This review contains spoilers
Fell to my knees at day 50.
this is honestly the best game ever, its so satisfying to finish it. A lot of the games tedium and brutality is one of the best examples of "ludo narrative synchroncity" I've seen. The seprhirot, even with their short screen time, are so well written and characterized its jarring to know this game was only written by a few people and its their first work, thank you kim ji-hoon for one of the worst best brutal and mind numbing experiences of all time.
this is honestly the best game ever, its so satisfying to finish it. A lot of the games tedium and brutality is one of the best examples of "ludo narrative synchroncity" I've seen. The seprhirot, even with their short screen time, are so well written and characterized its jarring to know this game was only written by a few people and its their first work, thank you kim ji-hoon for one of the worst best brutal and mind numbing experiences of all time.
This review contains spoilers
Honestly this game is close to being fun, managing anomalies or whatever they were called, cultivating power, understanding how to best approach each anomaly, honestly that part was fun. But then my first ordeal shows up and just mops the floor with me, people would probably call this a "casual filter" if it even is supposed to be, I could have just gotten unlucky, but really it's just supremely unfun. Had a lot of potential, maybe one day I'll be able to sit down with someone and they can explain to me what I need to do or how to best approach the issue I'm having, but until that day, this game is just lackluster.
I see Lobotomy being mentioned and see that it's an anomaly management game, so naturally I put it on my list.
When I finally boot it up, it didn't take more than 30 mins to find issues and pet peeves. Like the subpar UI and scaling whether it's the sprites, the text or event box. Plus I'm greeted to a bland environment with doll designs that I didn't really appreciate personally. Although it's criminal how could you fumble an inspiration like the SCP foundation, I've played games with bad characters like neon white before so I didn't think of it a dealbreaker.
I play a few days and find a few questionable design decisions. You can retry workdays as much as you like but if you're soft-locked (due to agent death/gear loss etc..) you can only rollback to specific intervals every 5 or so days. What gives this feature its purpose is how grindy the experience is. Some missions require working for way longer past the daily goalpost due to progress resetting every day.
What compounds this grind even more is that specific anomalies require very specific combinations or measures to be worked on in relative safety. For example, I get an anomaly that requires itself to be off-screen to work successfully, how do they realistically expect players to shy their eyes from their newest anomaly for at-least the first few times they're worked on? How many times am I supposed to realistically retry this workday before giving up and looking up the required measure for it?
I strictly intended to not look up anything to not spoil the fun, but this was too much for my patience.
Was the management cycle even fun enough to bear with those faults? Not really. You can loosely group management into 3 phases/levels. Working is just sending agents to work on the anomalies to generate the prized power source, Countermeasures is when an anomaly escapes or an agent goes frenzy and damage control is needed, and ordeals are random events that trigger once you work on anomalies more than a set figure and is basically a base invasion that you need to fight off.
The management part is boring when things go as intended so you've got contrived perquisites and the invasions to keep you busy. Plus you can get extra screwed if you luck goes south when picking new anomalies.
So
- The cycle itself isn't that fun and revolves around a grind
- luck is a considerable factor to justify the rouge-lite elements
- Art direction is poor and in 10 hours I've heard like 4 tracks tops
-Writing fails to build intrigue and instead puts the effort on building bland uninteresting characters.
Honestly IDK who should be the audience for such a game. I don't want to say that it's made for crusty weebs who fixate on characters above all else but I'm dumbfounded to mention another type of audience. Didn't want to hold prejudice against a Korean studio but this further proves that Korea is a fake and gay country.
When I finally boot it up, it didn't take more than 30 mins to find issues and pet peeves. Like the subpar UI and scaling whether it's the sprites, the text or event box. Plus I'm greeted to a bland environment with doll designs that I didn't really appreciate personally. Although it's criminal how could you fumble an inspiration like the SCP foundation, I've played games with bad characters like neon white before so I didn't think of it a dealbreaker.
I play a few days and find a few questionable design decisions. You can retry workdays as much as you like but if you're soft-locked (due to agent death/gear loss etc..) you can only rollback to specific intervals every 5 or so days. What gives this feature its purpose is how grindy the experience is. Some missions require working for way longer past the daily goalpost due to progress resetting every day.
What compounds this grind even more is that specific anomalies require very specific combinations or measures to be worked on in relative safety. For example, I get an anomaly that requires itself to be off-screen to work successfully, how do they realistically expect players to shy their eyes from their newest anomaly for at-least the first few times they're worked on? How many times am I supposed to realistically retry this workday before giving up and looking up the required measure for it?
I strictly intended to not look up anything to not spoil the fun, but this was too much for my patience.
Was the management cycle even fun enough to bear with those faults? Not really. You can loosely group management into 3 phases/levels. Working is just sending agents to work on the anomalies to generate the prized power source, Countermeasures is when an anomaly escapes or an agent goes frenzy and damage control is needed, and ordeals are random events that trigger once you work on anomalies more than a set figure and is basically a base invasion that you need to fight off.
The management part is boring when things go as intended so you've got contrived perquisites and the invasions to keep you busy. Plus you can get extra screwed if you luck goes south when picking new anomalies.
So
- The cycle itself isn't that fun and revolves around a grind
- luck is a considerable factor to justify the rouge-lite elements
- Art direction is poor and in 10 hours I've heard like 4 tracks tops
-Writing fails to build intrigue and instead puts the effort on building bland uninteresting characters.
Honestly IDK who should be the audience for such a game. I don't want to say that it's made for crusty weebs who fixate on characters above all else but I'm dumbfounded to mention another type of audience. Didn't want to hold prejudice against a Korean studio but this further proves that Korea is a fake and gay country.
Most accurate depiction of a person who underwent lobotomy
Seriously tho, the game is amazing, the gameplay although extremely tedious is definitely worth suffering through because of the great story and also although having to choose a new abnormality was always a pain the ass, it was still extremely interesting to me to figure out their gimmicks, and a lot them also have pretty dope lore.
Seriously tho, the game is amazing, the gameplay although extremely tedious is definitely worth suffering through because of the great story and also although having to choose a new abnormality was always a pain the ass, it was still extremely interesting to me to figure out their gimmicks, and a lot them also have pretty dope lore.
Love to see a game that's not afraid to REALLY make you suffer. A true work of ludonarrative excellence (and also just plain narrative excellence). Don't be afraid of the game's purported impossible difficulty, it's not actually that "hard" per se, it's just (deliberately) arbitrary and unfair (the difference being- it doesn't take a lot of skill or a huge brain to beat the game, it just takes the stubbornness to keep retrying). The ultimate goal of the game is to use the meta-progression tools at your disposal to avoid having to deal with the unfair bits.