Recent reviews by Run

still too early access. The controls feel really rough, especially for mouse/keyboard.

well that hurt. I suppose that was what they were hoping for.

-Unreliable first person narration. Its a delight
-great ps1 visuals
-controls feel pretty great
-the writing is well done

At a high level, its not much fun to play. The meta unlocking aspects are a painful set of mobile game mechanics that dont feel satisfying to work with. It feels like I need to unlock the tree and build up a pile of things in the metagame, for a measly amouint of support in the loops.

On the gameplay level, we've got a few different issues, While the idea of a deckbuilding town maker is fun, in practice its a fair amount of boredom. For example, you might have a sapling/quest requiring an eitr source to unlock. To get there, you will either need an eitr source to start near the object so you can build an exploiter, or finish a tree nearby. In either case, If the point you find this is just after your connnectors discarded, then you might be waiting forever for them to come back. While this could all be very interesting, in practice, it just feels like pulling teeth.

Finally, on a user experience, its a bit painful to play. Cards are obscured by each other when mousing over, so its possible to think you have one card, when it will switch to another. Camera movement stutters heavily (which honestly is a game ruiner), and the building placement just feels too darn fiddly.

The mechanics at this point have worn out their welcome. I loved the original, minus a few areas. The final section was full of logical leaps, and just didn't quite feel as engaging. I would say the middle section was probably the strongest, with a solid narrative driving it from start to finish. Final one is just exhausting :(

go buy vampire survivor, this is an incomplete mess that just wants you to spend real money on its gatcha heroes. (by incomplete, i mean half the buttons are coming soon, and there's even ones that don't exist, like the merge button....)

Its absolutely delightful! The karma is a positive feedback mechanisms to foster a warm and inspiring experience with folks across the globe. The fruit adds a lightly competitive mechanism for some extra fun.

You can also be a pear

Its a pretty great game, though it really use some QoL in a few places:

-fast travel is only available from the monorail, resulting a lot of extra walking. It would reduce the grind quite a bit to allow fast travel from any open world location.
-While the early puzzles have been pretty thoroughly battle tested, late game has a lot of forced restarts on mistakes. This isn't a deal breaker, but I certainly sighed a lot more in the second half.
-late late game has a section of uncheckpointed puzzles with insta-death water around them. This was almost a dealbreaker

Overall a little on the easy side. A ton of development has gone into the world though.

despite having some really interesting perks you can build with, it feels like the overall experience is very grindy and repetitive. There's not a lot of variance in the randomization, so you end up hitting your head against the same problem over and over, slowly grinding a few meta currency

it starts really strong, but the last segment is a slog. Lots of obscure "guess the intentions" puzzles, and a bunch of machines that don't make a lot of sense. I'd recommend it for part 1 though (at part 2 mostly)

+great visual style
+intriguing bargain basement bloodborne world

-it was incredibly hard keeping track of areas. not quite enough variety to the cave regions to easily remember where to go (i'm looking at you later zones)
-combat felt fairly unrewarding. I wouldn't say its bad combat, its just...exhausting.
-Boss fights especially feel grindy
-while it looks fairly open world, its for the most part a linear run the environs.
-lots of quest pieces don't have a clear use situation. you've just got this pile of stuff that you hope you use at some point