On its current state the game has more annoyances than enjoyment.

The design choices are the worst type for a roguelike: grind otherwise you are not winning.

Grind to get better gear with minimal % upgrades (but maybe you can get a bonus armor! just grind more please cause its random when you upgrade)

Grind so you have more money to keep doing tries cause getting back to a level cost money exponentially.

But you also don't want to do this and its better to do the whole section all over again cause you can't buy consumables on base and one of them (at least for the first boss) makes the fight like 90% easier.

If you die you lose absolutely everything you had on that run, so better grind again the gear you lost, then making another run to fix that gear, then making another run to get consumables for the boss that would probably kill you.

If you also add the fact that there is a weight system on this game so when you want to do a run where you want to kill the boss you dont want any items on your inventory cause they would make you slow, and you don't want that cause as a said before, dying is horrible on this game.

The devs have addressed this by saying they are going to add a mode for the people that don't want a roguelike, so this will be shelved until that mode happens.

Before playing this, I have obviously heard about how infamously bad it was, but mostly on a storytelling perspective. From the combat I heard it was boring so the combination of the two made it a game not worth to play. I would lie if I say I played this cause I was excited to play it, but also I want to clarify that I didn’t come to the game with a “I want to see how bad it is” but more of a “I want to see why everyone say is so bad”.

I played the game on version 1.25, without elemental affinity, without beat down and with the original edit of the game. For context, this is the closest you can get to the original version of the game. But also I tried to play with the new additions to put perspective.

I’m writing this big intro just to give weight to my words. No matter the options I picked, no matter if I came with a fair try, I truly believe this is the worst game I have ever finished.

This review is story spoilers free.

Let’s just say the good thing about the game: The music is cool, it has some well-known composers (toby fox is in here) so some songs are good. That’s it, that’s the only thing I can give the game. Everything else is so unbelievable bad from start to finish that I can’t believe someone thought that they were a good idea.

From how convoluted, confusing, bad written, unfunny, and boring the story was. Literally nothing makes sense at the end, you are literally in disbelief that what you witnessed has any relationship from what you started with. To the characters: every single one is either too unfunny and an asshole, or too perfect to the point where they are just not a character anymore. We are on a RPG, the characters are one of the most important parts of this genre and they didn’t even get this right. They are also kind of unimportant at the end, which can be a pain or a blessing.

Now if you know about Yiik you may know about the main character: Alex, the ginger boy. He is very annoying, pretentious, a piece of shit in general. He has some options during the game that are laughable. The worst part is that it can seem to be pointed out that he is like this for outside reasons, or at least, you could pick that at the end, so it does come across as a very unlikable character which is not what you want on your story (specially with the themes of the story). He also has some internal monologues across the story (if you select the original edit, which btw, is not the recommended option anymore) that make him look more like a piece of shit, and also are very long sometimes, and pointless.

On the actual game side, the combat is god awful. It’s a turn base RPG with a system like Paper Mario where you have to do a mini game on every skill you have. The problem with this is that most of the mini games are awful, or very long. For reference, there is a mini game of a character that, to do the max damage, you have to do for 17 seconds. Imagine having to spend 17 seconds of inputs just so at the end the character do minimal damage.

That’s another point, most of the combat in here is braindead and pointless. There are ways to increase the combos of your mini game to do more damage, but they will only increase (at least on the first half) like 2-3 more points of damage, which is not worth the effort. The combat it’s truly boring and bad designed. The worst part is that they had change it a little bit, and it’s still bad.

The level system is also pretty weird. You store experience and at the end have to do a weird menuing on a tower to apply points to each stat. You have to do this on a specific location too, so it’s very annoying to do.

The game is also not very well made. I almost soft lock myself at least 2 times (one of which I had to actually restart the game). It has constant movement glitches, duplicate items, and clunky interactions. Also if you ever play the game (why would you after reading this), play with the football on the main city. I can’t believe you would let that on a fully release game.

Just to end this horrible rant, I just want to say something about the design choices at the end, so if you don’t want to even get an indirect spoiler you can skip this paragraph: The last 2 chapters are one of the worst things I have ever witnessed in a videogame, there is no way someone thought that people would want to play whatever happens in the first one, and I can’t believe someone thought that the last one was a cool conclusion that people would be excited to play. Even if what you want to give a commentary on the RPG genre, the reality is that the point was missed at the end, and it came out as one of the worst last chapters ever, and probably the worst final boss in a RPG I have played.

So I’m Yiiking out of my mind after playing this. I did stream this game so I had fun even while being miserable playing it, but if you are a normal player that want to play this on their own to see how bad it is: Trust me, it is actually not worth to play. This game is not funny bad, its godawful bad on a design and storytelling level that there is not worth spending the time laughing at it. May as well just watch a YouTube video about it, or a gameplay so you don’t have to suffer doing 10 minutes of normal enemy battles in a RPG.