Recent reviews by IncompetentCat

It's two thirds of the way to good, but it doesn't quite get there. Combat is ok, but not quite as tight as you'd hope. Environments are very weak, as are the music and characters (or lack thereof). There are some good ideas and it's a commendable attempt, but I'll take another NG run in a proper Souls game.

Fine game when it works
But it crashes too often
To really be played

It's a masterpiece of detail-oriented game development. The tracks you leave in the snow and mud deserve a damn Nobel Prize. NPCs that get interrupted mid-dialogue will pick up exactly where they left off. Blood, snow, and mud will get smeared on your clothes and your horse. Bodies left in place will decompose. The closer you look, the more you find. And that depth is all the more impressive when when combined with the breadth of the world. And what a world it is - the environment rendering is perhaps the best I've ever seen.

But it has major flaws which _may_ outweigh those glorious, shiny details.

To say the controls are bad is an understatement. You'll burn at least 10% of your play time precisely positioning yourself to interact with one thing and not another. The controls in game menus are like a box of chocolates. What will the back button be this time? Escape? Delete? Backspace? Tilde? It's a surprise every time! This game might not be a great choice if you struggle with games that require you to make use of a wide variety of keys/buttons. And horse movement seems to be guided by the phase of the moon more than any input you provide, resulting in unexpected detours and crashes (the frustration of which is somewhat lessened by how well-done the crash animations are).

And then we must talk about the protagonists. Have you ever watched a horror movie where someone goes off on their own to investigate an ominous noise? Have you found yourself yelling at that someone, and being viscerally angry at the imaginary person for their life-altering-ly bad decision making in the face of obvious and unnecessary danger? Well, get ready for 30+ hours of that. Your character is, regrettably, a moron. And none of your decisions matter, so you are powerless to help them.

The combat is fine. The sound is fine. You'll love the world, but you may hate navigating it. And you may ultimately hate yourself for spending so much time immersed in misjudgement.

If you like a good scare, you can't go wrong with this one - even if you don't really care about the movies. Jump scares and terror abound. You're appropriately resource-starved and mostly (but not totally) defenseless. The sound is spectacular. And the way you interact with the world (cutting open doors, flipping breakers, etc.) is visceral and contributes a huge amount of tension.

It's at its best when all those factors come together. You're out of crafted deterrents, so your only options are hiding or dying. You're holed up in a locker listening to the alien run around inside the vents, but it sounds like it's a safe distance away. You slip out, take our your plasma cutter, and start working through the panel on a door. The sound in the vents gets closer but you're half way through the panel. And when you're nearly done, the source of that sound drops out of the vents and into the hallway behind you, and you can't decide whether to finish the job, return to your hiding place, or curl up in a ball and die.

Those types of interactions are all the more stressful because so much is apparently random. You know the game has not scripted this interaction, so the outcome is far from inevitable.

I really only have two grievances:

* Important items are sometimes easy to miss in the environment. And the constant threat of an unpredictable death really doesn't motivate you to carefully inspect every surface.
* It just. Keeps. On. Going. The first time you think you're at the end of the game, it keeps going and you're thinking "oh this is the epilogue", until they they give you a new gun. The second time you think you're at the end, you're not surprised to discover it isn't. The fifth time you think you're at the end, you're really ready for the game to be over. By the time the game actually ends, you'll think you died at some point and you're now in Hades and this is the boulder you've been assigned. This is possibly the only game I have actually enjoyed playing, and simultaneously desperately wanted to just stop.

Very zen, and way more immersive than I expected. There are a variety of different ways to have fun with it, which is always a plus. Taken seriously, you can spend hours just walking through the environments, stalking all sorts of animals. If you're feeling a little more whimsical, you can always unload your lever action on an entire herd of deer, or chase down a boar on your ATV, leaping off while it's still moving and unloading your revolver. Multiplayer makes both playstyles better.

