isaiaheverin
BACKER
I'm going to link my enemy combat design video series because so much of what's frustrating or disappointing in this game ties directly to what I care about most as a combat designer and why I created these videos in the first place. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaAa7EbxLMGOqF1EKT-ppDtgAUdrHC_ps
Overall, Jedi Survivor takes the successes of Jedi Fallen Order and fans them with the hot flames of more and more gameplay scope, much of which does little to improve the established formula.
Performance Gripes
This game's performance sucks. It's not optimized. I waited a year to play it, hoping it would get better, and it did, but barely. The variance in how well the game could run in different areas (on an RTX 3080 and 12th Gen Intel i7) ranged from 15fps to 60fps, probably averaging 45 with massive slowdowns in certain areas (the worst was outdoors on Jedha, which was unplayable without me pausing the game to lower the graphics settings to the minimum temporarily, and it still ran at <45fps). It doesn't fully utilize my CPU or GPU (and I explored all the fixes players have tried to find), so it's a mystery how the studio employed Unreal Engine so poorly.
Environment Art
Aside from issues with clarity in level design and lighting (below), this game is GORGEOUS. The art is the biggest reason I did not stop playing despite my annoyance with its gameplay. The fundamental Star Wars identity is crystal clear, the fidelity and range of environments are beautiful to look at, and spaces feel engaging to explore even when the level design becomes convoluted or unclear. No complaints here!
Story
Meh. It's not much of anything, it's barely even a story. The few meaningful plot beats are flimsy, the core motivation for the quest barely makes sense, and every time someone started yammering about "Tanalorr," my eyes glazed over. The characters are charming, I particularly liked Bode, but the game does very little with them. The immensely copious, mostly boring, and expository conversations with the various denizens that Cal can collect for his saloon also did nothing for me (other than stab me directly in the heart with the trauma of the KotOR Remake team I worked on having been dissolved). There's nothing positive to say here, but there's also not much negative to say because, frankly, there's nothing of substance going on in the first place, good or bad.
World Design
The maps are so big and jammed so full of collectibles that they border on being a 90s throwback. There are literally HUNDREDS of collectibles, most of which feel frivolous and time-wasting, with an imbalanced spread between the rare "Wow, that challenge was enjoyable to overcome to get this!" to the more common "Why on earth would you put this here? The environment is completely unreadable, and I don't feel bad I couldn't find it."
One of the core collectible types is just a faint blue aura, which, in some environments, looks exactly like everything else that is visible around the player at all times. One of the core collectible types is literally invisible and only conveyed through a response from the droid on Cal's shoulder, often tied to innocuous environmental objects that a player would have no reason to want to look at. There's a guy the player can meet who captures fish FOR the player, and one can only assume this was a fishing minigame that was reasonably cut from the game's absurd scope. Why can I plant seeds on a roof? This doesn't feel like a gameplay verb that is doing much of anything for this experience.
I don't have anything fundamentally against the overall design of adding a big hub world with lots of objectives to do, but outside of the critical path, Koboh honestly starts to feel like a huge mess the longer the game goes on. One big part of this is that the map is simply too big and becomes utterly unreadable other than "Did I go through this door before?" Beyond that, there are SO many "return to this with a new mechanic" moments that basically incentivize the player to ignore the entire planet until they're near the end of the game. At this point, I was exhausted with so many other flaws that the idea of trying to do meaningful side content (the actual quests, not just fetching hundreds of collectibles) felt like a waste of my time -- especially given the basis of PACING in a game, which is "evenly distribute side content alongside the main story."
It really feels like the scope of Koboh completely escaped the team, and they lost any sense of why a player would engage with it at any specific moment in the game. There was no basis from other games they were drawing on for this experiment, and I don't think the experiment was particularly successful.
The critical path in terms of level design, however, is generally... pretty good! The visual differentiation between various areas on Koboh was overall quite cool (though some are more boring than others), and the other planets the player visits at least have a clear visual identity, though were mostly less exciting for sci-fi locales. The level design of traversal was basic for most of the game until all the mechanics were unlocked, and from there, the game offered a few zones that felt engaging (though almost always straightforward). Some puzzles are fine but not impressive. There are a billion shortcuts, which feels convenient since I wouldn't want to replay most level segments even if I had to. They go out of their way to make everything so interconnected that a player who hates fast travel could never use it, which is certainly a choice in a game that's this big.
The level design would be best described as visually awesome but imperfectly conceived. The biggest flaws, as mentioned earlier, are in the side-path design of some areas where the environment art and lighting render certain paths totally unreadable, which feels like a knock-on from the game being too high-scope and the team not having time to refine their visual approach to player level design affordances.
Combat Design
The player has more abilities, attacks, and weapon styles, but all of these have some of the least refined animations and controls I've seen in a recent and well-received AAA action title. Combat is more chaotic than ever, with encounters involving up to a dozen enemies simultaneously attacking from all directions. However, only one of the weapons (dual lightsabers) can cancel from attack animations to block the constant staggered enemy attacks. The blaster and lightsaber combo is great for managing enemies (overpowered on lower difficulties, to be honest), but its sword attack animations are visually awkward and don't feel like something a Jedi would do. The "heavy lightsaber" is a neat callback to other action games, but it also makes zero sense given a lightsaber doesn't weigh anything, and Cal seems to be handling it like an 8lb claymore (it also doesn't feel well-balanced for any encounter with more than 2 enemies).
