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UPDATE: Finished the second playthrough, this time as Edward Carnby.

I neglected to mention all the stuttering and texture pop-ins and other graphical goofiness that happened (I think) in the previous review, so let me start with that -- it was present across both runs.

Some other fun things I encountered this time around while playing as Edward:

-- Audio repeating over itself multiple times while trying to have the same conversation with someone.

-- I could no longer use hatchets because the game decided I always had a hatchet, even when I didn't, so I could only use non-hatchet weapons for melee for the rest of the game. On a similar note, the Lagniappe for the Jack-in-the-Box apparently has a limit of one for its quantity you can have, which is interesting, as it's the only Lagniappe you can grab across both runs, as far as I can tell. But I did manage to grab it approximately six times during Edward's run, despite the limitations on inventory for it.

-- Starting from Chapter 3 onward, the map markers for rooms that still had stuff to do in them were all reset back to their flags for the beginning of Chapter 2 and they stayed that way for the rest of the game. This even went as far as things that were already done once that could not possibly be repeated, like in the case of opening the Medicine Box in Lottie's room. The box acts like you can interact with it with a key you no longer have and will tell you that you still need the key, even though you already opened it and got the key item needed for another puzzle.

-- I missed some trophies and was curious about what happened with them, so I went and googled the ones I was missing and found that four of them just straight-up don't work or only work for one character and not the other.

The role swap of using the opposite character results in almost the exact same situations, with the exception of one special scenario unique to each character in Chapter 4. If you play the game once with the character you want and then just watch a playthrough of Chapter 4 with the other character, you're covered instead of spending hours repeating the exact same processes. I guess playing as the other character for a second run does get you the ability to net all the Lagniappes (I did get them all), but there's very little reason to do so, unless you want to see a couple extra scenes that are callbacks to the original game...and one or two other scenes that involved the glitched trophies I mentioned, so you don't even get to see those!

In a sense, despite only spending less than half the hours on AITD this time around, I feel like the overall experience managed to be worse because of the ridiculous repetition with minimal payoff. I'm not going to lower the rating, but what a mess this game is. And I still don't have the trophy for playing for at least eight hours, despite having approximately fourteen hours of gameplay logged because of the weird bug during the Emily run where it just didn't accrue time for about eight hours!

Original update follows below:
--------------------------------------------------

So, quick thoughts on AITD2024 in no particular order because I just took my time through this and still finished it today in roughly one sitting (I apologize for lack of useful clarifications on stuff, I'm tired):

First, combat is absolute ass. And I mean beyond ass to the assieth power of assing. This varies between the few types of enemies you encounter, but generally speaking, you just swing wildly with R1 and hope you do enough damage to ruin them quickly (usually causing stunlock) with your melee weapon. If you're shooting, uhh...pray. Sometimes you can get a headshot and an enemy just drops, sometimes you have the four-legged facehuggers that...simply don't care if you shoot them because they just don't acknowledge bullets, even though bullets should hurt them. But that's more of a bug that we'll go over shortly. Also, there's attacks of opportunity (just called "opportunity"), but I only got one prompt to do so the entire game for some reason and even when I did it, the game didn't give me a trophy. Not a big loss, but it feels like some aspects of this game were more afterthoughts than anything else.

Second, HOLY FUCK THE BUGS AND GLITCHES. Things that happened during my run:

-- The very first time I started the game, apparently the game just stopped counting playtime after 49 minutes and 36 seconds. Why? No clue. But I got the trophy for beating the game in under three hours after spending about nine hours playing the game, with a final time of exactly two hours.

-- At one point, every time I tried a door that had a lock on it, my journal would update with an extra copy of the exact same page of objectives that I got at the start of the chapter. I added like seven copies of the same page just to test this and it just kept going.

-- The four-legged facehuggers are the only creatures with QTEs involved in their actions, and they can go from QTE -> you recover from QTE -> camera angle sucks so you can't see -> QTE again. Worse still, sometimes they just simply ignore bullets you fire at them. At one point, I emptied two entire clips into a facehugger and it just kept existing, so I reloaded the game and just ran past it. Some facehuggers were just getting stuck in walls or falling into existence from places or humping walls while I shot them.

-- Essentially, everything after Chapter 3 is a mess that needed some extreme polish.

Third -- The story is...a thing?

