behemoth01
2023
This review contains spoilers
General concerns:
2024
Lovely. Like a flash hit of yore
God, wish I hadn’t accidentally deleted my save of this. Which, 25 hours in, says something. I could have gone further.
2022
Sweet lil game. Like A Short Hike before it, it’s built heavily on the ground laid by Breath of the Wild; and like A Short Hike, it can’t quite offer the same thrill of exploration thanks to its constrained world and short draw distance. But it works as Zelda methadone
2021
Everything Jett: The Far Shore thought it was, this is.
2022
At easy, you can complete the game without ever really learning it; at normal, you can bounce off the game without ever really experiencing it. I don't know which to recommend. For me, I enjoyed the impeccable vibes of an easy play through, but ended up finishing the last of five levels by brute force a matter of hours after I started it – and without much motivation to crank up the difficulty and get good.
2018
I get it, you know? But once you get it, the core game is very take it or leave it. I didn't find the mechanical crunch crunchy enough to want to devote time to perfecting it.
2016
There's so much to do and so little reason to do it. It's the thrill of exploration, without new discoveries being thrilling; the joy of a power fantasy, without any fantastical power; the satisfaction of character growth, without anything meaningful occurring. Just before I dropped this, I had a random event that led to me being gifted an entire freighter and becoming the captain of my own miniature navy! And what did it mean? More resources to mine, to build into batteries, to power timers that would get me resources.
The 2D Mario team picked up the gauntlet of Odyssey and ran with it. This game is, fundamentally, about the seeing how high the density of creativity can go. How many new ideas can the team have? How many can they pack into one game? How many can a typical player be expected to pick up in a given session?
The constraints of a 2D Mario game have become a platform for innovation, in other words. If you start with the assumption that every player knows the ins and outs of your base game like the back of their hand, then you can push the boat out almost immediately.
Which is good, because – if there is a complaint about this game, it is that the constraints of a 2D Mario game aren't always great. I never hit a game over screen, but I resented even having to think about lives. In some levels, my hand became a painful claw from having to hold a run button for simply to move at the speed the level demands. After games like celeste or super meat boy, where restarts are instant, the laborious process of restarting a level here takes the fun out of beating your head against some of the post-game content.
But those are quibbles. What a game.
The constraints of a 2D Mario game have become a platform for innovation, in other words. If you start with the assumption that every player knows the ins and outs of your base game like the back of their hand, then you can push the boat out almost immediately.
Which is good, because – if there is a complaint about this game, it is that the constraints of a 2D Mario game aren't always great. I never hit a game over screen, but I resented even having to think about lives. In some levels, my hand became a painful claw from having to hold a run button for simply to move at the speed the level demands. After games like celeste or super meat boy, where restarts are instant, the laborious process of restarting a level here takes the fun out of beating your head against some of the post-game content.
But those are quibbles. What a game.
2021
There’s a fundamental disconnect between the mechanics at play, here, which the game never surmounts. This is, mechanically, a game about momentum, about boosts and jumps and drifts. But it’s ponderous. You’re constantly being told to stop jetting to scan something, or pick something up, or just wait for dialogue to finish. The first true level has a 20 minute timer that you end up just… waiting for?
I wanted to love this, I’ve been waiting for this game for 12 years, but it just doesn’t work.
I wanted to love this, I’ve been waiting for this game for 12 years, but it just doesn’t work.
2022
Too many legibility issues, too much make work, and too much randomness to make the core game loop - which is neat! - stick. It’s fun to build little engines, unlock new card recipes, and gradually expand your understanding of the world, but when you find yourself just micromanaging berries and apples for an entire play session, it’s time to call it quits
2023
Throughout most of the game I was just asking “why is this here”. Why are there upgrade mechanics for gear? Why are there side quests with neither material nor narrative purpose? Why are there main quests where you gather sand? A game pieced together from a bag of features that games “have to have” to “justify” a 60 hour playtime and £70 price tag. There’s a slick 20 hour (TWENTY HOUR) character action game buried in this, but that would have been an even harder sell on the Final Fantasy brand than this already is.
2022
Fascinating, unsettling.
Great, especially if you played it first time round and are coming back after a decade.
2022
A fun little adventure that gets progressively less interesting as it gets more game-like.