I personally played on the medium difficulty, which is trivially easy compared to the same difficulty in the previous game, after watching my roommate force himself through the highest difficulty with nothing but constant complaints. The team went from Souls-inspired deliberate animation-based gameplay with a good variety of enemies for the game's quick pace to something that felt more like pure chaos at worst and overly repetitive at best. Large encounters are just silly, with projectiles endlessly flying from 4 directions while 3-5 melee enemies take turns swinging within < 2-second windows one at a time, making the player's optimal actions "spam the block button and hope some of these enemies get parried and just throw out wide attacks as much as possible to try to break some of their stun meters." Small encounters are relatively fine but get pretty boring when the spread of new enemies stops growing less than halfway through the game.
Why does Cal have force powers when most enemies are immune to them for most of the game? The balance between "pure power fantasy" and "difficult and deliberate action game" is completely lost. On the highest difficulty, combat is just a slow attrition of throwing out safe attacks and ranged attacks because the enemies are utterly relentless, especially if fighting more than one at a time. It's optimal to mind-control enemies as often as possible, but then this feels like trivializing the experience and turning Cal into a coward even further.
In Dark Souls and Sekiro, the games that originally inspired this or were similar to it, most basic enemies have fewer than 4 animations to choose from, which are dead simple and easy to understand. Nearly every enemy in this game is capable of throwing out what feels like 5-10 unique melee attacks (potentially also ranged attacks, potentially also dodging) on top of having super armor as long as their stagger meter isn't empty as well as parry attacks they throw out after blocking multiple attacks. This means handling >3 enemies means tracking 3 completely different animations, and hitting 3 enemies means at least one of them will randomly pivot from blocking the player to attacking them. This whole "block and then parry and then attack the player" concept was brilliant in Sekiro where engagements are generally 1v1 (and the player can easily position enemies to fight them one at a time), but here, it's often optimal to use weapons with wide attacks to deal with weaker mobs of enemies and then just accept the punishment that one of them will probably super armor through it and hit you in the middle of your combo.
Oh, also...bosses? Mostly boring! Only the main boss was interesting. Otherwise, the animation quality and variety were just a step back from the first game. Most of the big creatures were very basic and largely annoying rather than engaging. They re-use "raiders who stole lightsabers" way too much, probably because it seems like they struggled to find an excuse to put lightsabers on screen with their story, but those guys re-used the same animations constantly and also had effectively zero weight in terms of story. I didn't bother looking for the bounty hunters because my friend convinced me they weren't interesting. VFX and animation timing clarity on many boss attacks also just isn't great -- all stuff that, again, feels like it suffered for the team reaching beyond their resources and time a bit.
Overall, the pacing and flow of player and enemy attacks just feels...like a mess. It's fine, it's playable, and it's not terribly boring or worth uninstalling the game over, but I just don't see a single improvement over the original game, nor do I feel like this team of combat designers has a great understanding of what makes the games that inspire them work so well.
Conclusion
I largely agree with one of my best friends on this: if the series continues on the path established by this game and keeps lacking refinement, insisting on a massive scope beyond what the team has the resources to polish, then I probably will not return to their games. There's a foundation of a great game between the cracks here, but it's remarkable how many steps back the team made from what was a BETTER foundation on the last game.
Overall, Jedi Survivor takes the successes of Jedi Fallen Order and fans them with the hot flames of more and more gameplay scope, much of which does little to improve the established formula.
Performance Gripes
This game's performance sucks. It's not optimized. I waited a year to play it, hoping it would get better, and it did, but barely. The variance in how well the game could run in different areas (on an RTX 3080 and 12th Gen Intel i7) ranged from 15fps to 60fps, probably averaging 45 with massive slowdowns in certain areas (the worst was outdoors on Jedha, which was unplayable without me pausing the game to lower the graphics settings to the minimum temporarily, and it still ran at <45fps). It doesn't fully utilize my CPU or GPU (and I explored all the fixes players have tried to find), so it's a mystery how the studio employed Unreal Engine so poorly.
Environment Art
Aside from issues with clarity in level design and lighting (below), this game is GORGEOUS. The art is the biggest reason I did not stop playing despite my annoyance with its gameplay. The fundamental Star Wars identity is crystal clear, the fidelity and range of environments are beautiful to look at, and spaces feel engaging to explore even when the level design becomes convoluted or unclear. No complaints here!
Story
Meh. It's not much of anything, it's barely even a story. The few meaningful plot beats are flimsy, the core motivation for the quest barely makes sense, and every time someone started yammering about "Tanalorr," my eyes glazed over. The characters are charming, I particularly liked Bode, but the game does very little with them. The immensely copious, mostly boring, and expository conversations with the various denizens that Cal can collect for his saloon also did nothing for me (other than stab me directly in the heart with the trauma of the KotOR Remake team I worked on having been dissolved). There's nothing positive to say here, but there's also not much negative to say because, frankly, there's nothing of substance going on in the first place, good or bad.
World Design
The maps are so big and jammed so full of collectibles that they border on being a 90s throwback. There are literally HUNDREDS of collectibles, most of which feel frivolous and time-wasting, with an imbalanced spread between the rare "Wow, that challenge was enjoyable to overcome to get this!" to the more common "Why on earth would you put this here? The environment is completely unreadable, and I don't feel bad I couldn't find it."
One of the core collectible types is just a faint blue aura, which, in some environments, looks exactly like everything else that is visible around the player at all times. One of the core collectible types is literally invisible and only conveyed through a response from the droid on Cal's shoulder, often tied to innocuous environmental objects that a player would have no reason to want to look at. There's a guy the player can meet who captures fish FOR the player, and one can only assume this was a fishing minigame that was reasonably cut from the game's absurd scope. Why can I plant seeds on a roof? This doesn't feel like a gameplay verb that is doing much of anything for this experience.
