Recent reviews by EmptyBucket

Short, good.

Gooood.

Higher quality than the other market simulators I've played.

Yes.

Of course thumbs up, how silly.

Put on a podcast or long form video essay, grab a long-haul route, and relax.

Really needs a steering wheel to get the most out of it. A controller probably works well for those used to them. Keyboards are rough, before I got the steering wheel I wanted to play but using a keyboard was just too much of a hassle.

Bene! Eugepae! Ego suadeo.

If you enjoy solving problems and puzzles with code, this game is for you.

Overall, yes, I recommend this game. If you like open-world games where you can wander around doing side quests, you'll probably enjoy this. The combat is pretty fun, I haven't had any issues with it. The graphics are good and in general the voice acting is pretty well done.

All that being said, my biggest complaint is how all the npc's treat Aloy (your character). She's immediately liked and respected and people seem to go out of their way to praise her. The only people that really don't like her are bad anyway. Although this isn't a huge deal, it can get pretty annoying sometimes being constantly pandered to.

The next problem is an issue I have with a lot of modern media, everything is black and white. Bad people are bad and do bad things, good people are good and do only good things. There is almost no real ambiguity or exploration of interesting moral questions. This type of writing tends to come off as if it was written by someone who doesn't really know how to write and is projecting what they learned in their ethics 101 course. Give me some depth and something to think about. Give me character and internal struggles and the reality of good and bad existing in all people.

If the writing was better, I would love this game.

But otherwise, it's fun and although I haven't fully completed the game, I'm sure this will be a game where I do pretty much everything it has to offer.

I'm not usually one for puzzle games but this one is definitely a bit unique (at least from my limited puzzle-game experience) that makes it worth playing, especially on sale. My 15 hours got me 100% of the achievements, with 11.5 of those hours finishing the game with the good ending, so certainly not long.