Recent reviews by TwoEleven

It's a kind of game that draws you in with a lot of potential, great world building, and a sense that you are just on the cusp of really 'getting' it. But ultimately, each time you walk away from it, you'll have the bad taste of wasting your time on something that wasn't as fun as you thought it was.

To get it out of the way, the heart of the game devs is there, and it is great. It is one of the reasons I wish the game could live up to its potential. The atmosphere of the world hit the right notes of both beautiful and oppressive. Everything from the gorgeous pixel art to the fluff text of eeach of the collectibles and monsters works to build up the alieness of the situation; the curiosity and excitement of the new, mixed with the fear and danger of the unknown.

All this wonder and immersion is then burnt to the ground and stomped on by utterly tedious, frustrating gameplay.

As a rougelike (calling it a 'rougelike-like' is meaningless by the way), difficulty is exactly what you expect. Each death is just a minor bump in the road, and each small victory or defeat is a step towards the eventual aligning of the stars where lucky breaks coincide with raw built up skill. And while these premises are true, nothing ever seems to hold any weight. The four skills each character gets are fairly concise and predictable, and any decently versed gamer will quickly be able to figure out the one way that the skills should be played in order to maximize effectiveness. Once that is done, the skills turn into a baby's first piano toy, mindless pressing the buttons in order while walking back and forth along flat terrain, picking at the conga line of monsters behind you.

Despite the complex backstorys and mystery given to each unique creature that you can read about in the encyclopedia, the only thing they are actually going to do is pace back and forth when they can't walk to you, walk directly towards you if they can, and execute function[Attack] IF(Player = next_to_monster). The bloody knife you picked up from a random chest (nearly every chest is totally random) might tell you that it's occult power is from the tortured souls of all of the innocents that the knife has told its holders to sacrifice, but all it is going to do is damage a couple extra enemies when you kill something. The life of the fantastical world seems to only exist on paper. Instead of discovering through luck or skill some amazing lost artifact that obliterates your enemies, and finding out you had stumbled upon the legendary Staff of Abraxas, the game tells you that the Mega Ballista Cannon of the Great War is actually just a random chance of +3 attack stat.

And maybe some will say, "Psh, its a rougelike, if I wanted to get into a story, I would read a book or play an adventure game, I came here for the gameplay". I definitely understand that sentiment. Its just the the weightless feeling is in the gameplay as well. It is understandable that the game is supposed to get harder the longer you take, that in of itself is a somewhat uniquely realized mechanic. But it is too much, too fast, and forced so hard there is no chance to breathe.

Within a matter of minutes of gameplay the monsters will already be such damage sponges and spawn with such frequency that the game becomes even on the first level a constant battle of attrition. Walking back and forth across a plane with lifeless AIs following in a mass behind you, occasionally stopping to press your four skill buttons in order to take a potshot at the crowd. You play in a constant state of ironic dread: every moment of calm when you aren't attacking creeps forward in agony, each second wasted increasing enemy health and damage while your XP/money isn't. Then in what should be an intense battle to the death you are lulled into a bored trance in the action game equivalent of data entry, where instead of stamping [Approved] onto the next incoming application you are stamping [Attack Key 2] onto Enemy #422. But maybe next round, you will find the Mythic purple plate armor and rip through your enemies! Then this tedious pulling at this slot machine will all be worth it! Until you find that rare, "powerful" item, and realize that adding 3 to your 10 attack doesn't mean much when the enemy's health is somewhere in the upper thousands. Replacing a claw hammer with a sledgehammer stops making a tangible difference when your objective is to flatten a mountain.

The game entices you with a land of intrigue and mystery to explore, but spends its entire time trying to shove you along as quickly as possible. I suppose the simple statement is, "great story and imaginative world, let down by boring gameplay", but 'let down' doesn't do it justice. When the gameplay doesn't just fail to live up to the world it supposedly occupies, but actively undermines it, the crime is magnitudes worse.

Seems like it could be a decent game, calling back to the simple circle-strafe and gun mechanics of Doom and that era, BUUUUT.... expect the game to crash around every 10-20 minutes for seemingly no reason. Until whatever bug this is is fixed, the game is basically unplayable.

A nice puzzle game with a good difficulty going through normal, but adds a ton of more gametime if you are trying to get the more difficult stars and BTM. Nice story for a puzzle game as well.