I don't have anything fundamentally against the overall design of adding a big hub world with lots of objectives to do, but outside of the critical path, Koboh honestly starts to feel like a huge mess the longer the game goes on. One big part of this is that the map is simply too big and becomes utterly unreadable other than "Did I go through this door before?" Beyond that, there are SO many "return to this with a new mechanic" moments that basically incentivize the player to ignore the entire planet until they're near the end of the game. At this point, I was exhausted with so many other flaws that the idea of trying to do meaningful side content (the actual quests, not just fetching hundreds of collectibles) felt like a waste of my time -- especially given the basis of PACING in a game, which is "evenly distribute side content alongside the main story."
It really feels like the scope of Koboh completely escaped the team, and they lost any sense of why a player would engage with it at any specific moment in the game. There was no basis from other games they were drawing on for this experiment, and I don't think the experiment was particularly successful.
The critical path in terms of level design, however, is generally... pretty good! The visual differentiation between various areas on Koboh was overall quite cool (though some are more boring than others), and the other planets the player visits at least have a clear visual identity, though were mostly less exciting for sci-fi locales. The level design of traversal was basic for most of the game until all the mechanics were unlocked, and from there, the game offered a few zones that felt engaging (though almost always straightforward). Some puzzles are fine but not impressive. There are a billion shortcuts, which feels convenient since I wouldn't want to replay most level segments even if I had to. They go out of their way to make everything so interconnected that a player who hates fast travel could never use it, which is certainly a choice in a game that's this big.
The level design would be best described as visually awesome but imperfectly conceived. The biggest flaws, as mentioned earlier, are in the side-path design of some areas where the environment art and lighting render certain paths totally unreadable, which feels like a knock-on from the game being too high-scope and the team not having time to refine their visual approach to player level design affordances.
Combat Design
The player has more abilities, attacks, and weapon styles, but all of these have some of the least refined animations and controls I've seen in a recent and well-received AAA action title. Combat is more chaotic than ever, with encounters involving up to a dozen enemies simultaneously attacking from all directions. However, only one of the weapons (dual lightsabers) can cancel from attack animations to block the constant staggered enemy attacks. The blaster and lightsaber combo is great for managing enemies (overpowered on lower difficulties, to be honest), but its sword attack animations are visually awkward and don't feel like something a Jedi would do. The "heavy lightsaber" is a neat callback to other action games, but it also makes zero sense given a lightsaber doesn't weigh anything, and Cal seems to be handling it like an 8lb claymore (it also doesn't feel well-balanced for any encounter with more than 2 enemies).
I personally played on the medium difficulty, which is trivially easy compared to the same difficulty in the previous game, after watching my roommate force himself through the highest difficulty with nothing but constant complaints. The team went from Souls-inspired deliberate animation-based gameplay with a good variety of enemies for the game's quick pace to something that felt more like pure chaos at worst and overly repetitive at best. Large encounters are just silly, with projectiles endlessly flying from 4 directions while 3-5 melee enemies take turns swinging within < 2-second windows one at a time, making the player's optimal actions "spam the block button and hope some of these enemies get parried and just throw out wide attacks as much as possible to try to break some of their stun meters." Small encounters are relatively fine but get pretty boring when the spread of new enemies stops growing less than halfway through the game.
Why does Cal have force powers when most enemies are immune to them for most of the game? The balance between "pure power fantasy" and "difficult and deliberate action game" is completely lost. On the highest difficulty, combat is just a slow attrition of throwing out safe attacks and ranged attacks because the enemies are utterly relentless, especially if fighting more than one at a time. It's optimal to mind-control enemies as often as possible, but then this feels like trivializing the experience and turning Cal into a coward even further.
In Dark Souls and Sekiro, the games that originally inspired this or were similar to it, most basic enemies have fewer than 4 animations to choose from, which are dead simple and easy to understand. Nearly every enemy in this game is capable of throwing out what feels like 5-10 unique melee attacks (potentially also ranged attacks, potentially also dodging) on top of having super armor as long as their stagger meter isn't empty as well as parry attacks they throw out after blocking multiple attacks. This means handling >3 enemies means tracking 3 completely different animations, and hitting 3 enemies means at least one of them will randomly pivot from blocking the player to attacking them. This whole "block and then parry and then attack the player" concept was brilliant in Sekiro where engagements are generally 1v1 (and the player can easily position enemies to fight them one at a time), but here, it's often optimal to use weapons with wide attacks to deal with weaker mobs of enemies and then just accept the punishment that one of them will probably super armor through it and hit you in the middle of your combo.
Oh, also...bosses? Mostly boring! Only the main boss was interesting. Otherwise, the animation quality and variety were just a step back from the first game. Most of the big creatures were very basic and largely annoying rather than engaging. They re-use "raiders who stole lightsabers" way too much, probably because it seems like they struggled to find an excuse to put lightsabers on screen with their story, but those guys re-used the same animations constantly and also had effectively zero weight in terms of story. I didn't bother looking for the bounty hunters because my friend convinced me they weren't interesting. VFX and animation timing clarity on many boss attacks also just isn't great -- all stuff that, again, feels like it suffered for the team reaching beyond their resources and time a bit.