--------------------TINY MINOR SPOILER-----------------------
It's reality, it's all in your head, it's cosmic horror, it's none of the above, it's all of the above, it can't make up its mind on who the story is actually about.
---------------------TINY MINOR SPOILER END-------------------------

Granted, this was the Emily side of the story and not the Edward half (I'll do that tomorrow over the course of the day, probably). Also, there's only two bosses in the game and one was a total joke and the other was just a pain in the ass that involved enduring frustratingly dumb stuff in order to prevail.

Fourth -- I want to go back to bugs again because there's one room in the entire game that uses a single fixed perspective the whole way where you can't rotate your camera and every time I walked through the room at a certain spot, my character would get drunk and turn right and slam into a wall. It was amazing.

Fifth -- The lore was great, actually. If you want Lovecraftian storytime, it's the one thing this game does really well. I should probably have lumped this in with the general story comments, but I do love that there's so much stuff being covered, even if how it's all handled outside of reading up on or encountering said material doesn't amount to much.

Finally -- This is nothing like an actual remake. The overlap between the original mansion and Derceto is that there's like four or five rooms in the entire game that are similar. About half of the game takes place in "other locations". There is no really neat underground. You will not get attacked by a giant worm that can one-shot you. You will not go mad from reading any books. There are two enemies that can one-shot you, but they both have their own easy sections to deal with them.

Extra Finally -- The "sneak" mechanic is either stupid or broken because some things you need to sneak past can also simply be walked past. Magical.

I can't recommend you buy this at this time of release, it's not even worth it at half off. Maybe wait until the game is 15 bucks or less if you just want to enjoy some creepy lore dumps, but the game is passable visually, sparse in regards to enemies, and combat is extraordinarily bad. But hey, at least the sound design was alright, sometimes...I just remembered that at one point, a radio kept just starting to play for one second and then would cut out again, only to repeat after another ten seconds or so. That might have been unintentionally creepy, but it's just one more bug to acknowledge.

I'm not really fond of writing reviews about something shelved unless I need to make a note to come back to it for technical reasons at some point, because I would honestly like to finish a game before writing up a full commentary of thoughts on it (or any witty zingers, were I able to muster any).

I think it's worth talking about TEVI (it's in all-caps on Steam, so that's how I'm going to refer to it) because I got deep into the fifth chapter (out of eight, I think?) and put 15 hours in already.

The difficult part about talking about TEVI is that there are really only two ways for me to talk about it:

1. Pretend like I've never played Rabi-Ribi (and pretend like I didn't see the cameo appearances of Erina and Ribbon or the Rabi Smash game in the back end of my playthrough)

2. Compare this game to Rabi-Ribi and expect some of the best exploration-based design in the history of Metroidvanias.

Well, I guess there's option 3: Why not both?!

Let me get the good out of the way: If you enjoyed the touhou aspect of bosses from Rabi-Ribi, you're not going to be disappointed here because the boss fights are easily the best part of the game. I didn't get to measure the differences in difficulty to see how vastly the bullets are applied over any given boss fight, but I'll always offer a shout-out when a game decides to modify difficulty based on actually affecting interaction and not just adding extra health, armor, or whatever. I played on Normal, I died a couple times, it felt like an okay difficulty, take that as you will.

The soundtrack is also pretty solid in some spots (I absolutely love the opening and Morose Town). Most stuff was fine and I think the soundtrack might be on par with Rabi-Ribi.

The game is huge, which I was rather expecting. I wasn't expecting that I'd only have 56% map coverage by the back end of Chapter 5, though. But also, this is where I need to bring up some gripes.

First, regarding level design: TEVI does something interesting with its room designs that I had to note, even if I absolutely don't like it -- there's almost always one-way paths forcing you in a direction away from the exploration that you're probably used to doing while playing a Metroidvania and these one-way paths often require you to go through some very roundabout traversing to get back onto what seems like the regular route you're taking. What makes this interesting is that this one-way funneling IS the regular route and is often the quickest way to the boss / next area while also showing you a significant amount of the area you're in. It's fascinating because you're getting probably over 50% of the map for the area completed just by being forced down these windy paths, but the act of being forced/corralled/funneled just leaves you feeling like you're not really that much in control of your movement through these areas. It's like a busted escalator that you can't go back up and you can't jump over the sides, either -- get to the bottom and see what's coming!

