Recent reviews by Griselgor

Great, difficult puzzles and a fun narrator. There are definitely some lows like gray spectrum's qr NGGYU (even though I think it was recently patched) and Pilgrimage. I appreciate the attempt at novelty but god the combat is suuch a slog, please just reduce monster hp by like 75%hp and fix hitboxes and camera bugs.
Also there's AI art that I hope can eventually be replaced for real art if the game gains traction.

Good but could be better. My first impression was great: graphics are fantastic and runs like butter, plus the shooting+hacking mechanic is quite novel. The game's systems and pacing also feel quite arcadey/oldschool (in a good way): linear with a few hidden spots, upgrades, optional "extra" levels in the form of training rooms, etc.
There are also a decent amount of weapons and finding random ones on the ground makes for good variety.
Unfortunately the rest falls kinda flat. The story is incredibly bland. The "bad guy" is incredibly boring, the setting should be decent yet is delivered through uninteresting/generic collectibles I'm not even sure what the point of the "hidden" infiltration logs was about. 9 entries just to learn that woow, the journalist was the mad doctor's brother in law!. who cares, and the dialogue between Hugh and Diana is veery simple and at times reminiscent of "quippy" modern AAA games. Sure, given that Diana is like a child
and there's only like 1 other character there isn't much room for deep dialogue, but even then it's quite boring. The whole dead filament turning robots into zombies is kind of random. The sad ending feels forced and generic.
The controls also felt a bit janky at times. Specially once you unlock your last ability, which has too long of a cooldown in my opinion, and also a weird aoe.

TL;DR: Okay to pick up at a discount if you like narrative games and don't mind a fair amount of jank. I appreciate the art style, music and overall vibe but in the end I didn't really enjoy it that much. I'm still upvoting because I support the effort behind it.

The dice mechanic is fine (different dice, passive modifiers, items, etc.), but the game doesn't give you any clear hints on how/when you're going to get more dice, so it's hard to commit to spend them. I think there are too many special dice and not enough regular ones to use in simple tests or for small adjustments. There is no way to force-fail a test without spending a die (so you are punished for being short on dice even if you accept a failure). Additionally, there are situations in which winning/losing a check has no difference in the outcome, which feels stupid, specially when you waste a very limited resource.

The setting is cool but the writing falls a bit flat. It tries to be profound too often. Some of the personalities are bland and uninteresting (foolishness in particular). I also locked myself out of some dialogue choices because the game doesn't hint at all about which events will advance the plot (and reset the map) and which won't (the name doesn't always make this immediately evident). Same thing with dialogue choices. If you play I recommend you save often and into many slots, and make sure to visit all map spots. The ending was also disappointing.

The pacing is a bit weird with all the cutscenes announcing the name of the "episode" or whatever, sometimes some "episodes" last literally 1 minute. Those cutscenes are also accompanied of weird artsy visuals that don't seem to fit that much.

The ui/ux is subpar too; there is a skill point system that is never explained, and I finished the game without knowing what it's meant to do (other than changing the name of your inside voices). I didn't notice any increase in scores nor any unlocked dialogues after upgrading. There's also a tab for body upgrades that I guess is simply for flavor. I also missed a way to auto-sort dice and a way to see your passive modifiers for all skill checks.

Finally, there are also a few bugs. The game just locked for me after some choices (repeatedly, after many restarts) and I had to take different ones. Also, one of my saves towards the end just sent me to a different branch I never took when loading it.

Decent. The story and ending are kinda predictable and cringey, but whatever

Fantastic. If the idea of a narrative spy game tickles you in the slightest, you should give it a go.
The setting is very original, delivered organically while playing (with many open ends, for better or for worse). The plot is also cool, and it's great to see how its pieces interconnect with each other and the setting as you progress. The voice acting is great (I like the raspy voice of the narrator, albeit a bit monotone at times), the art direction is great (at least for me), the writing is smart and deep and thematic (loved the spy jargon), the characters are diverse and memorable (although the main character could use a bit more fleshing out). The ending is slightly weak, I'd have liked some more dialogue after the final choices. Music doesn't stand out a lot, but when it does, it's also really good (big fan of the menu theme and "cover the moon when I'm gone").
The game is fairly lenient in terms of timings; I didn't encounter any relevant bugs/issues during my playthrough. There was one quest that I apparently skipped the deadline for, that got stuck in pending for a while (though apparently they patched it recently). There's also a veery tiny amount of voicelines that are missing or don't match the text.
In terms of gameplay/ux, there are a very few minor issues: it took me a while to understand that internalized thoughts didn't increase your stats, just raised their cap; and I also for some reason took too long to realize there was actually fast travel. The consumables also have weird stats; the "rarer" ones have worse ratio (e.g. a can with -4fatigue +3anxiety vs one with -2fatigue +1anxiety).
The game definitely reminds of Disco Elysium, but the vibe is different. DE is more comedic, the protagonist is a bigger ♥♥♥♥♥♥, has a talking tie, etc.; this one is grittier.
It's honestly a shame they had to lay people off because the game failed to meet its targets; I guess the genre is too niche.

Fun, light-hearted and over-the-top. Art direction in general is great, all maps feel unique, music is good. Boss stages are specially fun. If I had to point what I didn't like:
- the gameplay itself is kinda like a lot of QTEs stringed together. There's barely room for expression
- most trains are boring. It'd be cool if some maps favored some trains or the game forced you to run specific trains. As it stands I just played the whole game with the trick speed one
- something about the default controls feels unintuitive to me. Idk why but I kept pressing jump when I actually wanted to do something else. I get it they made it RB instead of A to free up your thumb for tricks, but still. I also find it confusing that detaching from a rail uses LB and not RB, you're kinda jumping. I also hate the input for multi-track drifting.
- it gets slightly too busy towards the end. It feels too difficult to make no-crash runs on your first try because there's barely any room to anticipate some obstacles. Also, some of the warnings feel inconsistent: the LB+RB one usually pops too early, and the "curve ahead" one feels inconsistent (curve sometimes appears instantly, sometimes takes up to 2s)

A crash made me lose >1h of progress. Crashes aside, apparently autosaving once or twice every map (or after certain events like rescuing a little sister) is too much to ask.

Cool story, puzzles, animation and voice acting. Weaker ending than the sequel, though

Eeh, just okay. Too short and too easy. You can tell it's an old game by the audio and graphics. Also the fast forward button is buggy and sometimes skips more than it should.

First game of the series I play and I was pleasantly surprised. Voice acting, character design, art direction and animation, writing and ui are all great. I also like the little clues scattered across all dialogues, the little meta jokes, the ending, and how the game tells you "we'll get to that later" when you pick a clue that could be valid instead of flat out saying "no".
It suffers from a couple of minor issues that most point&click/mystery games have: two of the puzzles I found annoying/hard to understand (pinboard and pirate keys), sometimes you get stuck because you forgot to click on an unassuming part of a room that happened to be an important clue (easily solved by clicking on the hint button) and the gameplay loop of going back and forth and exhausting all dialogues of all items x all characters can get boring (it could be solved by adding some time mechanic that forced you to be smarter about what to ask of whom; but then again, time mechanics can be stressful, so I guess it's not that bad).