Recent reviews by E.P.D. Gaffney

Amazing amazing amazing game. It uses a striking combination of some of the best sound design I have heard in all my life, excellent music, no voice acting of any kind, incredible writing for dialogue and everything else, and possibly the most effective use of pixel art I've seen yet. This combination is important and effective because your brain makes up for the lack of fidelity in the visuals, whilst the game provides all the other atmosphere you could ask for.

The puzzles were almost 100% difficult enough to be a welcome challenge without being overly obtuse and ridiculous. In other words, exactly what I wanted.

The game reminded me of a combination of the puzzle and atmosphere style of classic Resident Evil combined with a very well executed Victorian setting that reminded me very much of Poe and Conan Doyle, with a sort of Lovecraftian veneer to tie it all together.

You know, I'm really glad I decided to try this game. It's incredibly well made, it's gorgeous, the combat feels utterly perfect, boss fights are satisfying, the story is highly engaging for a 2D side-scroller with no voice acting, the atmosphere is immersive, the soundtrack is brilliant, the exploration is rewarding, the secrets are logical without being overly obvious, very little feels copy-pasted considering it's an indie game made by just three people, and the amount of content is kind of mind-blowing with the extra modes and the Rifts (my favourite part) and the large maps and the well integrated mana-skill tree-enchantment-specials metre-economy systems and their relationships to each other. Just a lovely experience.

I have to be honest, one thing that put me off was the character design. Most characters look great, especially the enemies. But the overdone sexuality on display in the previews really made me wonder if the game I was going to get would be developed by serious people for serious players, and not primarily just some kind of borderline pornography. I'm happy to say that it's an excellent game so far (I think I'm nearing the end of one playthrough), and even though my first impression based on most breasts making up half or more of the women they're attached to was to be sceptical, having my suspicions averted has rarely been so satisfying. I comfortably forgot about it once I played for a few minutes.

I would easily recommend this to anyone that likes a focus on good 2D melee combat in an adventure game.

Very impressed with this game. The original Strider was one of my favourite games in the early '90s, and what impresses me so much about this is just how much it feels like that game (the actual feel is nearly identical) whilst extending it from about a half-hour to several hours, adding several new mechanics that blend perfectly with the old mechanics, and fitting it into a metroidvania that works rather well.

It's only a couple hours long, and the controls are a little odd, at least if you're using a controller as I did, but other than that, no complaints. Combat is clunky but serviceable and even a little fitting for the setting. Puzzles are relatively difficult but I didn't need to look up anything and I liked being made to think to that degree. No hand-holding whatsoever, really. And the setting, story, music, acting, atmosphere, all that stuff, is absolutely top-notch. It all fits together perfectly. It reminds me a lot of Alien and other '80s sci-fi, the way it feels like a future as envisioned by the past. I just love it.

'Kill your darlings,' every famous writer in the world has offered as writing advice, assuming the internet is accurate (it was probably the not famous Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch).
https://www.bartleby.com/190/12.html

This is something I think the author of this game has either never been told or has outright rejected.  The reason I am giving this game a negative review is that whilst it absolutely does have very serious positives, they are mired in this self-indulgent, apparently neither edited nor proofread exploration of what amounts to mostly a few basics of philosophy, which is a set of seven documents that take far longer to read than the rest of the game takes to experience.

It is audacious to present the game as one that rewards exploration when the levels are very linear, take a few minutes apart from reading, and have unmarked doors that will end the chapter whether or not you were finished exploring what little there is to explore.  The only person doing the exploring is the author of the texts, with the assumption that even if the writing were flawless, I would want to be surprised by written work of that length when I turned on a game to, you know, play it.  And what's worse, I don't think the game even works without these notes.  So, really, they needed to be oh so much shorter, which an editor could have helped with because there is so much that gets repeated ad nauseam and so much that feels as if it were put through a big-word-thesaurus filter to increase length and look clever.  You'd think he were being paid by the word, although Charles Dickens knew to keep his work pared down enough for you to want to finish it even when he went a little long for the sake of an extra farthing.

To illustrate my point, about five minutes into the game, I get THIS,[pastebin.com] the first of SEVEN such notes throughout the game:
https://pastebin.com/FdXLEUDt

There are a number of bugs, like massive screen-tearing on my television but not my monitor (yes, I tested other games and they all worked fine), and because we wanted to use a controller, we discovered that rebinding your controller buttons makes them not work.  So we had to play in windowed mode and use the default button layout.  End of the world?  I suppose not, but still.

That said, I really wanted to like this game, even by the end of it, because although most of the concepts it tries to explore are relatively simple, some were novel, at least for a game (especially if I didn't kind of feel he wanted me to agree with certain of the takes presented), and the environments were occasionally used in wonderful, inventive ways.  Speaking of the environments, they were probably the best I have ever seen in a game, much of which has to do with the superior understanding of deliberate lighting choices and handcrafted models to an extreme degree for levels this size with a team/budget so small.  And the music is positively top-notch, complementing the level design perfectly.  Trouble is, as wonderful as these things are, the overarching story and premise are a bit trite and contrived, which I could forgive if other aspects of it were presented better.

