Beautifully written, incredibly dense and thought provoking but overall a bit limited. A medieval murder mystery about different points in a small country town's history that is ultimately more about the impact and the history surrounding the murders than the mystery.

Timeskips are whats needed to be even remotely accurate to a medieval setting like this, but the lack of interludes between them hurts even when the suggested emotional impact can hit hard anyway. Getting to decide how the main character Andreas feels about his estranged wife is a fun concept, but it's ultimately a veil for an emotional beat that will happen regardless of what you pick. There's a lot of moments like this, and it's not like previous obsidian games or games like this one were totally transformative with their choices, but for an entirely narrative experience theres just very little difference in anything. What's left feels more like a visual novel with all the most annoying parts of a 90s adventure game tacked on.

Regardless the plot is very, very engaging. The mystery and the uncomfortable guilt of probably knowing you're going to finger the wrong person is sort of thrilling. The main problem, again, is that half of Andreas journey happens offscreen and as more and more information is recalled it feels less and less "focused on the town" and more "budget." I feel like even just one scene in any of the provinces you picked or even at home would've connected the story a little better, because otherwise you're left with these disjointed and sudden "mind palace" scenes where different characters explain Andreas' emotional state to him. It's a fun play on medieval theater at first, but as time goes it just feels confused.

Again, an absolutely fantastic story that's gotten me very interested in a lot of the history surrounding it (kudos to the devs for including a reading list) but not one I can imagine going back to.

Definitely a lot to like especially compared to a lot of other CRPGs from the time but progression is so bizarrely obtuse at times and while still pretty forgiving the time limit is an unknown stressor that put me off the game for a good while. It took me four playthroughs to actually get a game going because frankly I didn't know what the game wanted from me and with how much time exploring takes I felt like I didn't have time to figure it out.

It feels very low budget at points despite an assumedly expensive (somewhat) star studded cast rounding out most of the voice acted characters. Important characters or objects often times don't have unique sprites and sometimes don't even have unique descriptions to signify to interact with them. Definitely a "click on everything" game, which gets pretty grating when most of what you get is repeated flavor text and empty containers. The rope on a random bookshelf (which has incorrect interaction collision in some places) in a random corner of shady sands being the difference between basic progression at the start of the game or a few days off your timer is just one example of how much you'll need a guide here.

There are a lot of compelling and fun characters but the story gets lost and sort of meanders by the time you get the water chip and go to LA. Theres a couple good town quests and dungeons to be found but it's very limiting, which works for the tone but combined with how little a lot of the fun and interesting characters have to say it all feels a bit rushed. There are multiple quests referenced or mentioned that are straight up not in the game or entirely unfinished, and finding the final boss ultimately comes down to a crapshoot bumming around a random location given to you by the worst follower in the game. Some endings are either entirely impossible or determined by seemingly random factors.

The soundscape is pretty dull, the droning ambience and whispers are good for some areas but get grating as they repeat. I don't mind the repetetive attack sounds but at some point I gave one of my followers a deagle or something that is so loud it manually lowered other sounds on my computer every time he fired???

Combat is infamously bullshit at some points but often times way way funnier than later entries. The brutal and well animated death animations combined with your followers accidentally doming you in the back of the head every 5 seconds paint this sort of bizarre portrait of chaotic gunfight that none of the games really capture afterwards. The animation in both the actual game and the cutscenes is generally very detailed and impressive for the time. Bosses have insanely brutal death animations and characters accurately display dismemberment based on what direction of a blast they were hit by, though there was one part where dogmeat turned into a man because he didnt have an animation for being killed by flames.

TLDR play with a guide if you want to have any fun, just watch some hack talk about the lore on youtube otherwise

5 years later still an entirely nonsensical fallout game getting by on the fumes of an mmo market with little competition.

As someone with an embarrassing 500 hours in fallout 4, I can tell you all the people talking about it having the "best combat" on the series are entirely wrong. Most people are very easily tricked by the very flashy particle effects and sound design into thinking that all of the combat in the game isn't either finding an angle to cheese overly tanky ranged enemies or finding a big rock to cheese the ones that run at you. Fallout 76 enhances this hypnotizingly boring experience by adding a full second of network communication delay any time you shoot something and a whole bredth of bizarre errors any time more than one player gets into a fight with a group of enemies.

To top it all off this game also uses a directional audio system mostly in line with new cod games, where everything is almost inaudible if youre not looking at it????? Quick combat encounters in Fallout 4 are now stretched even further as youll walk away from what you think is a finished encounter, only to get progressively attacked by a train of melee enemies trailing you from the scene and doing the wonderful full second stun all melee enemies get to do.

Playing mostly solo there was nothing particularly difficult aside from overleveled raid bosses I would occassionally attempt. Even as most of my armor and guns broke down and I didn't care enough to fix them, combat was as easy as just slowly walking up to enemies and slowly unloading a shotgun into them. There was a bit of challenge in what I think was supposed to be an expansion raid, but even going up against high level enemies, half the time their AI seems to break and they either wont advance on your or will just straight up stay still and stop attacking.

Unlike Fallout 4 there are actually interesting things you can build in your base but they are of course mostly locked behind microtransactions, a subscription service and a battle pass. Even experiencing most of the actual story content and doing plenty of dailies and events on the way, progression without spending actual money moves at a glacial pace.

There are some somewhat interesting sidequests but most either have no payoff or are just lead ins to dailies. Factions are maybe some of the most dry and boring I've ever seen in a game and while I don't like to be anal about nerd timelines almost nothing going on here makes any sense. The justification for this being so early after the bombs dropped is that appalachia was untargeted as a mostly rural region, but because of time constraints there were no people at launch, so all of the human npcs you meet are talking about "coming back" to appalachia. Coming from where all the bombs dropped??? The radio announcer, possibly the worst in the series, goes on multiple therapyspeak diatribes on how hard it must be for everyone out there while cracking lighthearted jokes about how dangerous the regions is. Multiple people talk about experiencing life before the bombs, which was a hundred years ago. What the fuck is happening?????

I think the moment I turned on the game was when going to the expansion areas and seeing the insanely ugly fullbright areas that look straight out of a half baked Fallout 4 mod. I genuinely don't see how the series can come back from this because this is Bethesda fallout distilled into a science. Shoot ghoul. Shoot supermutant. Shoot deathclaw. Look its the brotherhood. Shoot raider. Just fucking nothing. Soulless. There are people who are vehemently defending this game because they fell for the hypnosis trick. It's over.