Some of the one-way pathing is peculiar because there are blocks you can occasionally bomb, but some blocks that look exactly the same can also just crumble and cause you to lock into an animation that looks like you stumbled as you fall through them slowly to the next room. Sometimes, you can just touch a crumbling block and move past it without falling in. Sometimes, you just get locked into it and you're going to the next level down and working your way around to the next big moment. Sometimes, you can get into that seeming funnel and work your way out of it, only to find yourself going back up to the exact same spot, with you probably opening up a shortcut back to the area you started from, with the notion that you never would have been able to continue in that direction if you had wanted to go your own way. The game has determined that YOU WILL GO SEE OUR BIG STORY DEAL THAT WE WANT TO SHOW YOU. YOU MUST. BY ANY MEANS.

I love exploration and solid bosses, so that's probably why I'm drawn to Metroidvanias (and Souls-likes). Exploration is paramount to me, with the more options available equating to a better experience overall. Rabi-Ribi gave me this in a way that few Metroidvanias (I'm also looking at you, Environmental Station Alpha!) ever have. So, it's with great disappointment that I share how very little there is in the way of enjoyable exploration in TEVI.

I mentioned the whole thing about the story by any means necessary, and I wasn't joking -- your gating abilities are locked behind storyline moments or areas leading to the next storyline beat. And not only are they locked behind those moments and beats, the game will go out of its way to let you know in multiple ways. In some instances, the game will actively tell you that you don't need to go somewhere right now if you try and take a path that's open to you (at first, I thought this was just because of the merchant conversation in the Prologue, but it happens with multiple areas throughout the game). In other instances, if you try to go into an area that's in the same direction as the story marker on your map, you'll get a warning that if you go into that area, you won't be coming out for a while and that you better prepare yourself. Not really sure what preparation entails, because crafting is silly in this game and healing items are one of the few things that don't really take much effort to craft. More on that later. But in one other way worth noting, should you decide that you want to go exploring with any newfound power-ups you have to check out places you haven't been yet, you will generally find yourself stuck and unable to progress further until you have YET ANOTHER story-based ability that you're likely missing. And if you're like me and went back to the first area of the game after every new ability you got, then you're also probably like me and gave up after you got multiple bombing and movement abilities and had come back FOUR TIMES without being able to get back up to the area where you started. And nearly every new area is like this even when backtracking to them after getting an upgrade, you'll just make a tiny bit more headway than before and be stuck all over again. No bosses (I don't count the Elite Battle challenges given by a particular NPC as a side quest among these), no neat looping back between areas by linking multiple places together in unrealized ways, no cool power-ups (maybe a random stat potion or a sigil if you're lucky). If this were one of my first Metroidvanias, this kind of thing wouldn't bother me but when I heard about this game being made after playing through Rabi-Ribi's POST-POST-POST GAME, I expected the kind of loose and wild craziness of a game that absolutely understood just how much you could break it while still being able to move around it freely if you just understood the mechanics well enough. TEVI is the exact opposite of that.

I mentioned crafting briefly and the sigils in this game are very much in the same vein as the badges from Rabi-Ribi. Some sigils are found in plain sight, some are hidden in rooms on maps, some are purchased with a limited money resource (money is found through destruction of certain blocks and is never dropped by monsters), and some are crafted via elementals and essences. Some of your other orbitar (little shooty-assist-things for a spoiler-free description) upgrades and some of the abilities themselves can be upgraded through crafting. How do you get resources? Kill enemies, hope they drop what you need, and if they don't, spend nine of one resource to get two sets of three of another elemental or essence resource and hope you get what you need. This whole system feels like an afterthought because you're given the ability to wade through enemies in hopes of getting what you need and just gambling for less resources if things don't go your way. It's padding that could have been usefully spent searching for those same sigils and ability upgrades as drops in some of those paths that you just were never allowed to go further down until you have every ability in the game. There was a real chance to put some real rewards down alternate paths of exploration and instead, you're just killing enemies and praying to the loot gods that you inevitably get what you need after a time. I don't like crafting in games where it feels like it's shoehorned in and this seems excessively so, especially since they let you burn resources to try and RNG your way to more resources.