Overall, the pacing and flow of player and enemy attacks just feels...like a mess. It's fine, it's playable, and it's not terribly boring or worth uninstalling the game over, but I just don't see a single improvement over the original game, nor do I feel like this team of combat designers has a great understanding of what makes the games that inspire them work so well.
Conclusion
I largely agree with one of my best friends on this: if the series continues on the path established by this game and keeps lacking refinement, insisting on a massive scope beyond what the team has the resources to polish, then I probably will not return to their games. There's a foundation of a great game between the cracks here, but it's remarkable how many steps back the team made from what was a BETTER foundation on the last game.
This is a game that feels like it demands a poetic and emotional review that captures what it made me feel, but the truth is I'm not super into narrative for those sorts of feelings. However, I'm not going to do a blow-by-blow breakdown like I normally do, since it does feel like a game that deserves more of an experiential reflection.
First, I must say...I am not particularly into witches. They're fine! I like them as much as any other fantasy trope or aesthetic, but there's a degree to which I find "real-world witches" kind of annoying. My own mom was one, so I think I'm allowed to feel that way without it being offensive to fellow queer people who happen to really get into "witchy vibes." I was drawn to the game on the art direction alone and hoped for something cool to come of it, but I was NOT expecting such a rapture of amazing worldbuilding. It turns out that mixing witches with sci-fi cosmic magic is MY FAVORITE? And while I might find it a bit misandrist that men can't be witches (and I also find it weird that there's an implication that a gender binary exists across the entire universe...), whatever, this was one of the coolest worlds to read through.
The characters had incredibly deep and embodied dialog, but it was their material existences in the world as it was described through them that immensely breathed life into them for me. This was taken further by the plot, wherein the protagonist impacts the lives of these characters in the most high-stakes and high-concept ways possible such that every time I played a card and picked a future for a character, at least one of the options available to me made me think "what the fuck?" or "that is so fucking awesome." Not every choice actually "changes the outcome of the player experience," but instead, every choice has so much intense dramatic weight and so much thought put into the personal and cultural implications for the character in question that it ALWAYS felt deeply meaningful to make a choice at all. This is definitely the most inspiring lesson I've taken away from a game in recent memory as it regards emotionally engaging narrative design.
I'm not sure if I'll play it a second time any time soon. I've come to realize there's something about pushing at all of the choices in games like this that kind of makes the entire experience of immersion start to fall apart for me. Maybe I'll return to it one day, I am super curious how some of the other dramatic outcomes turn out. There are some REALLY radical choices the player can make, some of the most important being at the beginning of the game before they even have the context to understand the ramifications! Some might dislike this, but I thought it added an AWESOME dramatic irony to all of my choices, informing my later decisions with a level of investment I'm not sure I've EVER experienced in a choice-based narrative game before.
Incredibly cool, might go look for the other work by this team, and excited for anything they come up with in the future.
First, I must say...I am not particularly into witches. They're fine! I like them as much as any other fantasy trope or aesthetic, but there's a degree to which I find "real-world witches" kind of annoying. My own mom was one, so I think I'm allowed to feel that way without it being offensive to fellow queer people who happen to really get into "witchy vibes." I was drawn to the game on the art direction alone and hoped for something cool to come of it, but I was NOT expecting such a rapture of amazing worldbuilding. It turns out that mixing witches with sci-fi cosmic magic is MY FAVORITE? And while I might find it a bit misandrist that men can't be witches (and I also find it weird that there's an implication that a gender binary exists across the entire universe...), whatever, this was one of the coolest worlds to read through.
The characters had incredibly deep and embodied dialog, but it was their material existences in the world as it was described through them that immensely breathed life into them for me. This was taken further by the plot, wherein the protagonist impacts the lives of these characters in the most high-stakes and high-concept ways possible such that every time I played a card and picked a future for a character, at least one of the options available to me made me think "what the fuck?" or "that is so fucking awesome." Not every choice actually "changes the outcome of the player experience," but instead, every choice has so much intense dramatic weight and so much thought put into the personal and cultural implications for the character in question that it ALWAYS felt deeply meaningful to make a choice at all. This is definitely the most inspiring lesson I've taken away from a game in recent memory as it regards emotionally engaging narrative design.
I'm not sure if I'll play it a second time any time soon. I've come to realize there's something about pushing at all of the choices in games like this that kind of makes the entire experience of immersion start to fall apart for me. Maybe I'll return to it one day, I am super curious how some of the other dramatic outcomes turn out. There are some REALLY radical choices the player can make, some of the most important being at the beginning of the game before they even have the context to understand the ramifications! Some might dislike this, but I thought it added an AWESOME dramatic irony to all of my choices, informing my later decisions with a level of investment I'm not sure I've EVER experienced in a choice-based narrative game before.
Incredibly cool, might go look for the other work by this team, and excited for anything they come up with in the future.
2023
I may well one day write thousands of words resolving how this game is fundamentally opposed to every single value I hold dear in terms of writing and storytelling. The number of better works I've seen called boring or pretentious by people who would praise this game is nearly staggering enough to give me depression. It is what I feel is some of the worst writing I've ever seen praised in my entire life, and I would have truly felt I was trapped in a hell of my own making with how bad I think this is if it weren't for living with two people who thankfully agree with everything I see wrong in it. Beyond that, it may literally be the least fun I've ever had finishing a AAA video game (because normally I quit games I don't like, but I had to see this one through for reasons deeply personal to me)...but for now I'll just say this...
