"Yer not fond of me lobster?"

Honestly, a pretty neat time. It looks great, has excellent sound design, the fishing gameplay is really engaging, and the game carries a very thick layer of unease and dread that amplifies the experience. It does start a bit slow, but the more I put into the game the better the result turned out and it leaves me with a pretty simple and unique game but one that manages to thread the needle between being relaxing and unsettling. One of the biggest surprises of the year.

"Bloodborne at Home:"

Alright, so, at the core of this game, or should I say most of it is a good-ass soulslike. Its areas might be a bit too derivative of Bloodborne in a few areas but the puppet/carnival theme and the creative enemy designs are good enough for it to get away with that. It also looks, graphically, very great considering the size of the dev team and it has a pretty good PC port. So far, so good.

The combat and general gameplay loop is VERY Dark Souls, but not like post Bloodborne Soulslike, more like Dark Souls 2 Soulslike. That's not to say this game's design is bad, but there are aspects of this game like its hit detection, movement, and level design that feels straight out of old-school Fromsoft. Which are good games, but it didn't exactly age super well. Most of the enemies and bosses are great, the game looks and sounds amazing, and the world felt properly paced and dense, so I mostly had a good time while playing.

Then the characters started talking. This game has a lot more of a straightforward narrative focus than any Souls game apart from possibly Bloodborne and Sekiro. And while that's not inherently a problem, it is when you have a story that's akin to a Pinocchio movie made by the Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey director. It's QUITE BAD. The acting and animation for the characters is the only thing keeping this afloat, but when it's not being incredibly ridiculous in its premise or boring in its character dialogue, it has some beats in the story that are paced and executed as well as Edgy Deviantart Pinocchio fanfiction.

So yeah, the story knocks down an already pretty okay game by a point or two because if it's putting this much of a focus on it, I'm expecting something out of it. This is not a bad game, and am excited to see what these guys do next, but let's just say that after Fromsoft released Armored Core this year, this game scratched this souls-like itch for me for a little bit and now I have no intention of ever playing it again.

Out of all of the rpgs with Star in the name, this is like.. 2nd place.

What happens when someone who has never played a Bethesda developed game before plays a game that everyone only compares to other Bethesda games? Well...

I mean there are a couple good things..? I mean.. the scale is impressive and some of the model density looks pretty good. I couldn't play many of the faction quests for a reason i'll bring up later, but the one I did play was pretty solid. The acting and sound design are all pretty good. And occasionally the flow of combat is pretty fun. But.. DAMN.

It's not even just the bugs. Most of the bugs I got were the funny kind and those honestly added to my enjoyment. Shit like untextured wireframe circles on certain planets, spazzing out animations, 4 conversations happening with one character at the same time, spinning ships in space those were fucking hilarious. Those are fine.

There were a couple genuine bugs that impacted my enjoyment, like one of the faction quests not starting, which was disappointing because that was the one that, from what I heard, everyone likes the most. On the technical side my biggest issue is how ugly the character models and face animation can be, which did impact my experience considering how much of this game is talking to various npcs. At times it felt like I was in a survival horror game. There were a couple frame drops here and there, and the game crashed three times, but apart from that, I think the technical state isn't the worst?

Funnily enough, this game manages to find a way to fail both as an open world game and an rpg in completely different ways. Obviously the fact that exploration between planets is exclusively fast travel that you don't even need to get in your ship to do is kinda lame. But the main issue for me is how barren these planets are and how little to find and explore there is on there. I heard the planets are procedurally generated so maybe I was just unlucky, but with the exception of a few cool planets with different mid exploration events, it was mostly just barren empty space with visual locations that stop getting super interesting the longer I play. Ships are mostly just used for floaty, janky space ship combat that doesn't even control that well, so maybe thats why we cant fly straight between planets.

Additionally, the resource gathering in this game is REAL BAD. Not only is the encumbrance limit way too low, but transferring items between you and your partners is an exhaustive process that is way too time consuming for what's supposed to be just a simple task.

Additionally, I REALLY didn't like the story. Without getting into spoilers, most of the story is not super engaging or interesting with a bland cast of characters carried by their admittedly great voice acting. I was mildly entertained by the ending because, even if it was a predictable twist, a twist in general is still one that's entertaining to see unfold. But yeah, the writing in the one faction quest I did was actually fairly strong.

Yeah.. I just couldn't vibe with this one. Maybe at some point in the future, I'll continue to explore some of the side content in this one, but for now, I'm just kinda done and don't want to use up that much more time on a game that just isn't working for me. It has good stuff in it, but if this game is being criticized or praised for being as good as any other bethesda rpg, then maybe I should just stick with the shit Obsidian's making.

See? It's possible to criticize this game without being transphobic! It's not hard, either!