I forgot in the midst of my rant on exploring (I'm not going back up to reinsert this!) that the worst offender for how the world design is set up is the Freeroam Mode. This is an option you can enable when starting a game that lets you skip the story entirely and gives you a move that Erina from Rabi-Ribi initially had that allowed you to sequence break into areas you couldn't reach previously. This mode originally wasn't available until you beat the game, but I'm guessing after some push-back about the lack of functional exploration with gating abilities from reviewers, it was patched to become unlocked at the start. I've seen arguments that the level system (experience is given through exploration and beating bosses, I believe) and the limited supply of coins and occasional sigil or stat-boosting potion make up for the fact that you're constantly only able to make slight headway further into these areas you're retracing your steps back to, but these arguments also seem to come from people who are playing on the highest difficulties and found themselves needing every edge to compete with the bosses. It's an argument I understand, but I don't think it justifies the stilted exploration experience, especially if Freeroam Mode is a thing in the first place.

I haven't really talked about the story and that's because since I didn't finish it, it's hard to really comment on how it all fleshed out without being speculative. I'll say that the all social and political commentary feels VERY heavy-handed, but that didn't really bother me -- your mileage may vary.

I feel like there was more I wanted to talk about, but I've been writing this for way too long instead of actually playing more games. Even though this game is lukewarm for me due to design decisions, I'm kinda all for supporting these devs and hoping the next game feels more fun (for me). Also, UP+DASH in the air is the most unintuitive choice ever for making a down-smash attack with the spanner weapon. WHY?!

If you read this far, you're obligated to go buy Rabi-Ribi and then either give this dev the equivalent money for TEVI and not play it or buy it and then tell me how wrong or right I am later. I just needed to rant and ranting to my spouse and friends about this wasn't enough. Rant over, get it on sale next summer when Steam inevitably has a sale with it at 50% off. It's still better than your average Metroidvania just for the bosses alone, despite all my disappointment with it. I hope to maybe decide to come back and finish it eventually.

I might come back to this one, but if I'm going to, I'll have to start a new game. This game definitely has some issues that aren't completely apparent until you're already in the thick of it and it's too late to take back the mistakes you've made.

You're doing a job for a professor of a university, whose students apparently went to conduct some scientific experiments at an abandoned institution...and vanished. Cool.

I picked the Journalist of the three classes, because I saw that I get a Master Key that unlocks all doors and based on my stats, I knew I'd probably just be trying to avoid monsters as much as possible while trying to solve what's going on. As an additional skill to bring with me, I took Investigate (it made sense, I'm a journalist!) so I could find clues more easily, and off we went!

I arrived, I was told to find the night watchman and see about having him let me in, and then I was given freedom to do my thing. So, I did what any sensible individual would do, and used the Master Key on the front door. In with no issues, and I was off to the races!

...or so I thought. I looked around for a couple minutes and found some items, but found myself stuck with a door that wouldn't open because it needed some unusual kind of device to get further. No biggie, I go out and head south, find the night watchman, and then find out that he had lost his keys anyway and they were somewhere in the juvenile ward that was apparently left unlocked, so I just needed to waltz in there and find them for him because that guy definitely did not feel like doing his job.

And then I went inside that ward and found that I couldn't unlock any other doors because the Master Key was a one-use item. Whoops. Guess the whole "being weak" thing wasn't enough of a trade-off to warrant more than one door's worth of free openings. I find some clues, I get some experience, I eventually fight a single goofy dog and beat it and get more experience.

I kill some more enemies and make my way back to the save room that I accidentally missed on the way -- and it's worth noting that the reason I missed it is that there are no visible doors for any adjoining side passages from rooms. You have to walk over to what looks like an alcove/enclosure and just investigate it to find out if there is a door, if it's locked, and if you can go in if it isn't. But yeah, I made it to the safe room and discovered that you can buff your stats and learn new skills by spending experience. So, I burn all my experience gained so far on a new skill (Subterfuge, which lets me pick simple locks to make up for my missing key!) and a few Combat Runes that permanently buff my combat damage.

I go to rest and heal. The game goes, "That will cost you 1XP!" I have zero. I save, quit, and think about the mistakes that were made leading me up to this point.

I should also note that the controls (at least for my 8BitDO controller) were rather awkward and unable to be remapped. I'm fine with using the analog stick for movement, and having the menu be the same as the cancel button is whatever...but why does the START BUTTON simulate the same effect as UP on the analog stick? Weird stuff.

If I do go back, I will start a new game and I might still do the Journalist thing, but I've clearly learned some valuable lessons in my short while I've played. As always, I will update the review if I do make another trek.