Let's start with the good things:
The artstyle and atmosphere of this game is excellent (has a high production Tim Burton-esque vibe to it). The character designs were interesting and had loads of personality. The story was fairly generic but suitable and enjoyable. The game performed perfectly, no issues running this at full framerate. There were just a couple of minor bugs (e.g. a prompt staying in the corner of the screen) but were not at all game breaking. Everything aside from the gameplay was high quality.
Now the bad:
The gameplay however is really generic, uninspired and just flat-out annoying. I get that the focus of this game is the linear cinematic experience, but what they do to achieve that just doesn't make for fun gameplay. It is constantly interrupting your flow with cutscenes or disabling actions to get through dialog.
The combat itself is built around the idea of interrupting flow. The idea of constantly refreshing your moveset via a deck of cards is great on paper but it doesn't translate well in practice. You're constantly stopping to select from randomly drawn cards which just makes every instance of combat feel so drawn out and aggravating. The board game battles just added another layer of interruption on top of that lol. There's also just not that much variety. Thankfully it's extremely easy so it's not likely you're going to die and have to replay some areas.
They utilize a choice-based dialog mechanic when interacting with other characters but the choices don't matter. Seriously, don't do this, don't waste my time forcing me to choose responses if those choices don't matter. It's not fun, it just wastes the player's time. This, coupled with the combat system made me want to avoid interacting with characters when possible which meant avoiding any side quests.
Another time waster are these intermission sections between key sections of the game. All you do in them is walk forward for ages to trigger the next section of the game. If this wasn't mind-numbing enough, they have the nerve to slow your character down to a crawl.
It was such a shame given every other aspect of this game was so good. Unfortunately, you can't have a good game without good gameplay.
The artstyle and atmosphere of this game is excellent (has a high production Tim Burton-esque vibe to it). The character designs were interesting and had loads of personality. The story was fairly generic but suitable and enjoyable. The game performed perfectly, no issues running this at full framerate. There were just a couple of minor bugs (e.g. a prompt staying in the corner of the screen) but were not at all game breaking. Everything aside from the gameplay was high quality.
Now the bad:
The gameplay however is really generic, uninspired and just flat-out annoying. I get that the focus of this game is the linear cinematic experience, but what they do to achieve that just doesn't make for fun gameplay. It is constantly interrupting your flow with cutscenes or disabling actions to get through dialog.
The combat itself is built around the idea of interrupting flow. The idea of constantly refreshing your moveset via a deck of cards is great on paper but it doesn't translate well in practice. You're constantly stopping to select from randomly drawn cards which just makes every instance of combat feel so drawn out and aggravating. The board game battles just added another layer of interruption on top of that lol. There's also just not that much variety. Thankfully it's extremely easy so it's not likely you're going to die and have to replay some areas.
They utilize a choice-based dialog mechanic when interacting with other characters but the choices don't matter. Seriously, don't do this, don't waste my time forcing me to choose responses if those choices don't matter. It's not fun, it just wastes the player's time. This, coupled with the combat system made me want to avoid interacting with characters when possible which meant avoiding any side quests.
Another time waster are these intermission sections between key sections of the game. All you do in them is walk forward for ages to trigger the next section of the game. If this wasn't mind-numbing enough, they have the nerve to slow your character down to a crawl.
It was such a shame given every other aspect of this game was so good. Unfortunately, you can't have a good game without good gameplay.