To me, this is as bad as a David Cage game, but if one took all of the deeply offensive conceptions of human beings, veiled hatred of women, and sloppy plot beats and traded them for a script that's 90% just the most bland exposition imaginable about the most boring story you've ever heard. It is utterly sterile, sanitized of any sincerely dangerous, risky, or unappealing emotion or human quality, saying literally nothing about human existence that isn't fit to tell a 10-year-old, all while being dressed up in enough Twin Peaks cosplay to trick someone into thinking it was actually remotely dark, horrifying, or interesting on its own merits. It is the epitome of a work demanding the audience finds it interesting while saying nothing interesting at all, and it's amazing to me how well that apparently works because it has good graphics and points a sniper scope directly at the specific weak spot in the human mind that says "this is really goofy and strange and weird, just don't think about it."
An award for "Best Narrative" is a crime against writing, and an award for "Game of the Year" is a crime against game design. Someone must get Alex Casey to look into this. I fear everyone who praises the writing or gameplay must have joined the cult that thinks Alan Wake is a good writer.
To me, this is as bad as a David Cage game, but if one took all of the deeply offensive conceptions of human beings, veiled hatred of women, and sloppy plot beats and traded them for a script that's 90% just the most bland exposition imaginable about the most boring story you've ever heard. It is utterly sterile, sanitized of any sincerely dangerous, risky, or unappealing emotion or human quality, saying literally nothing about human existence that isn't fit to tell a 10-year-old, all while being dressed up in enough Twin Peaks cosplay to trick someone into thinking it was actually remotely dark, horrifying, or interesting on its own merits. It is the epitome of a work demanding the audience finds it interesting while saying nothing interesting at all, and it's amazing to me how well that apparently works because it has good graphics and points a sniper scope directly at the specific weak spot in the human mind that says "this is really goofy and strange and weird, just don't think about it."
An award for "Best Narrative" is a crime against writing, and an award for "Game of the Year" is a crime against game design. Someone must get Alex Casey to look into this. I fear everyone who praises the writing or gameplay must have joined the cult that thinks Alan Wake is a good writer.
2023
The art is beautiful, the voice acting is excellent, and the atmosphere is impeccable, but all of the actual substance of this work is doing little to nothing for me. This is one of my longer reviews that's mostly just negative because I have far too much to say about this topic. I care too much about metafiction, and in some ways, this is precisely the sort of game I'd like to make (if I weren't too financially cowardly to tie myself to working for bigger game studios for now). I'm giving this a "Recommend" on Steam because I can't say it's BAD. It's beautiful and well-delivered and thoroughly considered, but I have to unload what I feel about the substance of the story.
Also, note that there's a degree to which I feel less bad being really critical of the dialog in this game due to how verbose and sarcastic the game is, especially when one goes about checking out more endings than necessary to get to the true ending.
Spoilers Ahead.
Game Structure
First, a caveat on the macrostructure of the game. I saw it was a "collect all the endings for 97 achievements" type of thing, so I used the ten pages of save files to do that efficiently. It was only a conversation on Discord that revealed to me individual save states contain all of your choices that matter to unlock the true ending -- you can't jump across saves. Given that, I hopped into a save, blasted through a couple more endings (luckily, I had a few in one save), and got to the "true ending" in 15 minutes. However, it appears the benefits it gives of tracking which endings I already got in a single save might be gone anyway (you have to start a New Game), meaning going for more endings means doing more of what I was doing in the first place.
I'm not sure I understand the author's intent of how a player is supposed to engage with this, given they slapped 97 achievements on it, but I can confidently say I disagree with their approach. I don't accept the premise of "be satisfied with the handful of endings you get and set it aside" in something that functions precisely like The Stanley Parable regarding how many branching paths are condensed into 10-15 minute loops. The game's most passionate audience will read it all, so why not accept that as a given and account for it in the game structure more directly?
Story
As for the story...having seen over a dozen individual endings, I'd say it's a work that is far too preoccupied with itself in a meta context. It's not just the time looping -- it's the actual characters, the dialog and exposition, and the choices available to the player. It's all completely about itself while saying almost nothing beyond: the princess is fucked up and weird, the narrator thinks she's terrible and wants to follow the script, the situation is absurd and constructed, and the protagonist can and will question anything and everything about the situation across dozens of playthroughs despite the answer to every possible question having already been provided dozens of times. There is a "true ending" that contextualizes all of this, but the context is obvious. It's what I assumed it would be from the outset.
For a game with so many endings and unique dialog, the paths are almost all fundamentally the same. A spooky/weird/scary thing happens, the player chooses from a handful of contrived options to try to find a path they haven't done already, the spooky thing escalates, the player "dies," the narrator doesn't know it's a time loop, there are absurdly far too many lines of the protagonist/princess/narrator commenting on what is or isn't a time loop and what is or isn't a contrived situation (to the point where I started just skipping them because they all play out the same despite, incredibly, all being unique VO), and then the thread ends and that's it. After a few endings, you don't learn anything of substance about the princess, the narrator, the protagonist, or the situation you didn't already know, and the conversations start to sound the same.
And the real bummer is that the titular Princess is functionally not a character. All of this is a construct from the perspective of the Princess. She couldn't care less how any situation steers or ends up. There's nothing to learn about her. She has no wants or needs outside of the construct of being a vessel to do horrifying things and make meta or blithe remarks, and, in effect, she knows this and plays into it. Doing meta stories is fine, but, for me, a writer needs a LOT more substance at the heart of their meta characters to make all the overly contrived structure and constant sarcastic or repetitive meta-commentary worth the audience's time. I have to say Rick from Rick and Morty is the obvious great example of doing this well, fully knowing >50% of people who might read this will find this example terrible and write me off for it (which is ironic because this game is vastly more similar than not in terms of some fundamental principles and themes). It would also be nice if the meta-commentary said something of substance, but I can even enjoy meta works that say barely anything as long as there is substance elsewhere in the work. Unfortunately, I could not find substance here.
