Recent reviews by Twisted

What a lovely game! Super cute and fun all the way through with a bouncy happy plot. I decided to buy and play this game on a whim after a day of hardwork and there's nothing like a moe visual novel to help bring lift the mood.

Go play it right now! It only takes a few hours and It's free!

I really wanted to enjoy this game, I love everything about it but it falls apart in its execution.

There's a lot of good things I can say about this game, the gorgeous arstyle, the challenging bosses and the beautiful soundtrack but you can read all that elsewhere, with this review I want to bring some negatives to your attention that might not have been mentioned elsewhere.

To preface, I love Metroidvania games, Dark Souls is my favourite series and my negative review isn't because the game was 'too difficult'.

- Slow pacing, it take hours before you get any interesting abilities that'll spice the combat up for you. You start with absolutely nothing and you're slowly drip fed interesting abilities. In eight hours I had a 'dash', a 'wall climb', and a 'magic attack'. A respectable critic Joseph Anderson mentioned it'll take a player 20 hours before the combat reaches its peak in fluidity and fun.
- Repetitive in nature, most areas, enemies and combat encounters are formulaic. There's little that distinguishes each area in terms of level design. Each area may have one or two unique gimmicks and a fresh coat of paint, but otherwise it's all the same. Once you realize this the game starts losing its charm.
- Tons of backtracking and mindlessly walking around a huge game map. In addition most areas are dead ends when you first start. The game rarely points you in a direction, I often ran around in circles before any significant main quest advancement. Getting lost in this huge world would have been extremely satisfying and a great experience... if it wasn't repetitive and unrewarding.
- Some particularly frustrating parts that might sour your experience (Some enemy types are a pain in the ass). I'll just give one example of this, and that's the teleporting enemies in the Soul Sanctum, in addition to being an incredible challenge, they'll sometimes teleport ontop of you causing unavoidable damage. I swear the boss in that area was easier than the area itself.
- Checkpoints are few and far between, you'll often spend 3-4 minutes trying to get back to a boss after dying. The game is difficult and that's great! My favourite part about this game was overcoming a boss through multiple tries, the Mantis Lords for example took me five tries and I had a ton of fun. The three minute journey back to the boss room? That wasn't so fun. It's a huge shame because it takes away from my favourite part of the game.
- Losing 'Geo' early in the game is devastating. Losing currency is usually an acceptable punishment for death. However in Hollow Knight, losing your Geo is completely and utterly handicapping because you lose vital abilities that wouldn't be lost in games that have similar mechanics. You'll be unable to purchase: Maps, quick travel and tolls. In addition it'll set you back on expensive early game items/upgrades that are necessary. Geo cannot be easily farmed either, even later into the game the enemies will be dropping ~5 Geo each, it'll probably take you 4-5 hours to save up for the latern which is 1800~ Geo. I don't want to seem pedantic, but losing 4-5 hours of farming progress isn't fun. (Edit: I finished the game now and much later in the game farming Geo becomes extremely easy, so this negative point isn't too much of an issue later on but it can still be devastating to players newer to the genre getting their ass kicked.)

The lack of direction seen around the mid-point of the game ultimately killed it for me because I couldn't be bothered to explore anymore, eight hours in the game had completely lost its charm and every level was just a different coat of paint. If the pacing of the game was tighter and players were fed interesting upgrades earlier, and perhaps the level/world design was tweaked and improved I would have enjoyed this game far more.

Overall, the game is full of content, and it's at a great price. In fact, I find it hard to not recommend this game to others despite not personally enjoying it, because objectively this is a fantastic game.
But, as said by another reviewer "This game is a simply a grind." and if that's not what you're looking for in a game, this might be a pass.

This is one of the best clicker games out there. I remember when I first played it years ago and it barely looked like it does now, years of time and effort has been put into this game to make it the pinacle of idle/clicker games.

That being said, this is a Realm GRINDER, while it is a lot of fun and you'll still be unlocking exciting new content days and weeks into your playtime. It is time consuming, addicting and hard to put down, keep that in mind.

On behalf

yes

Well it has been a few months now so I've given up waiting for a patch.

This game has never ever launched for me and I've tried everything, including directly contacting technical support.

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Game randomly works nearly a year after release, what the heck. Either way, I still can't recommend this game after beating it.

I can't 'not' recommend this beautiful game

It's been pretty well patched. It's ok, but mostly a low effort game.

Yes

I thought Re;Birth 1 was amazing, and this just goes and improves everything. Simply superb, I am very excited for Re;Birth 3.