Recent reviews by Rosebud

While I was moderately into the story during Tape 1, the gameplay was just so incredibly tedious that I couldn't stand it enough to play any further past the first few parts of Tape 2. I like the characters and plot well enough, but the monotony of the camcorder is just AWFUL. If Don't Nod ever reads this: you know what the difference is between a poloroid and a camcorder? Seven seconds. Then another seven seconds. Then another seven seconds. Then another seven seconds. Then another seven seconds. Ad infinitum.

If you saw the UI and thought "hey this looks like Disco Elysium with skeletons" then I would say this is definitely worth playing, but not to set your expectations that high. The story is quite enjoyable, I liked the characters a lot more than I expected to, and the game is actually very good about depicting someone's slow descent into a willingness to do increasingly terrible things for power — whether or not they try to justify those things or just admit it's pure greed. The game also depicts necromancy as a complex practice requiring research, ritual, and even basic problems like finding bodies... Walking around with a bunch of zombies without being hanged for it.

The gameplay itself is a little clunky, though. If you roll your eyes at hand-holding golden trails that lead you right to the quest goal, this game sure isn't going to do that — but as much as I enjoy a puzzle, it can frequently be kind of maddening trying to figure out the next step of any given quest. More-so when the quest step is just "find this flower" and it just expects you to wander around until you find it. This game doesn't currently have any kind of wiki, reddit, or discord, and the Steam guides have a pretty sparse collection of information to rely on, so you're basically flying blind here. You also can't fast-travel when outside of the main city until the end of the game, which isn't a huge deal but can make travel tedius and often feels like an unnecessary waste of time.

The combat is fine. It kind of feels tacked on because it would be weird for you to control a hoard of undead and not be able to fight anything, but it's not a combat game. It isn't bad, but if it's what you're here for, you're in the wrong genre.

Ultimately I think the pros outweigh the cons by a pretty significant margin, and I would recommend the game.

I don't think this is an inherently unethical use of AI the same way using AI for art is, but it does mean you can't really work through the spell creation process to get the kind of spell you want, like you can in Noita. I kept trying to figure out what the logic was behind how spells are created so I could get them to behave how I want them to — that literally just isn't possible, I guess? It's basically just random.

The gameplay is fine in a vacuum, but the spell creation system actually being random with virtually no way to affect the details of the spell ultimately makes the game too irritating for me. I don't like having to sit there for 10 minutes combining and recombining runes until the AI eventually decides the ones I'm using will give me something approximating the spell behavior I want.

I beat the game, uninstalled it, started a different game, then got irritated because it wasn't Silksong and reinstalled it to play again.

Loved this game up even through the Mistlands update. It was tough, sometimes really tough, but doable and rewarding.

I played Ashlands content for one hour and I'm probably never picking the game up again. I can't fathom who thought "let's make the new biome one long tedious fight that requires steering a small island half-way across the world through an obstacle course to get to" was a good idea, but even cheating to warp back led to an endless chain of battles with no exploration. I have zero interest in playing this game any further if this is the direction they're taking it, and I can't recommend it to anyone who liked what the game was up to this point.

And to those of you saying "you only played an hour? keep trying!" Yeah, I have a life, I'm not going to dump a dozen hours into something I loathe just to make it modestly less loathsome. Ashlands just isn't fun.

I loved Mega Man X and this scratched that itch better than most Mega Man X games. I don't even really like roguelikes but I sure liked this!

I loved this game! While a little easy at times (I played on hard and it felt like normal), it's really more about the puzzles than the combat. The graphics are really cute, the characters were likeable, and the story was a great balance of silly and surprisingly dark. The most disappointing thing about it was that it isn't popular enough — there's almost no fan content for it anywhere!