But as it stands, if you ignore the story and explore everything in this game, you are looking at maybe an hour of playtime that has little emotional or intellectual impact.  And yet, if you don't ignore the story, whilst it increases playtime dramatically, so much of it is just an egregious waste of your time.  I can't in good faith recommend this game.  I can say there are great things about it, but I can't say they're worth any time investment.  Maybe watch a video of it and hope the developers can release a more mature product someday using their excellent level design skills and much better writing (or more environmental storytelling, which when it did occur here, was beautiful).

Horrifying stutter. PS3 version has the same issue but maybe even worse. Friends say the PS4 one works fine. Yay for people with a PS4 (not me). There's a DLL and some suggestions in a guide on here that may help mitigate the stutter. I tried the suggestions and it didn't help much, but didn't realise the DLL existed until I'd got a refund and bought the game on PS3 (foolishly assuming it would work better). Tell the world my story.

Feels like Vanquish if Vanquish were more about melee combat than shooting. It's excellent. Its major flaw is it's quite short, and its minor flaw is a couple of relatively minor bugs.

It has basically no story, but that doesn't bother me. Its graphics more or less PS2-like, which is great for performance and doesn't bother me at all visually.

I can't say enough good things about the balance and depth of the small number of seemingly simple mechanics at play here. The final boss is the epitome of hard but fair, and the game is the epitome of easy to learn but hard to master. If you want to enjoy a couple of hours of a fairly unique melee fighter, it's a great choice.

On the whole, phenomenal game for what it sets out to do. Excellent art style, responsive and mostly tight controls, lovely sound design, great sense of humour, and most important, lovely level design that evolves consistently to keep the experience fresh. Apart from that, there are hidden helices throughout the game, one per level, and collecting all eight in a section unlocks a secret level for that section. Similarly, S-ranking an entire section unlocks a secret level for it. The concept of abundant, meaningful unlockable rewards is one of my favourite concepts that used to be a given in older games, and one that I often miss during newer experiences, so it was great to have that in this game.

My top complaint is that there's generally only one correct way to do a level, with deviations from that being nothing more interesting than a wrong timing or wrong turn and thus resulting in lower scores. The game's conceit reminds me a lot of Metal Gear Solid's VR missions, but in those, there are often a large number of ways to approach a level, and MGS's S rank equivalents really make you think outside the box.

My other objective complaint is that for some reason, Up (on my controller) flips switches and is not mentioned in the controller bindings, though there is a designated button for it elsewhere on the controller. This causes trouble sometimes when I try to flip a switch and quickly jump away. I can't see a good reason to force Up to have that functionality when there's another button for it that can be rebound.

A minor complaint is that although you unlock fun gadgets each time you go through a level, using them blocks you from an S rank, and there's really no reason to use them for much else, so that feels like a missed opportunity. Making a good number of helices inaccessible without the use of gadgets could have been an interesting inclusion, but overall, you can just ignore the gadgets; it doesn't take away from the game at all that they exist, even if they aren't very useful.

And finally, although S-ranking can be very rewarding, it can often feel more annoying than challenging given some of my above complaints, although in fairness, the same can be said of MGS's VR missions. One major problem however, is that the things the rank is based on -- time, how often spotted, and number of deaths -- will have targets listed for how well to do in order to score an S. Or so you'd think. I don't really know what they're for, because they're generally wrong. I had to look up the real targets in a guide.

Great little game. Short little game. Haven't looked into its level editor options yet but that should be great fun. I think it loses something if you don't replay levels trying to get a higher ranking, which is a major problem because all they offer are the rankings from people on-line, and all the top scores are generally cheaters. As it's clearly inspired by Metal Gear's VR Missions, they should have gone that route and included their own rankings as well, and offered unlockables as rankings are met. Still, if you don't go in expecting that, I don't think it ruins the game. Maybe in a future title they'll go that route.

Minor bugs. I needed to remap my controller buttons as it didn't seem to do well with analogue values for things that weren't movement. Meaning, I needed to use buttons rather than triggers for things that were mapped to triggers by default. The bumpers worked fine.

Massive stutters when discovered by enemies, but it didn't ruin the experience for me, so I didn't try to fix it. Some checkpoints didn't work. Trying to interact with a forcefield just at the moment it's disappearing seems to freeze you in place and you need to reset to the last checkpoint. Again, just a minor annoyance. Game launched in a weird resolution. Forgot how I fixed it but the solution is widely available. Again, not a big problem.

The game itself is a bit of a slow start if you're a veteran of this type of game, but I'm glad I stuck with it. The level design, enemy types, 'OSP' equipment/abilities, it all starts to get extremely interesting as you go on. It's not just a rehash of the Metal Gear ideas by any stretch, though the inspiration is impossible to deny (moreover with the many references throughout). Though I wouldn't mind a rehash myself, it's admirable that they managed to make such a unique product despite their inspiration.

