Recent reviews by Winter Witch

This review contains spoilers!

On The Edge is oddly disappointing, but only within the context of the very high bar the studio set with The Last Autumn. I feel like if the DLCs were developed and released in a different order, than this chapter would have been received better. It's fairly solid work, on par with The Arks for how much it refreshes the core gameplay loop. I found helping other settlements grow to be conceptually satisfying. But as a game production send-off, a final chapter? It kind of limps across the finish line.

What I would have liked to see:
- More meaningful consequences to your policy decisions with regards to other settlements, beyond the friendship meter
- A structure as unique as the abandoned army warehouse should be more than a steelworks that also gives you steam cores; at least some ethical events and complications would go a long way
- New London a little more threatening - making harsher demands of our outpost, maybe some actual retaliation when we declare independence
- The final scenario in such an epic story deserves a much stronger denouement! It ends so suddenly!

On The Edge is far from a must-play, but it's a decent scenario with a few cool new gameplay elements. Whether or not that's worth $13 is up to you.

Let's talk about the most common things that seem to put people off this game.

1) The harsh grind of the survival mechanics gets in the way of the cool story -
While this is by design because the devs were trying to capture a particular feeling of desperation and struggle that's in their opinion integral to story immersion, they also have acknowledged that people engage with games and find meaning on different levels. Hence, they've added a detailed array of difficulty sliders that you can opt in to (they're all locked at the dev-recommended levels by default) so you can make adjustments if some aspect of play is frustrating to the point of taking you out of it as opposed to enhancing the experience. Dare I say, you can also make it *harder* if you're crazy like that. Go for it!

2) It's poorly optimized/buggy/won't run -
There are certainly some problems. Can't speak for everyone, but for my own part, it really seems to eat up more system resources than I would have thought. I had to turn the graphics down some to get satisfactory FPS, but I still like how it looks on medium settings. Despite that, I'm getting stutter for one or two seconds after entering new load area. Maybe it will get better with time and patches, maybe not. For what it's worth, I have not experienced any crashes, and I'm loving this game way too much to care about the other issues.

Still interested? Let's talk about the good stuff:

Super compelling mystery/intrigue/apocalypse scenario, absolutely brilliant script and excellent English localization, such great atmosphere and mood, super cool setting that's a fusion of turn-of-the-century working class Russia and Steppe culture and mythology, the characters are super well written and make you get very personally invested, "mind map" style quest journal that's a stroke of design genius, great soundtrack, immersive and interesting minigames for performing medical diagnosis and autopsy, barter economy that plays very nicely into the survival elements, and last but not least an AWESOME story that fills every in-game day with real, gut-wrenching player choice and emotional intensity. Make no mistake, this is a roleplaying game in its purest form - not a by-the-numbers classic RPG, but a game in which you truly play a role, become a character, and the outcome is up to you.

Pathologic 2 is a strong GOTY contender for me, and I think the people that made it are incredible visionaries.

If you're on the fence, I urge you to at least try it within the refund eligibility period. What do you have to lose? It's such a cool game!

Edit 9/23/19: I've finished the story... and Jesus Christ, this might be the best ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game I've played in my entire life! My original review above doesn't do it justice. For the love of god, buy this game if you're even a little interested! It's a work of art.

To put it simply, NieR:Automata is my favorite game of all time. It's more than meets the eye, and surprised me again and again when I first played it on PS4. Any technical issues you may encounter here can be surmounted with a bit of easy modding, and the experience couldn't be more worth the effort.

This is an emotionally powerful, genre-defying masterpiece. Please play it.

Cute and enduringly charming, truly excellent if played with a friend. The romance and friendship progress scenes with each of the other people in the town are fun and well-written, though I find myself wishing they had more to say outside of those one-off scenes, especially during yearly holidays and festivals (during which their dialogue never changes year after year, no matter your relationship with them).

Of course, the best part by far is building your perfect farm and home. There's plenty of space on your character's property to do this collaboratively with a good friend or spouse on another computer and still get really creative. Working together on resource-gathering expeditions in the mines is fun too.

Resist the temptation to look things up! Pulling back the curtain on the game's systems to "optimize" your gameplay spoils the fun of discoving things for yourself.

Absolutely spellbinding despite its flaws! Story, setting, and characters so far are very compelling, the barter economy and survival mechanics are interesting and extremely immersive, and while the graphics are dated, the art and design of the game world have been crafted with a lot of care and attention, and mesh well with the excellent, unusual soundtrack. The overall mood and tone are so good that I feel completely present and immersed in the narrative.

