It puts me to sleep after a few hours, but I DO keep returning to it a couple times a year. Occasional moments of quiet beauty, dignity, heroism. Far more moments of dumb samurai cliches and tired game design. There are a handful of missions that capture the breathless excitement of a climactic village-battle like you remember from Seven Samurai. The combat system is at it's best when you are racing around a chaotic fight, barely managing to save less skilled warriors (or farmers) than yourself, using whatever tools you have at the moment.

Incredible art direction. Stuff I liked:
- the main city's big, clear light bulbs
- high noon light filtered through rough fabric, scaffolding, and leaves
- hot desert wind at dusk
- the way that the dust kicks up and arcs over you as you slide down a dune when travelling with the wind
- the glow of the moon overlapping linework
- gradients of pale atmosphere joining background elements together
- choosing glider engines based on sound
- finding a glider setup that doesn't bonk on the ground after a jump
- countless mysterious, grand pieces of architecture in the distance that hold up upon closer inspection
- cool clothes that don't have stat modifiers
- good fishing minigame made better by the easy setting
- the chunky run animation
- the fire particles run inconsistently but are, occasionally, the best I've ever seen in a game

Yes the game runs inconsistently, but so what? Just look at it.

I imagine the Zelda team was weeping with envy as they toiled away on TotK. I wouldn't be surprised if their next project looked a lot like this.

There's a lot of roll your eyes about going on here, but here's a few random things I like:
- NPCs giving you little tips about nearby mini-missions
- putting your gun away allows you to wander the occupied island anonymously
- people make fun of you for wanting a normy life

random things that are terrible:
- every single car honks at you
- too many guns. I want like five, not fifty.
- gratuitous knife animations
- puddles on hills
- Far Cry 1 had plants that bend around you. What happened to that?

I loved the clarity of the quests and artwork in this game. Photography games are extremely hit or miss for me, and I thought Toem did a good job at turning the camera into an intuitive and satisfying game mechanic.

One gripe is that there is very little incentive to refine your photos in the game's encyclopedia, since all subjects are always billboarding toward the player. Two different pictures of the same subject (a bug, a tree) will typically be largely similar. This is such a compelling ongoing activity in the recent Zelda games because of the dynamic lighting and animations in those worlds. In Toem, as appealing as the art style is, it never really compelled me to take a picture of the same thing twice. Apples and oranges of course, but for whatever it's worth, I think that particular sub-system isn't very well suited to the art style.

Still the game's strengths are in its personality and confidence in it's own aesthetics, and on that metric is wonderfully well-executed.

I loved the boss fights in this game! Everything else left me a bit cold, but I did feel compelled to finish it, so hats off I guess! The sound design and animation are strikingly tactile. It's a great length (5-6 hours). The puzzle design feels sort of old fashioned and, particularly compared to other game that these devs have worked on, like Inside, the situations around the puzzles are abstract to the point of feeling meaningless. There's no recognizable purpose to any of the mechanisms in the world, and the player character has no motive mentioned. "Inside" also obscured the player character's motive, to wonderful effect by the final act. Here it just feels like a hole.

I've played a couple hours so far. The core climbing mechanic is wonderfully realized, but something always feels a little insubstantial about playing the game. I think it has to do with lack of specificity in the scenario/level design. The broad idea of the game world is undeniably cool. But the opening cutscene decides to favor mysteriousness and grandeur over setting up a clear situation for the player character, and so there are no real stakes when you're playing it. It's an approach to story/world that feels nearly identical to something like Journey, which a lot of AA and indie games have taken good and bad lessons.

Speaking of set pieces, the level design clearly evokes Fumito Ueda's games, but I think it fails to have the same dramatic pacing as them. There is set dressing sort of sprayed everywhere. Beautiful as the art style and models are, there's not much contrast in the look and feel of one space from the next. The theme of each area tends to be vague as well, as if all the artists had to go one were two word prompts like "fishing village". There's too much stuff for it to feel minimalistic like a fairy tale, but not enough specificity to feel like a real space. I believe that there will be more dramatically different biomes further on in the game, but I'll be surprised if the general level of purposeless detail diminishes.

Last gripe: you have a cute little blobby friend who rides on your shoulder. I'm definitely barging into the party and pissing in the punch bowl here, but this little cutie grates on me so much.

One good thing: The model of the player character is cool! Love the shin guards.