You are sometimes punished for such folly (by falling to your death or being mauled by your would-be prey) but never in a way that leaves you feeling bitter.

However, there are points where you will encounter soul-crushing bugs. No matter how many fixes get released, it feels like there's always at least one bug that causes the moose you've been stalking all day to vanish into thin air. Those moments always cause me to put the game down for a while, and have caused other people I know to simply stop playing entirely.

...but I always come back to it. Maybe it's the reasonably priced (when they're on sale) DLC, that keeps adding a little more variety. Maybe it's the fact that I like the idea of walking around the woods at 6am, but don't actually want the experience of pulling handfuls of ticks and mosquitoes off me. But whatever the reason, it's a great ROI.

Short version: just buy it already. It's a great, well-balanced exploration/adventure game.

Long version:

It's been many years since I last played a game that made me feel compelled to keep playing. Well done, my friends.

My favorite stuff:
* The game is (mostly) very immersive: the environments are great and the sounds and creatures are excellent.
* There's a strong survival horror vibe, starting from the very beginning when you can't see what's below the surface of the water. You'll spend the first third of the game just being generally terrified of everything. The sensation returns any time you enter a new zone and discover it's somehow even darker and more godforsaken than the one before it. This adds some great tension to the exploration element. But on the downside, I am a great big coward who never mustered the courage to explore the entire map.
* The vehicles are all great in their own ways. The customizations (especially the interface) are a real gem. Never before have I felt compelled to customize a vehicle in a single player game. They did a great job making the vehicles feel as good as they look, becoming increasingly grand as you progress. Small things feel fast & nimble. Big things feel powerful and almost luxurious. God, it's like that satisfying "thud" you get when you close the door of a well-made car...
* The inventory system strikes a good balance by giving you just enough space to not be a pain in the ass, without giving you so much space that you can just hoard. The same can be said for food & water - enough pressure to change your behavior, but not so much that you're constantly struggling to survive.
* There's considerably more story than I expected to find. I don't expect it will be turned into a best-selling novel, but it's more than enough to keep you moving forward.
* Habitat construction took a little getting used to, but once you get the basics down, it's good fun. Power management, like the inventory and food systems, struck a great balance. Hull strength, unfortunately, seemed mostly pointless given how easy it was to mitigate.
* Trying to kill things is generally pointless. This was at first frustrating, because I couldn't use the things that are very obviously designed to be dangerous weapons to rain furious hellfire down upon my enemies. But I eventually came to appreciate it. Again, it leaves the game with a good balance between the pressure created by lurking terrors, and your ability to disable or evade them, without turning into "HAHA SPAM BUTTON TO WIN".
* I would've loved co-op, so I could at least pretend my wife would play with me. But given that it's single-player, the time capsule thing is really quite neat.

The not-so-great stuff:
* Performance wasn't what I hoped for. Upscaling would've helped. This is the only thing detracting from the immersion.
* There are a few important points where it's easy to miss minor (but important) details that leave you feeling lost. Thankfully, when this inevitably happens, the wiki is pretty good at un-stucking you and the spoilers are clearly marked. But I found myself wishing for just a couple more hints. As is, I wonder if there are significant things I did miss.
* I am considerably more afraid of the ocean than I was when I started.
* In the later areas, I sometimes felt like I was being punished for no reason and it didn't add anything to the game. I only brought one of the rare items I found, because I had no reason to believe I needed two. I parked a vehicle in the wrong spot and came back to find the batteries completely drained, with no means of recharging them (seriously, just take those things out of the game entirely).
* My wife doesn't want to hear about my adventures.

Short version: I really wish I had a sideways thumb. If you've played a Resident Evil game and you're like "I want more of that", it's worth picking up. But only if you're comfortable using WASD for movement, and you're willing to adjust your expectations based on the price.