The writing was good, but minimal, which it should be. Likewise for the acting and all story stuff. Didn't care to have that getting in the way.

Absolutely a fantastic experience. Something that will stick with me for a long, long time. It has its flaws, but overall, I'd say it comes at least as close as 90% to what it wanted to be, which is irrelevant to what I may have wanted it to be. My initial response to the first part of the game was a fear that I'd fallen for a trick, and that the game was going to be far too easy and the gameplay far too boring but the story and graphics would be either very good or 'Hollywood-slick'. I'm happy to say that whilst I stand by my criticism that the gameplay takes a while to pick up, I was overall very very wrong.

I can get the easy stuff out of the way. Probably the best-looking thing I have ever seen, with extreme levels of graphical fidelity and realistic human beings and imaginative art direction. The acting and writing are among the best if not the best in video games. The story arc itself is simple, but the way it's told is deep, deep stuff that is the product of great understanding of both your everyday human psychological and emotional make-up, as well as those of people with mental illness. I admit my understanding of mental illness is limited, but from what I've been told by people with varying degrees of mental illness, the depiction here is among the best in media, despite being flawed in some ways. The sound design is incredible as well. A lot of care was taken with every little bit of this game. And it ran super smooth on the highest settings even though I never closed any of my game development software or my 500 browser tabs.

So, seems like a 10 out of 10, yes? Well, it's close. I have a few criticisms. First, the sub-titles are in need of some proofreading.

Second, the perma-death lie was a good idea but horribly executed. These deaths should have felt like my fault, because rather than making me feel oppressed by my character's mental illness and her fear, I just thought it was bad game design. I looked for my save file location to back up my save because not only was I dying for stupid reasons if there's a mechanic like that in place (mission, run across flaming village with a million post-processing effects and get to door; fail by wasting literally under a second because you can't see), but the game is like 80% super slow pacing or cut-scenes, which is not tense to replay but just annoying. Turns out the mechanic was a lie. And I have to say, I enjoyed the game so much more after learning that. If they wanted to implement this type of mechanic, it would need a different approach, and should probably not be a lie, unless maybe on some unlockable harder mode it's real.

Third, her mental illness is treated like a gift by her boyfriend, and again, I'm not well versed in this, but that seemed off to me. I spent the whole game wondering was it patronising to tell her she shouldn't want to get well if that's what she wanted. Now, this is not completely a bad depiction. First, a lot of mentally ill people do come to terms with their illness and would not want to 'get well' despite the problems they may face as well because of it. Second, a lot of mentally ill people have praised the game for its depiction and I imagine that should be taken into consideration. Third, considering the setting, I think the guy can be forgiven (but considering the other concessions made for the audience, perhaps it were best left out). And last, I have some experience with the kind of interaction they were depicting between Senua and her lover, and I actually think it was pretty much perfect besides that one concept.

Fourth, the combat. I'm actually overall very fond of the combat system. The combat I like in a game is stuff like Metal Gear Rising, Resident Evil 4/5, and Evil Within. Dark Souls felt very good as well when I played it. This game has a very slow type of combat, but it's deceptive in that at least left on Auto difficulty (which gets harder than Hard if you do well enough), when the game sarts to pick up and throw thirty or more total enemies at you in a wave encounter, with groups of three to six or sometimes more at a given time, the combat feels incredibly satisfying with all the quick thinking you have to do. So what's the problem? Well, it's clear that despite being very well designed at its core, the game wasn't designed with combat in mind first and foremost. This is fine because it's not the point of the game, so it's not a failing, but they were just so close to having a combat system that could have been made into an extra mode like Resident Evil's Mercenaries or Metal Gear Rising's VR Missions. It needs just a couple of responsiveness tweaks and a couple more 'requirements' contingent on enemy type, with maybe some more cancels and more limited dodge usefulness. But overall, I have to applaud them for developing a combat system this slow that can feel this tense and satisfying.

Fifth, I've heard of some game-breaking bugs even recently, and myself experienced a few mostly unremarkable but slightly immersion-breaking glitches. I don't appreciate the auto-save system keeping just one save. Not to mention if I cared about the lore stone achievement, I'd have to replay the entire game as a result. Not a great move.

Finally, I don't see myself replaying the game too many times. Very story-based, which means, now that I've experienced it and know what happens, not much reason to go back to it. This is why I'm very critical of games that are almost exclusively story-driven and why I'll take a game with deep combat mechanics over a good story any day. It's why I really wish the combat in this game had been developed just a little more so that it could become more of a focus on repeat playthroughs. Seeing how close they were kind of hurts.

But having said that, it really is that good that I would personally say it's worth its full price despite being just a few hours long (for me it was 11.4). It's honestly that good and that unique. This is coming from a person that finds video game stories almost completely unnecessary. It's really, really good.