ZerbanDaGreat 最近的评测

It breaks my heart to give this game a thumbs down, because it's such an incredible and unique experience when you go into it blind and really immerse yourself in the vibe of what it wants. Finally figuring out an unspoken puzzle, finding a new page of the manual for its tantalising hints about what's to come or acting as the final piece of the problem you've been struggling with, it's really something special. Unfortunately there's a few sticking points. First and foremost, these are some of the worst boss fights you can imagine in an isometric adventure game, with annoying patterns and extremely short vulnerability windows which pairs very poorly with the extremely ill-advised Souls-like underpinnings to the combat. Boss 1 and 3 are fairly manageable, but 2 and 4 are cancerous and I have no regrets about skipping 5 by refusing to beat the game.

This is a relatively difficult game. That's fine starting out, it uses difficulty to funnel you around certain areas and create a sense of satisfaction in progression as you learn new abilities that you may have secretly had all along, or find new tools that trivialise otherwise terrifying enemy types. There's even a stat upgrade system hidden in a relatively early manual page where, naturally, even figuring out how to input the function is part of the puzzle, and that helps a lot. The Quarry was my personal danger point where the environment design conspired to send me down what was apparently a secret path, leaving me completely stumped about the intended path forward, and even once I did cave and look up what I was doing wrong the area's gimmick makes some insane asks of you to reach the next progression item. But y'know, that's fine, it's a climactic zone and the final of the three macguffins you're likely to acquire so it feels appropriate.

Then the game puts your balls in a vice. It takes away all your upgrades and sends you to a new zone with a new dungeon where everything pretty much two-shots you and the 'final boss' of this dungeon drops you down a hole into a room with about half a dozen statues in it. Interact with one of the statues and you have to fight either 20-odd of a normal enemy as they spawn in rapidly to overwhelm you, or an old boss - in one case two! You have to interact with each statue, killing everything it spawns, all in a row, no breaks, no deaths. Due to how incredibly fragile you are without upgrades and how difficult it is to keep up the damage output against so many/such tough enemies because of the same, I hit a wall. Then, because I was getting exhausted and I just wanted to know how close to the end I was, I looked up a text walkthrough and saw this sequence was only part one of a six- or seven-step process to backtrack across the entire gameworld slowly reacquiring all of my stats before I could finally fight the final boss who would presumably be even more ballbusting and annoying than the fourth boss.

I know full well there were settings I could've tweaked to reduce the difficulty that maybe could have let me squeak through that combat gauntlet and maybe I could've started having fun again back in the overworld, but I didn't. I had no desire to. To me it didn't matter that I could have made the combat easier because my problem was that the game had fundamentally changed its nature, its vibe, to something I no longer enjoyed. I also learned that in the endgame/'postgame' the puzzles take a sharp turn toward esoteric The Witness type stuff and whacky cryptic ARG ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, something even a glowingly positive review I watched later noted was a massive shift in puzzle philosophy that could've used a more gradual ramp-up.

This is a magical, special game which offered me something completely unique for the first 75% of its runtime, and if for some reason someone undecided reads this review then I hope the full body of it will adequately prepare them to have a better overall experience than I did.

This game slonked me silly

A charming and fully-featured survival horror game in the style of Resident Evil, perhaps closer to the classics than even RE7 and RE8. This can be to its detriment at times, as bumbling through subsections of the game without knowing where the maps or save rooms are is sometimes a lot to deal with, and some wonky triggers on what the game actually marks on your map can be an issue. When I played the game save rooms were not marked on the map after discovery, making backtracking and shuffling items around needlessly tedious, and a critical red key door in the office tucked away in the corner of a disused floor was marked as simply an unlocked door for me so I ended up spending 20-30 minutes frantically running around to every conceivable location I could reach to check for progress. The game is also quite on the easy side, as the few times I died were either due to the inventory not pausing the game or having boxed my heals entirely to make more room - even on the hardest default difficulty the aforementioned progress block backtrack bonanza was the only time my supplies became remotely an issue, and by the time I discovered the hidden third weapon I had absolutely no reason to use it.

Even so, exploration is quite a bit of fun, with an interconnected world full of secrets I mostly couldn't find and extra supplies I could, some cute 'sidequests', and the satisfaction of a strategic duct tape usage paying dividends again and again and again all throughout a playthrough is hard to beat. The store and lore files are interesting without being obnoxious, the visual and audio presentation are the perfect middle ground of appealing on a budget (except maybe Gordon's ♥♥♥♥♥♥-up hands and arms), and sprinting around already knowing where you're going while violently ragdolling puppets with a shotgun is just really satisfying. Not my favourite game in the world, but glad I supported it.

All characters start with a magnet in their butt that draws enemy swords to it no matter how fast you circle around 10/10