The good:
* It appears to have more content than the RE3 remake.
* Some of the sound effects are quite good - especially the guns.
* Management of individual magazines for your guns feels right at home in a survival horror game. It's a great addition.
* I am so damn tired of dealing with zombies in sewers. What were all those people doing down there to begin with? But other than that, the environments are enjoyable.

The bad:
* The writing, voice acting and corresponding animations are very, very rough. If you're in this for the zombies, you may not care. But it can be quite jarring at times.
* The closest thing to a boss fight is needlessly confusing. I eventually had to give up and ask youtube what to do about it.
* Too many (virtually all) of the game's lore items are references to a website. I get the ARG angle. In some games, it works. But survival horror games rely heavily on immersion, and the game actively encourages you to pause and open up a deliberately bad website.

The mind-bogglingly terrible:
You can rebind your movement keys away from WASD to something else. Great! But you're still stuck using WASD to navigate the menus. And the fact that you have to manage individual magazines means you're going to spend a fair amount of time in there. So if that key combination doesn't work for you, pass this one up.

As a software engineer, I'm simply appalled. This tells me there are multiple, separate code paths responsible for interpreting that "key W = move forward". And that those code paths are somehow... hard to change? That wasn't a challenge when I started writing software 20+ years ago. It hadn't even occurred to me that it was _possible_ to make this difficult anymore.

Professional grievances aside, this was a minor annoyance for me. My keyboard has a physical layout that makes it difficult to use WASD, so I'm forced to use ESDF for most games. I can manage WASD in the menus, but it requires re-positioning my hand. But there are lots of people who don't have the luxury of just being slightly annoyed about this, like people with certain disabilities. And lefties. For them, not being able to change keybindings may be a game-breaking experience.

Lots of demons, loud music, apocalyptic levels, and outrageous guns. What more could you want? The answer is not much.

But for some reason, this game gives you "more" anyway. The stream of gun modifications and upgrades, suit perks (and other equipment attached to your suit), character upgrades, runes, cosmetic unlocks, etc. just keep on coming. It adds some variety, but doesn't actually make the game much better and at times borders on overwhelming. It's not bad, it's just noise.

If you liked any prior Doom game (and especially if you liked Painkiller) It's worth picking up, but probably not at full retail price. You're going to hate playing when you start encountering the Marauders as regular enemies, so not paying full price will make you feel like you got _some_ kind of concession out of the deal and will contribute to your overall mental well-being.

It's not a _bad_ game. It's super engaging and it's easy to log hundreds of hours playing and barely scratch the surface.

But in some ways it is designed to make you regret having played it at all. A dinosaur you spent dozens of hours leveling? Stunlocked by jellyfish... aaaaand it's gone. That shiny new assault rifle you sunk a bunch of materials into? Turns out it's basically useless against dinosaurs! Who knew? P.S. you just got knocked off a cliff and fell to your death and now have no hope of recovering your gear. Look down. Now, look back up, at the base your base could look like - until it gets completely wrecked by a wandering alpha rex. Also, your flying mount just flew off into the sky and is now completely out of reach because your keybindings mysteriously reset themselves every fourth full moon and your "get back here" whistle is suddenly bound to something else.

You're probably going to buy the game anyway, because it's INCREDIBLY COOL - HAVE YOU SEEN ALL THE DINOSAURS? O M G. And you're going to have fun. You're even going to enjoy your first 35 deaths because you're a noob and it's hard to get mad when you're being carried off into a swamp by some kind of adorable crocodile monster.

Then you'll get a little more capable and you'll start to accumulate nice things. But the lord giveth, and the lord will taketh away. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but some day. Because that's how it's designed to work. And when it happens, you'll regret every hour put into it. Pretend you're lactose intolerant and this game is 5 gallons of your favorite ice cream. You'll enjoy it for a little while. But that joy will be fleeting. And you shall suffer as I have suffered.

I wish I could say I was never going to play this game again. But that would be a lie.

Without a doubt, the finest single player RPG ever created.