I tried the game three times, but every time had enough of it within an hour...

Aliasing is OUTRAGEOUS! I tried different monitors (I had experience with OLED showing less aliasing in some games), mods, supersampling from 4k, changing settings and gamma, even CRT filter. The game is just unplayable. Heck, there is even aliasing in MOVIE cutscenes. Very little, but still!

I wonder how people aren't seeing it? I get really bad headache from this, so it's surprising nobody mentions it in their recommendations...

P.S you know what I wonder? I play old 3d games like Tomb Raider 1-9 or Fallout 3/NV/Skyrim with no AA what so ever, AND IT DOESN'T BOTHER ME AT ALL. quite the opposite, I prefer the sharp look. So why the hell games from this period (I'm thinking mostly late PS3, early PS4) neither work with AA on nor off? Like in games before and after AA can be toggled on and off for visual customization, but in this time period devs couldn't do either. I would bet that it's because earlier devs were making games with sub 900p resolution, and afterwards they had to think about FSR/DLSS upscaling, so it reflects in how they optimized the polygons and detailisation - while in this period people just discovered 4k and were not thinking too deep about the visuals, as they will always be able to make showcase at super high resolution on the game events, completelly ignoring how it will look when people are playing it....
Anyway, sorry for the rant
upd: I figured out why the aliasing here bothers me so much - it's white and not the colour of surrounding objects. That's why other games with awful aliasing, like nier replicant and automata, look good on oled steam deck, while this one is unplayable for me. Well that and third person view xD

STEAM DECK USERS! this game shouldn't be verified, it's not even playable - literally...
First - the game will crash on epilepsy warning, -dx11 in launch options fixed the issue;
Second - the game will get stuck at loading screen (15%) after hitting new game and selecting difficulty, setting proton to 10 (beta) and clearing the proton files fixed the issue.
Third - the game will freeze after loading screen on dlc outfit message... Reboot helped.
Fourth - most cutscenes doesn't work (sound only).

upd: I'm switching my review to positive. I forgot to change my setting from max when switching to steam deck from pc (gfn) and... performance was actually good? like 45fps, more than I saw on minimal... I guess low settings are just bugged out.
upd2: I forgot how often you get separated from kk (read no weapons, only useless bow). It's even an enemy mechanic in the late game. Reverting my review to negative.

original:

Performance is awful! It begins with cinematic 24 fps cutscene on the LOWEST settings with high textures... Yes it's 2022 games with very reflective world, but it looks straight out of 2015! And I even disabled the reflections...
Don't take me wrong, I like this art style, BUT one of its advantages is power efficiency - which is absent here. I mean where does all that horsepower goes? They surely are rendering something excessive, what we cannot see. Essentially I want to say, that they had the right idea with graphics, but they forgot to optimize it and just put every slider to maximum in the engine...

Gameplay...
Well combat kinda fun, but having to break stuff for ammo kinda sucks.
"Stealth" segments (including forced one in chapter 2) kinda pointless since you can just run through all the enemies - while they finish their detection animation you will be already almost out of their aggro range.
Progression feels redundant, there's no flexibility in the build as all abilities are what I would consider necessary so RPG mechanics seem forced.
Then soul collection is straight up awful, like the grind for the sake of extending playtime.
Side quests are good, though. They feel like out of a supernatural Yakuza/LaD. 10/10.
Main story? I liked it, but game will benefit significantly if instead of 12-14h game full of filler content with open world, they have made a 6-7h game with slick linear progression. Like use the fog to close the road back, instead of hiding the open world...
BTW, it was said a lot, but having cosmetics in first person game is just hilarious... I heard that sometimes they get unequipped on their own as you progress the story (have read it on the deluxe dlc page), can't confirm as I didn't engage with this mechanic at all.
P.S. having graphic settings baked into cloud save is just awful. Like, the game wasn't made in 2002, it's a modern game and developers are supposed to know of their existence? Did they not put any effort into the pc port? Oh, yeah... that would explain the performance...

ME1: played a few years agon on xbox, no comment.

ME2:

- cutscenes are locked to 30fps.

- unnaturally high RAM usage (13gb on Steam Deck, I would expect 4gb for this game, especially since it only uses 2gb vram)

- no real graphical settings

- awful perfomance in in-game cutscenes with massive cpu bottleneck (on steam deck it barely manages 30fps, while in-game you can get about 90fps for 12w)

? I remember abandoning it on xbox because I hated that they turned it into shooter and removed the infinite ammo which was pretty cool in the 1st. I'm indifferent now, though.

I don't recommend you play this, but it's still miles better than marvel's guardians of the galaxy (not the telltale one, the one you can still buy in 2025). Especially on steam deck. And it's still the best pick if you carve a space narrative adventure (which I do), it just has issues which makes me wanting to warn you since they're quite annoying from time to time (I enjoyed 95% of it, but 5% either made be motion sick, had fps drop to 20s or made me wishing for a skip button) which makes it a no buy, unless you can tolerate them (which I did).

Also disclaimer - I'm not familiar with the source material or the franchise.

story: enjoyable but generic. It makes you think of all the possibilities constantly - especially when the choices present themselves that're supposed to "matter". But then you feel the fallout realizing it couldn't happen because of the budget... It has too high of a budget to have simple branches and too small of a budget to voice and animate all of them...

gameplay: good when flying or walking, bad when they try to add combat, puzzle, stealth or anything else of the sort.

Language: half of the characters speech is giberish. I get that they went for "space slang" or a language born of mixture of others, but they could've at least subtitle it with something comprehensible... Like in Still wakes the deep they subtitled Scotish phrases even though it was perfectly clear what character say (I even wished they didn't since I couldn't spell them), on the other hand here they just write down the way it sounds - and they're using kaka all the time, which is a childish (infantish? baby-talk) way to say feces in my native language, and what's worse it fits contextually so it transforms into kindergarten for me, just can't take them seriously or view them as adults...

motion sickness: no FoV slider and no switches for camera sway and wobble (in space/zero g walks, especially when fixed to the ground)

perfomance: can run at 90fps on steam deck (low-high mix. high AA, view distance and texture), but drops to 60 in mildly demanding section and under 30 in rare instances (like mirror cutscene).

Visuals: everything looks sharp, which is good, but the characters feel uncanny.

choices: from the very beginning game makes it clear that your choices and QTE doesn't really matter with the tutorial fight. The game distinctly made to be experienced in one way, well I guess it IS a telltale series... At least people can die depending on your choices so it feels like you can change the story, even if it is minute. But most of the time you ain't given even that and all options presented are in essence the same. Like will you call someone stupid or an idiot? You're presented with a choice but there's no choice to be made, just a very weak illusion nobody is gonna fall for.

Also most of the problems in mid to late game are caused by characters not wearing the fracking helmet. You're on the colony that died of a deadly plague with bodies all around you? You're handling a different even more deadly plague? Yeah, take that sheet off. You're boarding a damaged ship with pirates ready to make more holes in it? Yeah, this sheet goes off. Like WTF, did zero gravity caused their brain to evolve backwards?

I wrote a long review but the steam didn't save it... the story is good, but I'm unfamiliar with source material. The graphics are good, not "realistic" that's popular lately, but it reminds me of ps3 era games like dishonored only in higher fidelity. The performance is good, 75-90fps on deck with medium-epic settings, cutscenes are prerecorded and limited to 60 fps, so I played locked 60fps.
the motion sickness didn't worry me with high FoV and some other settings like slower camera, but close by the ending it got really bad when character is hurt and both character and camera are asynchronous swaying and wobling.

I liked it, but don't feel like ever replaying it...