Some words of caution:

Stealth makes no sense. You can fire multiple rounds from a gun while standing right behind someone and they won't react so long as you're holding Crouch. They will if you shoot or stab THEM, but not somebody else right next to them. But 9 times out of 10 someone inside a building will notice you as soon as you enter the front door even if you were sneaking when you entered. I'd assume it was supposed to work that way, were it not for the OCCASIONAL success.

I go back and forth about the combat. It's very difficult and often avoidable, which I like, but the difficulty feels like it's caused by poor mechanics rather than a deliberate design choice. The timing feels off for your punches and knife swings, and guns (the revolver, at least) seem to suffer unreasonable accuracy drop-off across even rather short distances. I fired at someone about 15 feet away with a weapon in almost perfect condition and missed 3 times in a row. They were standing still and I had the reticle carefully trained on their head. I like that this makes fighting more than 1 or 2 people at once next to impossible and incentivizes looking for nonviolent solutions - the player-character is no super soldier, after all. But there are better ways to do it than super-awkward weapon handling.

THAT BEING SAID, the story and worldbuilding are so good that I've been happy to make peace with these shortcomings. Simply save very often to protect yourself from unfair outcomes and janky knife fights.

The game is heavily story-driven, so I will update this review with more complete impressions after I've finished at least one playthrough.

I've seen this game categorized as a roguelike. It has a BIT of that randomness, but to be honest there are more constants than variables. It's more of a choose-your-own-adventure game, accompanied by a fantastic atmosphere delivered through the memorable soundtrack, spot-on art direction, and singularly artful writing.

You are a ship captain seeking your fortune on a vast, uncharted underground ocean known as the Underzee, whose many locales are influenced by Victorian steampunk, Lovecraftian nightmares, and lots of occult strangeness and original folklore in between. You will have to manage your fuel, food for your crew, and their faltering morale on this strange black ocean while seeking opportunities on islands you come across.

The heart of the game is found in an enormous host of vignettes that you will encounter as you sail from island to island and are presented with a variety of scenarios that can be creepy, funny, witty, and suspenseful all at once. These are delivered in written form, with very well-written paragraph-form text accompanied by a few still images to set the scene, upon which you're presented with a choice for how to proceed or react, or what to say if you're talking to someone. Some stories could secure your captain's future or hurt your ventures quite badly depending on your choices. All are chock-full of amazing lore and worldbuilding, although the underlying secrets of this strange setting (of which there are many) are answered sparingly with tiny hints and tidbits. There are even some stories that unfold while you're at sea - you can encounter a shipwreck to explore, a crewman may go mad and try to kill you, or an officer of yours could present you with an opportunity or request your help with goals of their own.

If you die (and you WILL die), a new captain takes your place with the opportunity to salvage some of your resources for a leg up on their own adventure. The islands on the map shuffle so the exploration element remains fresh (in-universe, it's a very mysterious phenomenon that maps of the Underzee lose accuracy over time). However, the storylines on the islands reset. This is necessary for the game's underlying design, but is also one of its weakest points. Your prior experience will allow you to maximize positive outcomes on your adventures, snowballing gains to your captain's abilities and resources and thus allowing you to reach further and further into the game world and attempt more dangerous, more rewarding stories at further, weirder and more fascinating islands. In the meantime, you will find yourself re-reading the early scenarios near the starting port of Fallen London many times over until your captain finds their footing, and this gets tedious.

There is real-time ship-to-ship and ship-to-Lovecraftian-Horror combat out on the Zee, in between written narrative parts. It's not bad, but it is another of the game's weaknesses. Your ship is plodding and hard to maneuver, and the various creatures and enemy vessels, while diverse in appearance, mostly all attack you in similar repetitive ways. The main difference is in the rewards you get for defeating them, which are interesting and often accompanied by a decent little storylet for some of the more imposing monsters. It can certainly get more intense when you're low on resources and your crew is worn down and frightened from a long voyage, and when a sea monster crests the horizon you have to decide whether to gamble on a fight and plunder, or try to flee.

There's also a pretty decent trade system. All of the loot is interesting and help flesh out the world, with trade goods such as casks of mushroom wine or mirrorcatch boxes full of fresh sunlight lending a lot of character to the game. And if you pay attention to buy and sell prices from port to port, you can iron out some profitable trade routes for yourself to help cover the costs of your explorations and save up for upgrades to your ship's engines, guns, and lights.

In summary, it's a fascinating setting with tons of great narratives that reward exploration and taking risks, it knows how to be creepy and also quite clever, and it really captures the imagination. Drawbacks include a lot of repetition with your earlier captains as you find your footing, and methodical, simplistic ship combat. Lastly, the incredibly deep and mysterious world often leaves you with more burning questions than clear answers, which I absolutely loved (I nominated for this game for the "Haunts My Dreams" award 2017) but seems to frustrate some people who like things to be clearer.