Recent reviews by Demnos

I enjoyed Nocturne when it first came out, but even that was somewhat bare-bones other than the setting and some mechanics that were new to me at the time.

Combat is fun at first, but fails to stay fresh even against late game bosses and dlc. I like having to defend against potential instakills, but far too many enemies are just sponges. You can have all four members of your team hitting weaknesses all fight long and it can still take 10 minutes to down an unimportant unintroduced boss thrown in to pad the game out.

The world feels very empty, bland, and somehow the maps feel very small and way to large at the same time. Movement is slow and monotonous. It probably wouldn't have been so bad if I wasn't compelled to do every side quest and collect everything I could in an attempt to find anything compelling. Spoiler alert, there isn't anything compelling or interesting to stumble across. Every bombed out building is just collapsed walls, sand piles, and bare empty flat floors. Every street is filled with sand piles and the same handful of wrecked cars. Honestly, they could have made the world black and white or 2d and would have lost nothing. It becomes apparent very early on that the sand everywhere is just to 'sand' down the rough edges everywhere. Harder see how devoid of interesting designs, props, or anything if sand piles are blocking the view almost everywhere especially early on.

The lowest point is the story and the characters. Characters are all one-note and I quickly started skipping dialog whenever possible which isn't something I do in many games. Characters will repeatedly natter on providing nothing new long after a player has already gotten the point they made initially. Most of this isn't voiced, which is fine, but the game will insert random phrases over the text. More often than not it does not fit the text and is just annoying. 'young man' 'young man' 'young man' 'young man' 'young man'.

The MC is a blank slate. Some games do this well, this one does not. There are very few dialog choices and almost none of them do anything different. If someone says 'Take my hand', nodding and taking their hand or taking their hand while nodding is *not* a choice. It doesn't help that you could sum up this game's entire story in a single page without being overly reductive. This review is already longer than whatever story board they used.

I guess, I'll download the easiest difficulty and plow through the other endings and achievements just so there's never any reason for me to revisit this game. Kudos if you like this game, hard pass from me.

Boring, empty, repetitive.

This game hooked me initially, but once you see how little control you actually have over a run it quickly wears out its welcome.

There's no real skill to building a deck because it all comes down to luck. I've had runs where I could pull flush houses or better every hand and still ran into an unavoidable roadblock like a bad boss blind or never finding a joker that buffs your multiplier. I've had an almost equal number of runs where I breezed through it only aiming for single pairs because the jokers I ran across in shops were well suited for any build.

Most of the other negative reviews have said it better, but I'm hoping they somehow find a way to balance the game a bit more down the road.

While this game has some charm and can be a pretty laid back and fun time, there are a lot of glaring issues that are really hard to overlook.

Ran across several instances where no enemies would spawn. It seemed to happen when I broke off from the main story to do sidequests at certain points. There was no warning that enemies wouldn't spawn until I raided a fortress that the main story was waiting on me to do. Everyone loves trekking 15 minutes into the wilderness just to find that your target will never appear.

Do you like long wind up animations and dramatic attacks? Cool, by the time the animation progresses far enough for the actual attack to land, the enemy is now 40' away attacking a wall and you've wasted time, resources, and gained nothing. Certain fights, especially against flying enemies will have you seeing this exact scenario play out well over 75% of the time you attack or parry.

There are a lot of random things in the environment that will halt your movement and kill your momentum. I ran into this a lot in any swampy area where 3" tall tree roots would trip me or my chocobo up everytime. Jumping won't even help you avoid this. It's a small issue but it happens all the time.

Even trying to interact with things is a major problem. A lot of the times I would see a button prompt to press 'A' to talk to someone, get in my car, mount a chocobo, pick something up, etc. Unfortunately, well over 90% of the time, Noct would simply jump when I pressed 'A'. The only thing that would help would be to take a few steps away, turn back, approach slowly and hope that pressing 'A' wouldn't make me jump 1-3 times before the prompt was satisfied. Very annoying.

I guess I'll sum it up by calling it a death from a thousand cuts. No one issue alone is enough to ruin your fun, but there's fiddly problems everywhere.

My first playthrough, I walked downstairs after messing around in my room for a few minutes. The bartender downstairs made some rather unsubtle hints that I owed him rent money. I flipped him off, tripped over a poor old woman in a wheelchair, and promptly died of a heart attack on the floor.

Seriously fantastic game that I recommend you go into blindly.

Loved this game. The weird SCP-like anomalies, the story, and the liminal feel of the entire game really scratched an itch I didn't know existed.

I'm normally not the biggest fan of 3rd person shooter games, but this was fantastic. My wife was also really caught up in the game and that always adds another level of enjoyment.

Really looking forward to the sequel. Hope they can catch lightning in a bottle twice.

Very long metroidvania with a surprising amount of mechanics.

Saved the town with nothing but a bone saw, a sliced off kneecap, two hearts, bear claws on ma feet, and some kids I kidnapped from school.


Good times!

a

Obra Dinn but worse in every way. My biggest gripe is that you solve murders and the killers aren't arrested or otherwise bothered. You have absolutely zero agency over the plot which makes it all meaningless. You are playing as a disembodied fart that smugly says to itself 'ha, this guy murdered this other guy in cold blood' and no one listens or cares.

The deductions are fairly simple, but it was a bit fun, but I regret buying it anyway.