Recent reviews by DBFC Philip J. Fry

Great game, massively replayable. Took me about a hundred complete run-throughs to even start feeling repetitive, and that's not even counting the endgame challenge modes.

A sequel that outshines the already near-perfect first game.

When people talk about video games as art, they're talking about the Ori series. Beautiful graphics, tremendous soundtrack, a heartbreaking story, and gameplay that's varied but never wavers in quality.

On the borderline of too grindy, but as long as you're willing to keep up with all of the different quest lines it can make the grind worth it.

An intriguing way to spend 4 hours

Fun game, good mechanics. The few minor criticisms I have are far outweighed by ease of play overall. The bosses are kind of a joke, particularly once you get the right chipset into Haiku. Clear influences from Hollow Knight, but that's a compliment in this case. Good story, I wish there had been more. You can do a completion run in about 8 hours.

Overall, definitely worth picking up, especially if it's on sale or part of a humble bundle.

This is as good as it gets. Nearly perfect controls (the downward smash can be tricksy but that's it), great story, varied, immersive levels, lots of places to explore, non-linear mid-game, well balanced enemies and bosses, just plain fun to play.

I really can't wait for the sequel!

A near perfect love letter to old school Zelda games

I want to like this game. I think it might be good once they get to 1.3 or 1.4, but right now it's just too buggy and unbalanced.

CONS:
-Major memory and GPU issues. Pixel graphics should not be pushing my GPU hotter than Halo 4. Visual bugs increase the longer your play session and a quick look at memory use shows the "recommended" specs are a joke.
-Visual settings don't persist across saves. The first thing I have to do on every session is switch the frame rate back down to 60 so the game will run without catching my video card on fire. The settings you make on the home screen seem to have no relation to anything.
-No/extremely limited farming automation. If farming is the heart of the game, and you have 3 farms to manage, you need sprinklers.
-Friendship/romance system is very buggy. I was able to get a post-marriage item after the second date with one NPC.
-The combat system is a joke. Some attacks can't be avoided at all, some it seems like you should be able to jump over and jumping does nothing but make you get hit in the air. Able to use very low-tier weapons and armor to tank through late midgame enemies. Bosses are entirely unbalanced and grindy. With as much variety is given to every other area the VERY small armor and weapon choices is definitely lacking

MIDS:
-The delay between shaking a tree/crafting station to when the item is picked up is waaaay too long, particularly if you're above the crafting station. Too many times I've walked away from a table without realizing I hadn't actually picked up the thing I'd just crafted.
-It would be nice if the female NPCs weren't all so grossly overs*xualized. Doesn't impact gameplay obviously, but it takes me out of the world when the portraits come up during dialogue
-Some of the crafting recipes are totally out of whack. 15 logs for 1 piece of coal??

PROS:
-Good story. Nothing earth shattering but interesting certainly.
-NPCs feel like different characters which is nice. A lot of these types of games have NPCs that are barely altered copies of each other.
-The ability to shift the speed of the day is fantastic. When I'm waiting for an NPC event it's nice to have the day be half as long as when I'm working on the farm
-Farm mechanics are mostly good. Not being able to re-water squares is wonderful, particularly since this has to be done daily by hand
-Mine progress system is interesting and a good balance for exploration.

OVERALL:
As other reviews have said, the devs are already going towards microtransactions vs game fixes, which is no good for longevity of this type of game. I'm holding out hope that a few more patch/update cycles will fix some of the more foundational issues, but for now I'm heading back to SDV.

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