Recent reviews by zincowl

Prophetic, earnest, shameless, insufferable, unbalanced, saccharine, simple, complex, mundane, inventive, cynical, idiotic, expansive, comical, pathetic, sincere, predictable, authentic, boring, frustrating, fun, thoughtful, indifferent, self-aware, unassuming, arcady, cinematic, worthless, priceless, influential, derivative, focused, scatterbrain, nonsensical, deliberate, disappointing, dumbed down, patronizing, avant-garde, passionate, by-the-numbers, inconsiderate, straightforward, pedantic, pedestrian, streamlined, overthought, dramatic, profound, surface-level, obscure, laughable videogame.

The first great and truly original thing Below does is set a very distant perspective on a detailed, naturalistic world.

The way it makes you guess what exactly you're looking at is a very ingenious attempt at communicating how looking at surroundings in an 8-bit game might've felt like in the past. Especially when a very tactile sound design -- reminiscent more of survival horror than soulslikes -- makes such an effort at leaving an impression, be it the world itself or how you interact with it.

Below's second great idea is to make you plan out your own death.

Instead of cultivating perseverance and input memory, it encourages you to weaponize fail states. Just like you manage your inventory, you are also responsible for managing your next run when the current one has yet to end. Where you die matters. And survival elements like safe rooms, hunger, crafting, and very tight level design make this unconventional task three-dimentional.

Sound design is not the only thing that Below borrows from survival horror. You'll find yourself trying to solve logistical and navigational problems not too far from Resident Evil or similar titles. Having to scramble for ways to prolong your current life, backtrack for resources, or finally bring a key to a door often felt more like being in a mansion than in a dungeon.

I feel Below is from AND for someone who likes very particular aspects of these types of games, namely the immersive, methodical nature of how you progress through levels, punishment for rash decisions, and deliberately obscure presentation of game rules.

This game is very slow, punishing and demands patience. All familiar and tired genre staples at this point. But Below is positively unique in what it uses its difficulty for.

It was better when souls games didn't quite know what they were. It was better when nobody knew what they were either.

Aside from few unique selling points that it desperately tries to make you aware of in its tutorials along with somewhat misleading claims to the ever shifting concept of an "immersive sim", Weird West is by all accounts a small version of a Bethesda game with familiar genre trappings, albeit more morally unhinged in its story and characters.

It has a moderately reactive open world consisting of nearly identical larger towns and small settlements spread out across the map while the main crux of its RPG routine is picking up everything in sight in the fashion of a mole or a vacuum cleaner with the goal of selling it to vendors or crafting.

Surprisingly, however, what this game also offers is a mildly satisfying twin-stick shooter with bullet-time, although it is once again undercut by resource based systems that never let the player fully explore neither their arsenal nor the character skills. All the while the tactical aspect of the fights can only be expanded upon through hiring AI companions that expectedly work as distracting cannon fodder, taking away any desire for active participation.

What remains is the freedom of approach, which this game reduced mainly to the freedom of who and how to kill. This becomes evident immediately after opening the skill and perk menus that offer to exclusively amplify repetitive exploration activities and weapon handling through gradual percentage increases. This limp fixation on loot and combat continually haunts all 5 available characters all of which are barely distinguishable between one another, which means that even if this game didn't try to sacrifice gameplay variety to serve the story structure by taking the player through their stories in a continuous manner, this variety would still remain barely noticable.

All of the above-mentioned observations make the whole experience seem like a confused venn-diagram with Weird West sitting somewhere at the cross-section of "poor content variety", "tired RPG cliches", "unrewarding progression", and "mediocre shooter". Makes me wonder what all those big action rpgs would be worth without the pretty views and music they spend so much time and resources on.

You know you're in for a treat when you see a "junk" section in a game inventory. A sign of time well-spent.

This game is great!

The dialogue is abhorrent!

This game makes you care about elevation, type of terrain, weather and surrounding flora just as much as any other Hideo Kojima game about intimate relationships with soils.

Yes.

If you like Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, please buy this game. This is exactly what you are looking for.