I've been dreading giving this game a (real) review ever since I finished the main story and looked up the other endings. My thoughts on it are so conflicting but I'll attempt to give an honest review to highlight both it's victories and it's numerous cardinal sins.
I don't like doing this but I'm going to use a pros and cons list to help stay organized because I feel like I could get rambly on this one.
Pros ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- This game definitely gets down the "feel" of a from soft souls game if only on the surface level in the game play loop and how the combat feels (sometimes)
- The soundtrack, design, animation, and most of the voice acting is great
- A society being overthrown by puppets who in the end were powered by dead people souls somehow is an interesting premise (if not a little too much like iRobot)
- There were some pretty awesome bosses and I liked the way they reused some areas and made enemies "evolve" over time by making infected versions of earlier enemies, different weapon variations, etc
- Deflecting can feel fun at times and the puppet string prosthetic is fun to use
Cons -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- First off the game being about Pinocchio is a huge detractor. It makes it insanely hard to take this game seriously. So much stuff feels forced into the game just because it was in the original Pinocchio story despite the fact that they're changing things so much that it hardly represents Pinocchio in any way at this point. Did the localization not realize that P sounds like another word in English? Who named the freaking "rise of P" ending? The WHAT organ? It's nearly a miracle we never had to collect "P liquid" or that they didn't refer to the Pinocchio nose on the picture frame as the "P stick".
- This game is crammed full of pointless items, systems, and an overabundance of confusing mechanics. More options doesn't = good if a large portion of the options suck.
- These characters are all boring and one note. I feel like the game expected me to get close to all these hotel people but all they do is give me stuff or sell me stuff or talk about their one character trait over and over again. Yeah I'm Korean and that dog guy saved me! Yeah I'm a rich billionaire who's parents were murdered by a puppet! They never grow or change and you never spend any meaningful time with them. The fox and cat were the closest to having progression but they ruin it by just being dicks to you at every chance they get.
- This game copies way too much from souls games just to say they copied something without thinking of whether it's good or fun. This game is on par with and/or worse than dark souls in the cheap ambushes department. Seriously this game is freaking obsessed with cheap stupid ambushes. Literally anytime I saw an item or chest I walked in backwards just because 80% of the time some stupid mob is waiting for you. This was never fun in dark souls or bloodborne, it was just kind of cheeky but I forgive it in those games because usually it's just now and then.
- Half of these weapons do not mesh well with the combat system and the way you're often forced to play the game to succeed. I could go into more detail about certain enemy attacks and move sets that bugged me and felt like they were clashing with the style of gameplay but I'll just stop here.
- I absolutely hate that you can't cancel out of attacks to do a deflect. This is my personal opinion and I learned to overcome my desire to want to do attack cancel deflects but it still felt bad. After having played Sekiro and Sifu going back to a game with deflects like this felt like having to write a letter to someone after years of having email.
- This camera is the real boss of the game. The fact that the camera doesn't auto adjust angle or almost ever auto adjust at all is extremely damning and frustrating. So many times I got stuck in corners while trying to dodge an attack or stuck in freaking enemy geometry and couldn't see where I was going. Also faster enemies like some late bosses or the second phase of the archbishop were an absolute nightmare with the camera flailing everywhere and just feeling terrible.
- The overall quality of the English localization is just not very good at all. I would forgive this if this was a smaller Indie studio but everything else about the game feels AAA so why is the English this bad? There aren't that many misspelled words though there are some but mostly the bad grammar and strangely worded sentences are what frustrates me. As someone who worked a Japanese to English translation job in the past I'm seeing lots of cases were I think direct or even machine translation might have been used with very little or maybe even zero native English speaker proofreading.
- Lastly (I promise) is that this story is just so weird. The way lies are integrated as a game play mechanic is so half baked. Sometimes the things you have to lie about are your opinions (Am I beautiful? Do you think she loved me? Was I a good dad? etc) so at first I thought "oh maybe the lies are the 'good person' answers" but no there are straight up other times where you have to lie to get the warm fuzzy points by lying to someone which leads them to somewhere dangerous. So many other parts of the story are just so forced either to make the game more like dark souls or to include something from Pinocchio. Seldom is anything added to the game at all if it's not to fulfill one of these delusions.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yet the game was actually kind of fun. This is all on just some bosses being cool and my affinity for the souls game play loop. To summarize my thoughts, the game feels like a symphony with a ton of different melodies going on but the melodies seldom go together very well and when they do it feels entirely on accident. It feels like someone did an AI generated from soft game and yeah if you squint a little it looks like a from soft game but if you take any time to look at the details you'll see weird artifacts and mangled hands and strange geometry in the background. Ultimately worth a shot if you like games similar to dark souls or bloodborne, but vastly flawed. It feels to me like so many people give this game a pass for all of these flaws just because of the Victorian/belle epoque/whatever vibe it gives off and this bugs me like crazy.