I feel like I have to acknowledge the meta ending character who ties all the endings together. Well... wildly, to me specifically, it just feels... lazy, to be honest. I've been obsessed with metafiction and even meta horror for years, and an entity who exists beyond the script to consume the outcomes of the story into some overly vague and (to be generous) poetic monologs implying a greater fantastical force that doesn't operate on a thematic or worldbuilding level to contribute much of anything to the work is... Yeah, like I said, it just feels lazy and obvious. I've written similar things in first drafts or notes, and they feel like half-finished ideas that I'd like to have taken further because I think a metafictional horror force should at least have substantive character to it. Or the worldbuilding around it should be impeccable to allow for how innately obnoxious it is as a concept. I can forgive this type of character in an SCP short story or something because that's a low-scope and lower-effort work, but this game puts SO much effort forward.
Even setting aside "how a meta entity should function in fiction," I also think that entity should say clever or interesting things, not just aimless and contextless poeticism. "I am an ocean of possibility, I am endless and consuming change, I am Isaiah's complete lack of surprise or curiosity at anything I am saying (except I am not that because I am not a work that is up to the task of meaningfully criticizing itself (despite being endlessly meta and sarcastic))." Like, I entirely got it the first time it was explained, and adding another 1000 words of exposition about it after that didn't make it more compelling or emotionally engaging for me.
Conclusion
The whole thing, as Peter Griffin would say, insists upon itself. I walked away with the thought that it has great vibes, an ambitious structure, and also that the whole thing must have been MUCH easier to write this many branching paths for by constraining the three available characters to be so simplistic that they only exist to support the fundamental structure. In no way do I mean to diminish the effort put in -- I acknowledge this is a monumentally sizeable creative work -- but the whole thing is an immense web of effort that seems to insist it is much more emotionally substantive than I felt about it as a player.
Also, note that there's a degree to which I feel less bad being really critical of the dialog in this game due to how verbose and sarcastic the game is, especially when one goes about checking out more endings than necessary to get to the true ending.
Spoilers Ahead.
Game Structure
First, a caveat on the macrostructure of the game. I saw it was a "collect all the endings for 97 achievements" type of thing, so I used the ten pages of save files to do that efficiently. It was only a conversation on Discord that revealed to me individual save states contain all of your choices that matter to unlock the true ending -- you can't jump across saves. Given that, I hopped into a save, blasted through a couple more endings (luckily, I had a few in one save), and got to the "true ending" in 15 minutes. However, it appears the benefits it gives of tracking which endings I already got in a single save might be gone anyway (you have to start a New Game), meaning going for more endings means doing more of what I was doing in the first place.
I'm not sure I understand the author's intent of how a player is supposed to engage with this, given they slapped 97 achievements on it, but I can confidently say I disagree with their approach. I don't accept the premise of "be satisfied with the handful of endings you get and set it aside" in something that functions precisely like The Stanley Parable regarding how many branching paths are condensed into 10-15 minute loops. The game's most passionate audience will read it all, so why not accept that as a given and account for it in the game structure more directly?
Story
As for the story...having seen over a dozen individual endings, I'd say it's a work that is far too preoccupied with itself in a meta context. It's not just the time looping -- it's the actual characters, the dialog and exposition, and the choices available to the player. It's all completely about itself while saying almost nothing beyond: the princess is fucked up and weird, the narrator thinks she's terrible and wants to follow the script, the situation is absurd and constructed, and the protagonist can and will question anything and everything about the situation across dozens of playthroughs despite the answer to every possible question having already been provided dozens of times. There is a "true ending" that contextualizes all of this, but the context is obvious. It's what I assumed it would be from the outset.
For a game with so many endings and unique dialog, the paths are almost all fundamentally the same. A spooky/weird/scary thing happens, the player chooses from a handful of contrived options to try to find a path they haven't done already, the spooky thing escalates, the player "dies," the narrator doesn't know it's a time loop, there are absurdly far too many lines of the protagonist/princess/narrator commenting on what is or isn't a time loop and what is or isn't a contrived situation (to the point where I started just skipping them because they all play out the same despite, incredibly, all being unique VO), and then the thread ends and that's it. After a few endings, you don't learn anything of substance about the princess, the narrator, the protagonist, or the situation you didn't already know, and the conversations start to sound the same.
And the real bummer is that the titular Princess is functionally not a character. All of this is a construct from the perspective of the Princess. She couldn't care less how any situation steers or ends up. There's nothing to learn about her. She has no wants or needs outside of the construct of being a vessel to do horrifying things and make meta or blithe remarks, and, in effect, she knows this and plays into it. Doing meta stories is fine, but, for me, a writer needs a LOT more substance at the heart of their meta characters to make all the overly contrived structure and constant sarcastic or repetitive meta-commentary worth the audience's time. I have to say Rick from Rick and Morty is the obvious great example of doing this well, fully knowing >50% of people who might read this will find this example terrible and write me off for it (which is ironic because this game is vastly more similar than not in terms of some fundamental principles and themes). It would also be nice if the meta-commentary said something of substance, but I can even enjoy meta works that say barely anything as long as there is substance elsewhere in the work. Unfortunately, I could not find substance here.
