Recent reviews by Tolpen

I have a number of issues with this game. All of them are skill issues, so they are irrelevant to recommendation.

The game is simple, there is no mechanic for loosing. The emptiness of the space really drills in that "hey, this is a desert and you are on your own". Beautiful in simplicity of the visuals. Faces? Who needs them. Puzzles? Very solvable. The few that I had to look up had a simple answer "wait for the correct time". (What I was looking for was the correct time.)
Very easy storytelling once you see the first shipwreck, but the beauty is that you are the only one who knows. After a fashion you are the almost-all-knowing deity gently steering this young woman to get the most out of the "figure it out without negative consequences" phase of life.

I sometimes struggle a bit with slipping on non-vertical surfaces and so far had to restart twice because the game only accepted "go forward" - no turning, no whistling for my hoverbike, just forward. I save often, so it's not that much of a problem, but watch out for it, dear Reader of This Review Before Committing To The Game. Occasional camera clipping into texture is also not fun in tight spaces where you need to see where you are going, but for the most part you are going to be fine (it's a desert, there aren't that many tight spaces)

While controller might be recommended, it is not vital - I've gotten so far with keyboard and mouse only. This game is lenient and even where it isn't, the worst it does to you is just letting you try again. Consider playing on something with larger display than 14", mine is sometimes a bit.

A big win for people without dedicated gaming desktop/laptop who are afraid of failure negatively impacting their gameplay. If at first you don't succeed, return there, take a look, maybe there was a better route, maybe you hurried too much. You can throw yourself at it as many times as you please.

Visual eye-candy and the story does not drag on. Smart writing, and I love smart writing. And I do appreciate a sensible murder mystery that does not take take sharp turns in logic.

Also, Vriska Sekret jumpscare.

(Who locked the office door?)

Game is mislabelled as roguelike when it is, in fact, a roguelite.

The game's mechanics are easy to get the handle of. The action of drawn figures makes it very engaging even when just in singleplayer. There is a bit of resource grind, but most materials stockpile passively, so a farming run is a special occasion. The game is extremely lenient to the player, or at least to me, so unlike most bullet hells, this one does not see me dead very often.

My only issue is that for some unknown reason the game lags for me terribly. A second of game time stretches sometimes up to 3 seconds in the real world. I assume it is the map generation, but boy, does it hurt.

A good farming sim.

But bronze ore?

I thought I was fairly okay with a horror game that had no jumpscares and no decisions and the timer could be turned off. I was wrong. I was so, so wrong.

Both the biologist and writer in me are extremely impressed with the metaphor.

The voice acting is oh so good. So, so good!

It might be a me-problem, but the entirety of this game fell flat for me. From the point of view as point-and-click-adventure it got rather boring and tedious extremely quickly, and the true horror was dragging the little whiny nitwit around while thinking "Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" on a loop.
From a visual standpoint the game is nifty... for five minutes. The "psychidelic nightmare" theme gets old extremely quickly and after two scenes/levels it boils down to the following: Something's head is going to come off and/or somewhere turns out a bleeding smile and/or something's limbs are going to stretch to unreasonable length.
The soundtrack... was. There was a soundtrack for sure. I didn't hate it (unlike in the previous games which DVA provided the OST to, where it got on my nerves extremely quickly), but it was one of the most unmemorable experiences of game soundtracks for me.
If the game resorted to jumpscares, I would have at least felt something. After finishing the game to 100 %, there were only two moments where I got at least shocked for the moment, which were the hands coming out of the ground for the first time, and running into one of the deerpeople who appeared out of blue.

That is not to say the entire game was bad. The changing Happy Wall I actually liked, and I had great fun building stone cairns (though it happened several times that the stones got stuck in each other and that was rather annoying). However, I am not going to recommend a supposedly horror game just because you can walk into a wall repeatedly and put stones on top of each other.

Best bucket ever bought.

The older I get, the more Sacred feels like a parody of all ye olde isometric RPGs about the hero who had a dream of soom and now gets up to save the world.
The graphics? Aged poorly (though not as poorly as, say, Wizardry 8).
Music? Still holds up.
Story? Barely noticeable.
Diablo? Nearly copypasted, but all need for strategies have been tossed out of the window.
Good time mindlessly smacking everything I come across as an extra emo dark elf into bloody gory pulp? Absolutely had.

Game does not have to be a masterpiece or even good to be enjoyable.