Recent reviews by Ash

I can deal with the jankiness of combat, cinematics, sound design, and animations, but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like unkillable npcs is where I draw the line.

No, giving the players "agency" while rigging the mechanics in the back is never good storytelling, and an absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hell no when it comes to game design. I'd ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ask for a refund had I not gotten it in a bundle. Hope your next game is better.

Was really looking forward to this, but found it disappointing in the end.
One of those games with seemingly a lot of potential at first that falls short on every level.
The world seems pretty at first, but is ultimately empty and boring.
The combat seems intriguing at first, but is in reality tedious and repetitive.
The crafting system seems extensive, but ends up being one-dimensional at best, annoying at worst.
Story, enemies, loot system, all seem interesting in the beginning, but are quickly revealed as uninspired and flat.
With a few more quality of life improvements and modern design choices this could have been a much more solid game for a lot shorter runtime, but as it is now it overstays the welcome rather quickly.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Cuno

Try in a few years. Right now it's a piece of crap.

Neat idea, pretty aesthetics, but the game is just bad. Unfortunately, not due to bugs. On a fundamental, game-design level, the game is a miss that plays like a grindy artificially bloated mobile shovelware.

This is a though one.

As a huge fan of CRPGs since late 90s I have to say that this game does a huge number of things right. Characters and their interactions, art style, writing, design, even the simple fact that your party limit is 6 characters just to name a few. I haven't felt this close to the golden days of Black Isle since... well, the golden days of Black Isle. Unfortunately that feeling quickly fades.

The game has a ton of bad and a great deal of ugly, some of which is due to the design choices, some due to the limitations of the engine, and some thanks to the absolute tragedy of a ruleset that is the Pathfinder system. Even the golden boy of its time, Baldur's Gate series, had the foresight to adjust the AD&D P&P rules to the medium it was employing - by no means did it do that perfectly, but it did try. Pathfinder does no such thing, and while it keeps its promise to the niche Kickstarter crowd it targets, it does so by sacrificing any semblance of user-friendliness and, at the end of the day, fun.

Based on an already hefty and overly-complicated D&D 3.5 rule system, Pathfinder adjusts them by running and ultramarathon, taking every obnoxious and convoluted paradigm and squaring it.
If you want a character that can both take a dump and wipe its ass, you will need 3 feats, for which you will have to study the feat system in detail. Think it's a joke? Never played 3.5/Pathfinder before? Good luck understanding why your Magus, a class that is literally built on a premise of casting magic in melee combat, keeps getting wrecked every time it tries casting a spell in melee. Or why your ranged character keeps missing EVERY. SINGLE. TURN. Does one of your multi-class options have an armor proficiency? Who gives a ♥♥♥♥, your caster option doesn't - enter Arcane Spell Failure Chance! I think by now you get the point...

Just so this wouldn't turn into a long-winded Pathfinder system piss-parade, the game itself is perfectly capable of making you go "WHAT!! THE ACTUAL ♥♥♥♥!!" in plenty of instances. Moments of complete failure to understand what the premise and purpose of a feature are, such as locking a dialogue option, and indeed a solution to a quest, behind an alignment option, or making triggered trap effects last for 5 minutes of real time. I don't even want to start on the travesty that is the kingdom management.

TL;DR
Buy if Pathfinder fan, masochist or demented (none of which exclude any other).
Else avoid.

This is a difficult one, but for all its failings, and there are quite a few, this game deserves your time for the story it tells. While not genre-breaking in any way, its take on the vampire trope is sufficiently fresh to deserve to be heard till the end.

Hopefully the sequel will learn from where this game stumbled and bring something worthy of note for the decades to come.

Despite the idea you may get from the trailer and screenshots, the game amounts to a quick-finger puzzle game.
Quirky, fun at first, and even funny at times, it quickly grows old.
There's little variation in the puzzles and, for someone expecting strategy/tower-defense gameplay, there's none of that.
Would not recommend for this price, maybe if it was half off.

Slightly clunky at times but extremely fun RPG platformer.
Recommended for a relaxing afternoon of fun.

If nothing else decent ever came out for VR, it would still be worth buying cause of this game.