Recent reviews by Euphemius

Updated review: Custom difficulty settings has solved all of the frustration I was having the game and once I have more free time to get back to this, I hope to spend many more hours on Enshrouded yet!

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For a few days, this game was my new favorite game. I was glowing about it to everyone and recommended it to all my friends. It was beautiful, engaging, and meditative. It could be difficult, but I could tailor my own experience by keeping to areas I was appropriately leveled for. Everything felt thoughtfully designed. The roads would always take me more or less where I needed to go for any major quest, and there was fun exploring off the beaten path. Progression felt good, and I looked forward to getting more blocks to build a big, elaborate base with.

Then I excitedly headed off for the new patch zone. I was over-leveled for it by now, but I was actually stuck in the level 13-15 bracket for a while before I decided to mindlessly grind materials because I was enjoying the game so much. I thought this was such a thoughtful patch, that they must've heard feedback that there wasn't much to do in that stretch of the player experience and were responding to it appropriately.

Let me just say that if I had gone to that zone twenty hours of gameplay ago, when it was level appropriate for me, I would've quit the game and never looked back. I'm not a 'skilled' gamer by any means, and playing games with Souls-like difficulty isn't my definition of fun, but I hadn't thought this was trying to be a Souls-like game. This area was frustrating and grueling. There are traps and rough terrain everywhere. The ancient spire is in the middle of nowhere, and the roads no longer take you anywhere near where you need to go. I spent almost an hour lost, trying to find the spire so I could clear it for a waypoint. My partner was trying to help me, and he managed to find the tower before I did, then died about thirty separate times while I was still lost before we both gave up and left the area for good.

It wasn't fun. It wasn't thoughtfully designed. Blackmire seems to exist purely to punish the player, like one giant enshrouded area with no time limit. There was no sense of relaxation or exploration to be found, just endless frustration and death. The platforming aspects in this game are finicky to begin with, and now a previously unreliable feature is actively gating progression. It doesn't feel like it's even the same game I've been playing.

One particular annoyance was those purple light mobs that spawn, multiply, and then incessantly dive bomb the player. They don't drop anything, they don't appear to give any experience points, and they are small and easy to overlook until you're surrounded. They seem only to exist to grief the player, which feels in line with the rest of the Blackmire experience.

I will be avoiding both, and I'm disappointed in the change of direction this patch has taken. I was truly having a phenomenal time right up until this area, and if this is the intended player experience then this is no longer a game I want anything to do with. Which is unfortunate, because again it was previously my new favorite game that I couldn't stop recommending to others. I'm hoping it's just growing pains and will continue to play in other areas, but I can't recommend it again until Blackmire and future updates show the thoughtful, well-rounded design of the earlier areas.

I binged all 5 of these games in one go and of them, this is my favorite. It has the best mechanics and also absolutely took me out with one of the best ending themes I've ever heard? If you only play one game in this series, I recommend this one the most. But you should play all of them, because they're all amazing and the stories are all interconnected.

I bought the first game, thought it was pretty fun, then suddenly I owned all five and was done playing them in a single week and now I don't know what to do with myself. To repeat myself a bit from my review of the 5th game:

If you like escape rooms, get this game. If you like horror stories, get this game. If you like learning about Chinese culture, get this game.

The first one starts off a basic but it's still wholly worth checking out, and all five are interconnected in the story. The quality increases exponentially per game, and 3 is my favorite for gameplay mechanics while 5 is my overall favorite for story/journey. I became extremely attached to the meta-plot and now I'm just sitting here trying to find any other game that comes close to this escape room/horror/puzzle game adventure experience and there simply aren't any. Already waitlisted Dark Notes but what I really want is Paper Bride 6. Send help I'm in too deep.

I binged all 5 games in a fugue state. I became extremely attached to all the characters, and now I don't know what to do with myself. If you like escape rooms, get this game. If you like horror stories, get this game. If you like learning about Chinese culture/opera, get this game. This is probably the strongest game in the series, but they were all amazing. The puzzles can be a little hit/miss but the hint function is your friend.

Now I'm devastated to learn there's virtually no other games in this genre of escape room/horror/puzzle game, and I don't know what to do with myself until HeartBeat Plus releases something else. I got two of my friends and my mother also playing this series, I really can't overstate how fun it is. Beautiful, captivating, and creepy all at once. When will 6 be out???

Incredibly soothing and hypnotic. Picked this up on a whim with a few other games in hopes of decompressing during the end of a busy term at school and I haven't even tried out any of the others because this is keeping me so well occupied while also being 1000% relaxing. Immediately nominated it for a Steam award because it's saving my entire life this month.