I don't like doing this but I'm going to use a pros and cons list to help stay organized because I feel like I could get rambly on this one.
Pros ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- This game definitely gets down the "feel" of a from soft souls game if only on the surface level in the game play loop and how the combat feels (sometimes)
- The soundtrack, design, animation, and most of the voice acting is great
- A society being overthrown by puppets who in the end were powered by dead people souls somehow is an interesting premise (if not a little too much like iRobot)
- There were some pretty awesome bosses and I liked the way they reused some areas and made enemies "evolve" over time by making infected versions of earlier enemies, different weapon variations, etc
- Deflecting can feel fun at times and the puppet string prosthetic is fun to use
Cons -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- First off the game being about Pinocchio is a huge detractor. It makes it insanely hard to take this game seriously. So much stuff feels forced into the game just because it was in the original Pinocchio story despite the fact that they're changing things so much that it hardly represents Pinocchio in any way at this point. Did the localization not realize that P sounds like another word in English? Who named the freaking "rise of P" ending? The WHAT organ? It's nearly a miracle we never had to collect "P liquid" or that they didn't refer to the Pinocchio nose on the picture frame as the "P stick".
- This game is crammed full of pointless items, systems, and an overabundance of confusing mechanics. More options doesn't = good if a large portion of the options suck.
- These characters are all boring and one note. I feel like the game expected me to get close to all these hotel people but all they do is give me stuff or sell me stuff or talk about their one character trait over and over again. Yeah I'm Korean and that dog guy saved me! Yeah I'm a rich billionaire who's parents were murdered by a puppet! They never grow or change and you never spend any meaningful time with them. The fox and cat were the closest to having progression but they ruin it by just being dicks to you at every chance they get.
- This game copies way too much from souls games just to say they copied something without thinking of whether it's good or fun. This game is on par with and/or worse than dark souls in the cheap ambushes department. Seriously this game is freaking obsessed with cheap stupid ambushes. Literally anytime I saw an item or chest I walked in backwards just because 80% of the time some stupid mob is waiting for you. This was never fun in dark souls or bloodborne, it was just kind of cheeky but I forgive it in those games because usually it's just now and then.
- Half of these weapons do not mesh well with the combat system and the way you're often forced to play the game to succeed. I could go into more detail about certain enemy attacks and move sets that bugged me and felt like they were clashing with the style of gameplay but I'll just stop here.
- I absolutely hate that you can't cancel out of attacks to do a deflect. This is my personal opinion and I learned to overcome my desire to want to do attack cancel deflects but it still felt bad. After having played Sekiro and Sifu going back to a game with deflects like this felt like having to write a letter to someone after years of having email.
- This camera is the real boss of the game. The fact that the camera doesn't auto adjust angle or almost ever auto adjust at all is extremely damning and frustrating. So many times I got stuck in corners while trying to dodge an attack or stuck in freaking enemy geometry and couldn't see where I was going. Also faster enemies like some late bosses or the second phase of the archbishop were an absolute nightmare with the camera flailing everywhere and just feeling terrible.
- The overall quality of the English localization is just not very good at all. I would forgive this if this was a smaller Indie studio but everything else about the game feels AAA so why is the English this bad? There aren't that many misspelled words though there are some but mostly the bad grammar and strangely worded sentences are what frustrates me. As someone who worked a Japanese to English translation job in the past I'm seeing lots of cases were I think direct or even machine translation might have been used with very little or maybe even zero native English speaker proofreading.
- Lastly (I promise) is that this story is just so weird. The way lies are integrated as a game play mechanic is so half baked. Sometimes the things you have to lie about are your opinions (Am I beautiful? Do you think she loved me? Was I a good dad? etc) so at first I thought "oh maybe the lies are the 'good person' answers" but no there are straight up other times where you have to lie to get the warm fuzzy points by lying to someone which leads them to somewhere dangerous. So many other parts of the story are just so forced either to make the game more like dark souls or to include something from Pinocchio. Seldom is anything added to the game at all if it's not to fulfill one of these delusions.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yet the game was actually kind of fun. This is all on just some bosses being cool and my affinity for the souls game play loop. To summarize my thoughts, the game feels like a symphony with a ton of different melodies going on but the melodies seldom go together very well and when they do it feels entirely on accident. It feels like someone did an AI generated from soft game and yeah if you squint a little it looks like a from soft game but if you take any time to look at the details you'll see weird artifacts and mangled hands and strange geometry in the background. Ultimately worth a shot if you like games similar to dark souls or bloodborne, but vastly flawed. It feels to me like so many people give this game a pass for all of these flaws just because of the Victorian/belle epoque/whatever vibe it gives off and this bugs me like crazy.