I feel like I have to acknowledge the meta ending character who ties all the endings together. Well... wildly, to me specifically, it just feels... lazy, to be honest. I've been obsessed with metafiction and even meta horror for years, and an entity who exists beyond the script to consume the outcomes of the story into some overly vague and (to be generous) poetic monologs implying a greater fantastical force that doesn't operate on a thematic or worldbuilding level to contribute much of anything to the work is... Yeah, like I said, it just feels lazy and obvious. I've written similar things in first drafts or notes, and they feel like half-finished ideas that I'd like to have taken further because I think a metafictional horror force should at least have substantive character to it. Or the worldbuilding around it should be impeccable to allow for how innately obnoxious it is as a concept. I can forgive this type of character in an SCP short story or something because that's a low-scope and lower-effort work, but this game puts SO much effort forward.
Even setting aside "how a meta entity should function in fiction," I also think that entity should say clever or interesting things, not just aimless and contextless poeticism. "I am an ocean of possibility, I am endless and consuming change, I am Isaiah's complete lack of surprise or curiosity at anything I am saying (except I am not that because I am not a work that is up to the task of meaningfully criticizing itself (despite being endlessly meta and sarcastic))." Like, I entirely got it the first time it was explained, and adding another 1000 words of exposition about it after that didn't make it more compelling or emotionally engaging for me.
Conclusion
The whole thing, as Peter Griffin would say, insists upon itself. I walked away with the thought that it has great vibes, an ambitious structure, and also that the whole thing must have been MUCH easier to write this many branching paths for by constraining the three available characters to be so simplistic that they only exist to support the fundamental structure. In no way do I mean to diminish the effort put in -- I acknowledge this is a monumentally sizeable creative work -- but the whole thing is an immense web of effort that seems to insist it is much more emotionally substantive than I felt about it as a player.
Their efforts to make Norman "My Son Is Sick So I Filled Him With Alien Goo" Osborn an emotionally sympathetic character is very funny. Not gonna write a full review on this one, just have to say I'm really confused by any praise for the story, characters, or dialog. It's overwrought, it's shallow, it's poorly paced, and the canonically witty and funny characters Peter Parker and Miles Morales did not make an actual joke in the entire game (let alone a funny one). For a game with so many words, somehow they didn't manage to figure out how to write any of them in a good order.
I don't have a lot of detailed thoughts on this one. It was a fantastically fun time, and I believe the immense flexing of the visuals (animations, environment art, and VFX) is never going to be praised as much as they deserve. This is easily one of Nintendo's greatest triumphs in terms of game art, and while I know whatever magic happened on this team probably won't cross-pollinate because being in 2d is what made this art fidelity even possible on the Switch, it gives a vision of what Nintendo can do with modern art technology when not wholly blocked by low-end hardware.
The gameplay is excellent. I never liked 2D Mario movement, so I feared I'd bounce off this one, but they really have polished it into something that feels easier to control from the perspective of someone who never got used to their acceleration and momentum physics. The Wonder effects are obviously all cool as hell, and the transformations are okay (Elephant is the best, Drill was never exciting to get), but the real huge win is all the badges that really change how the game plays. I couldn't drop the double-jump badge once I got it, as it's just too good.
The levels are 80% good. That's really what stops it from being a 5/5 perfect game for me. Most of the level design is flawless, fluid, and full of little twists that are enough not to be too hard or too easy. But, unfortunately, there are some mechanics and levels that just plain suck. There are a couple of RNG-based sequences that are simply not fun. There is an expert badge, the pogo-stick constant jump one, that basically becomes RNG by turning movement into raw physics and then offers horrible challenges that require a level of precision the mechanic simply doesn't allow for consistently.
My last complaint is the Final Final Test that is unlocked after 100%ing the rest of the game. The first sequence of this level is literally RNG, using hazard cycles that will never be exactly the same depending on when the player jumps and parachutes into them, which basically ruins the entire thing from the start. The rest of the level was mostly fine, save for the horrifying Invisibility sequence that blocked me from being able to beat it (even with easy-mode Yoshi and some online assistance). The whole thing is more challenging, IMO, than the White Palace in Hollow Knight, and I'm not really bothered I couldn't beat it because it was hard in ways I thought were mostly annoying at best.
Overall, great game. Definitely one of my favorite platformers ever that is unfortunately brought down by a handful of huge stinker moments.
The gameplay is excellent. I never liked 2D Mario movement, so I feared I'd bounce off this one, but they really have polished it into something that feels easier to control from the perspective of someone who never got used to their acceleration and momentum physics. The Wonder effects are obviously all cool as hell, and the transformations are okay (Elephant is the best, Drill was never exciting to get), but the real huge win is all the badges that really change how the game plays. I couldn't drop the double-jump badge once I got it, as it's just too good.
The levels are 80% good. That's really what stops it from being a 5/5 perfect game for me. Most of the level design is flawless, fluid, and full of little twists that are enough not to be too hard or too easy. But, unfortunately, there are some mechanics and levels that just plain suck. There are a couple of RNG-based sequences that are simply not fun. There is an expert badge, the pogo-stick constant jump one, that basically becomes RNG by turning movement into raw physics and then offers horrible challenges that require a level of precision the mechanic simply doesn't allow for consistently.
