Recent reviews by CroiCroga

It was all so very true, what it told me about myself. And I really appreciate the persons who made this, who wrote the texts. I really needed someone to tell me those kind things about myself, because no one else would have.

My word: Gratitude.

I've played over 10 hours of demo content, and I must confess I have spent 10$ to get the current build of the whole game (subscribe star) and spent maybe 5 or 6 hours on it today.
My first playthrough in the demo: I got in, got killed a few times by wolves, got ♥♥♥♥♥♥ by a 130-lvl drake, the drake gof off and decided to stay, killed all the wolves on the island, then all the nightmares, then we had two dragonborn offspring together and I had to find slaves to babysit them. Fun!

To me, it looked like a Conan MMO clone with sex (its interface is a 1-for-1 copy, for example) and I liked both the building/survival aspects as well as the sex implementation.
At the date of my review, the game is - in my opinion - on a threshold between pre-alpha and alpha. Considering that just a single dev is working on this project, I must say they've made a good progress so far. There are many creatures to "play" with, smut is easily accessible for when its needed. The creature models and animations need a lot of polish (in the demo, some did not work properly) but I believe that is what the dev is going to focus on right now - according to their blog posts,
The world itself - textures, buildings, stones, trees, etc. - are textured very well and look quite nice. I was playing at max quality, but I do own a 3090 video card, so can't testify to how much optimization this needs on lower specs.
The demo differs from the full game in that it has less creatures to ♥♥♥♥ and a much smaller landmass, but basically most of the mechanics are in place.
Yes, there are a lot of bugs that need work on, and the full build seems to be less stable than the demo - the build crashed twice and froze a couple times, demo did no such things. But the game is playable right now, it has content I enjoyed and I consider my 10$ well spent, so if you're into things such as this, I recommend trying.

My secret word: Stranger

To those who used to go through the first game, well, they have more questions in this one.
The font is hideous, though.

Secret word: GIFTED

Well, that was interesting but also insightful, it got my profile quite correctly.

Wow, this game - it's completely awesome! The visuals are very appealing, and the story is both thrilling and touching, I've come to really care for the characters. Also, there are so many choices to take... I just finished my 3rd playthrough, and each time it's completely different, and I already see several more paths I'd like to explore, see what would have been if I made a different choice at some point. If you're considering buying this game, don't consider, just buy it already!

This game is one huge bug. The controls are boasted in reviews to support both XBox and PS3 controllers, well, guess what? It doesn't work with PS3 gamepad AT ALL. The game recognizes that I plugged a gamepad in, but it defaults to Xinput, shows me buttons from XBox gamepad to press, and my PS3 buttons do not work. I had to use a 3rd-party app to map controls along, but they still work only partially, and, well, I just give up. Even with keyboard the controls are awkward and frustrating, random buttons in random places, the characters either overjump or jump not far enough, etc.

Also, opening Setting page after you just loaded the game leads to... black screen. If you were running it fullscreen - hello hard reset! It looks to me that even the developers didn't play their own game, otherwise they would have seen this bug.

The only good thing about this game is visuals, but the bad controls butchered it for me.

Don't want to rain on everyone's parade here, BUT this is the worst game in the series, period. It begins funnily enought, but the story soon degrades into an incomprehensible tangle of self-repeats, where you have to do the same stuff over and over and over again until it drives you nuts. Especially annoying is this "limited time" mechanics they introduced here - oh, solving puzzless when the clock is ticking, what a great idea, let's annoy the player even more, this is totally worth a promotion! AND if that was't enough there is a game-breaking bug in the sauna scene that's been there since the release and nobody is even thinking of fixing it, I had to download a savegame off their website just to be able to continue playing.

And then you learn that whatever you accomplished with the 3 previous games, and whatever you were doing here, was all for naugh and everything is sad and hopeless. Well thank you very much, Daedalic, for making me care for your characters, giving a hope that they could make it this time and then killing them off AGAIN!
If i could make myself go back in time and never play this, I would.

I honestly wanted to recommend this game - because there are aspects that I liked - but I cannot.

First and foremost my save game became corrupted after 3 hours of playing, and that did it. There's lost of other bugs in this game, like sharks spawning out of nowhere next to you and killing you in one bite, bugs in crafting and so on. Feels like an Early Access pushed out because the developer got bored or something.


Secondly, the whole concept if this game is ridiculous and perverted. I wanted to say that the author has no understanding of even the simplest concept of school-level physics, but it is much more worse - they do not even understand how water and swimming works, least of all, how swimming under the water might be working.

The whole game is based on the premise that the protagonist's submarine is broken (in pieces, no less) and so they are stuck underwater, because they cannot JUMP high enough to reach the surface! So we have to craft a base to survive underwater and actually go DEEPER to gather pieces of the broken up submarine, so it can bring us back up and above. Because, I repeat, when you are deep underwater, you can only walk and jump and hold that electrical thing that moves you fast. But it can't move you to the surface either. Not to mention that we're walking and jumping at depths that would be completely rid of color and light, and not survivable by a human on it's own, but that just some geek details, right?

Maybe I am so picky about this because I have over 40 dives logged, but with all the bugs this is beyond ridiculous.

I have played a lot of games during my life, I have seen a lot of bad games too, but this is just the MOST BADLY DESIGNED one I have ever played, and I own a computer since 1994. I loved the trailers, the graphics, the music, the concept etc. but I couldn't play it.
Couldn't go past the very beginning of the game, the very second level actually where you encounter traps for the first time. Spent 40 minutes and died over half a hundred times (stopped counting) but I just couldn't pass the second trap.
Honestly, I cannot be THAT bad, I used to beat platformer puzzles in Portal and Talos Principle in a matter of minutes, and this game is just so very badly designed I give up on it, trying to get past this stupidity.

Thank you dear god that this game has a sequel! I so fell in love with the characters and was pretty shaken to see how they were left at the ending (a very dramatic one, I must day), which in itself says a lot about this game: it makes you care. All in all, it's a beautiful game, with great story and lovable characters, if you're into adventure/quest games - buy it, don't think!
Now, a more detailed opinion.
It is very atmospheric due to the incredible hand-drawn backgrounds, some of which are beautiful, and some are moody or even downright scary, but never bland or boring. The characters were created with much love too, they really made me care, and even those characters who appear only for a short period of time are playing their part, be it for humor or to add some dramatic play. And they are, all of them, are not cardboard, they're interesting to see and I felt sorry that some died along the way.
So I must say in all honesty that this game's story is better than a lot of books I've had to read. Though, the story felt unfinished regarding some arcs (like, we get to see the fairy land, but don't get to learn what happens to it afterwards), but there's a sequel that I haven't yet played as of writing this review, but I do hope it'll fix those unfinished points.
As for the puzzle part, there were a few places that made me scratch my head, but 90% of the puzzles are pretty logical if you think in the terms of "how can I use the surroundings".
The only thing that made me cringe (besides the ending), are some animation bugs. I played Mac version, dunno if it happen in the PC one, but running water in the first part of the game and some moving animations very kinda glitchy, when Geron walked it sometimes looked like he's lame on both legs. It did not affect gameplay in any way, just looked weird.