Recent reviews by Fabian Temeraire

Even the easiest missions available are so hard that the only way to complete them is to find some cheesy exploit. Who playtested and balanced this? I know I'm not the best at games, but this garbage is ridiculous.

I've attempted and failed eight missions in a row at this point, and I'm getting rather sick of all the time I've wasted.

This game has instilled in me a deep hatred for other human beings.

SECRETS FOUND: 0/7

As of right now, the game has some major issues. It seems to run just fine, but the problem it has is loading everything in. Moving to a new area takes sometimes up to 30 seconds for the loading screen. Then when the new area finally loads in, it needs to load the objects in the environment, your items, and even the UI. Just trying to open the pause menu so I can save has sometimes taken 20 minutes to load (and even then, I still have to wait even longer for the buttons in the menu to start working).

I enjoyed the first game well enough, so I imagine that this one will be good as well once they figure out how to improve these issues. Until then, the frustration outweighs the fun in its current state.

**EDIT**
Moving it over to my SSD did improve performance. There are still some issues with the game taking too long in loading environmental assets, but it's mostly fine, now.

It's okay, but it's just not nearly as good as many other metroidvanias available. There weren't enough upgrades to make the game interesting. Each area, rather than being a new and exciting place to explore always felt like a chore to navigate.

There was really no reward for exploration, as the only rewards are ingredients used to create Tweaks, which only a few are useful and you rarely need to make more or change them out.

The world design just seemed random and I could never get into it. The non-human enemies seemed so out of place. The scenery itself was pretty good-looking. That's one thing I'll give the game is that its pixel art is on point.

The story sucked. It was oddly bleak and depressing for how colorful it looks. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the story was just so boring. Most of the dialogue was just all the protagonists being whiny ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, and all the antagonists just pretending to be intelligent philosophers spouting words straight from the thesaurus. It all seems like a pretentious bunch of nothing.

The ending seemed extremely rushed and incredibly anticlimactic.

In summary:
Rating: 4/10

It's not terrible, but there are plenty of other more fun and less depressing metroidvanias out there.

It was all around a pretty good game, but it was just a bit too long. By the end of the game, I had gotten tired of the gameplay and just wanted to finish the story, turning the game on story mode, so I could breeze through the combat. Here are my main complaints about the game:

1. Stories told through exposition dumps: It's not a good idea in books, and it's not too much better in games. This game is very story heavy. Normally, I love that, but at several times, I just got bored with having to read paragraph upon paragraph of exposition, especially when a lot of the side characters that have a lot of text to read have no personality. You need something else besides just dialogue to keep the reader engaged. I'll be honest, I skipped 90% of Storyteller's dialogue because of this.

2. Imbalanced Combat: I'm looking at you, Blackwater! Okay, so this one gets REALLY bad in some parts, especially in Act 3. I was playing the majority of the game on Normal with most of the battles in Turn-based mode. Most of the battles were pretty well-balanced where large groups of enemies and bosses were still difficult and required strategy. However, you reach some places where they just throw these massive beasts with 40+ AC and a quite sizable healthbar at you that none of my characters could hit unless it was a crit. These battles are only possible by realizing you messed up by entering the combat, dying, reloading and then dumping every buff known to man onto your party before starting the combat again, and even then, it takes forever to finish the encounter in real time mode. This was quite common and was one of the other reasons why I lowered the difficulty down to baby mode to finish the game.

3. Resistance to fire / electricity. There are so many awesome spells that you almost never get to use because practically every single enemy in the game is resistant (or immune) to fire and electricity. Nenio just became my buff mage because all her offensive spells either did very little damage due to resistances, or failed due to incredibly high saving through modifiers in the enemies after Act 3.

4. Voice Acting: It's not very good. Certainly not the worst, but almost all the voices sound so out of place in the context of the world of pathfinder.

5. Writing: It's okay. There are some times where the dialogue is great, other times where it's so bad, I wonder how it made it through the editing process.

6. Party Customization: When you first start the game, you create your character and are overwhelmed with the huge amount of classes and subclasses available to you. However, your character is the only one who you can freely customize. Every other character has a set class (and they are pretty standard) and if you don't like it, you have to multiclass, which, since their stats are preset, limits your options. Also, you'll never see their class reach level 20 if you do that. If you retrain the story characters, their level resets only to what they were when they joined your party. I know that if I want to experience the other classes the game has to offer, I can just restart and customize my character with a different class, but the game took me around 180 hours to complete. I don't have the time to do that again.


Conclusion: The game has some really major flaws, which may not have seemed so major had I not just finished Baldur's Gate 3, but I did, so I can't help but compare. The writing I can get over. Writing is difficult, especially when you are writing this much. Seriously, the amount of text in this game can probably fill a whole book. But the gameplay problems could have easily been fixed and tweaked to make it more fun.

I had a good time for the majority of the game, despite these flaws (thus the recommendation), but you either need a lot of patience or to skip a lot of content to make it through the game without becoming burnt out. By the end, I was more glad that the game was finally over rather than satisfied at the conclusion of a story well told.

It was okay, but it was annoying more than it was fun. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I played the Classic mode rather than Survival, but I don't really want to play it again to find out. There were some issues with the level design, namely the plant matter level and that second to last level, which is the most annoying thing I've played in a long time.

It's not terrible, but there are certainly better games out there.

It was a short, but fun game. The only problems I had were with the lack of map. There were times closer to the end where I found myself wandering around for the better part of an hour, just trying to find where I need to go next. I realize that you are a monster, and therefore wouldn't realistically have a map, but this is a Metroidvania. Metroidvania's have maps.

Anyway, that aside, it's worth a play. Certainly a unique spin on the genre.

This game is way more fun that it seems. With one of the simplest controls of any game I've played, it somehow manages to entertain me more than most of the games in my library.

I realize that this game is probably made by one guy, so I'm not going to comment on the faults in the gameplay or the two songs.

But one thing that was well within the abilities of the delevoper to control is the lighting. For heaven's sake, turn the bloom down! This game turns everything with a color shade brighter than a pair of blue jeans into a blinding light that leaves you squinting at your screen to make out anything. Unfortunately for you, the things you need to collect are a glowing blue item. Yeah, you're not going to see it until you are right on it.

I found myself staring at the world through the corners of the screen, because the little vignette counteracted the ridiculous bloom levels a little bit where you might be able to make out what's around you. But not even the vignette could help in the snowy mountain level.