My last complaint is the Final Final Test that is unlocked after 100%ing the rest of the game. The first sequence of this level is literally RNG, using hazard cycles that will never be exactly the same depending on when the player jumps and parachutes into them, which basically ruins the entire thing from the start. The rest of the level was mostly fine, save for the horrifying Invisibility sequence that blocked me from being able to beat it (even with easy-mode Yoshi and some online assistance). The whole thing is more challenging, IMO, than the White Palace in Hollow Knight, and I'm not really bothered I couldn't beat it because it was hard in ways I thought were mostly annoying at best.
Overall, great game. Definitely one of my favorite platformers ever that is unfortunately brought down by a handful of huge stinker moments.
2023
Easily one of the most beautiful works of visual media I've ever experienced. It's not just the alien beauty of the environments, it's the immense attention to detail in every facet of how those things move and interact. There's a fascinating interplay of organic, inorganic, and abstract visual concepts that are all flawlessly employed into an interactive space with so many moments of sublime and wondrous environmental motion offered as a reward for solving puzzles and interacting with the world.
The gameplay, on the other hand, is only pretty good. There are some solid puzzles on offer here, but it rides a really weird line between the simplicity of Limbo and Inside and a much more abstract puzzle design space that begs for a more fully realized and longer puzzle game. For me, that causes it to land in an unsatisfying spot. Some people don't like Inside for being too easy or simplistic, but if something is going to be mostly about atmosphere and art, I'd personally prefer the gameplay to be a bit more straightforward. Similarly, if a puzzle is going to make me think, I want it to make me think in a way where resetting the state of the puzzle is fast and most of the complexity lies in figuring things out top-down rather than just carrying objects slowly around large levels to figure out where to slot something for the next (usually simple) step.
It's not braindead easy, but the most difficult moments just feel obtuse not because the conceptual tissue is lacking but because the layouts of the level obfuscate how things connect often due to requiring the player to travel unsatisfyingly large distances between the pieces of the puzzle. The most complex world layering puzzles at the end also have some really annoying setups in terms of how much space has to be traversed to reset elements of the puzzle when the player makes mistakes, and every case of this is implemented in an unnecessary way (the distances could all easily be halved in terms of level design).
There are also weirdly some bosses, they're... Fine? A little bit too long on waiting on behavior cycles in some cases, but not frustrating or boring. Not a lot to say there. Also a bit annoyed I missed 2 of 12 collectibles, but there's no backtracking whatsoever, so it happens.
Overall worth the play experience for the art alone, but the gameplay offered an itch that it never fully scratched.
The gameplay, on the other hand, is only pretty good. There are some solid puzzles on offer here, but it rides a really weird line between the simplicity of Limbo and Inside and a much more abstract puzzle design space that begs for a more fully realized and longer puzzle game. For me, that causes it to land in an unsatisfying spot. Some people don't like Inside for being too easy or simplistic, but if something is going to be mostly about atmosphere and art, I'd personally prefer the gameplay to be a bit more straightforward. Similarly, if a puzzle is going to make me think, I want it to make me think in a way where resetting the state of the puzzle is fast and most of the complexity lies in figuring things out top-down rather than just carrying objects slowly around large levels to figure out where to slot something for the next (usually simple) step.
It's not braindead easy, but the most difficult moments just feel obtuse not because the conceptual tissue is lacking but because the layouts of the level obfuscate how things connect often due to requiring the player to travel unsatisfyingly large distances between the pieces of the puzzle. The most complex world layering puzzles at the end also have some really annoying setups in terms of how much space has to be traversed to reset elements of the puzzle when the player makes mistakes, and every case of this is implemented in an unnecessary way (the distances could all easily be halved in terms of level design).
There are also weirdly some bosses, they're... Fine? A little bit too long on waiting on behavior cycles in some cases, but not frustrating or boring. Not a lot to say there. Also a bit annoyed I missed 2 of 12 collectibles, but there's no backtracking whatsoever, so it happens.
Overall worth the play experience for the art alone, but the gameplay offered an itch that it never fully scratched.
2020
Cross-Posted to Signals and Light Cohost: https://cohost.org/SignalsAndLight/post/2800169-analyzing-baldur-s
Caveats on Experiencing "Unfinished" Games
First, I must acknowledge that not everyone will have the same experience with this game in more ways than I have EVER seen in gaming history. Not just different stories or experiences of gameplay mechanics but also wildly different amounts of bugs and experiences of how quests can fall apart if a player doesn't play carefully and willingly reload over issues. The "best case" of the game requires avoiding triggering chaotic outcomes arising from the number of opportunities that exist to provoke violence with NPCs unintentionally or how easy it is to play the game like a deranged murder hobo even though it's not written or scripted to make that a fulfilling experience. I personally ran into <5 actual bugs that affected my progression, most of which I could fix or workaround; otherwise, my only technical problems were varied UX issues (with inventory, combat mechanics, navigation, stealth, etc).
All that said, I had a FANTASTIC experience, and this is EASILY my favorite combat-focused RPG ever made, which is saying a lot, given how rough the edges are on release. I hope Larian can continue cleaning up the issues and add another layer of polish in a definitive edition so that more people can play without problems. (Though some of the possible chaotic outcomes in this game are genuinely impossible to remove given its systemic and complex nature.)
Overview
I don't think I've ever felt so mentally consumed by a video game with such a long runtime (~125 hours). Most of the other games I play that go >100 hours are just raw gameplay in a way that makes time evaporate (PvP games, Monster Hunter, etc), whereas this felt like an immense journey crammed full of memorable experiences. I don't think I've ever shouted "hell yeah!" as many times as in playing this game, always as a result of some whacky and wild story beat or incredibly cool piece of loot or mechanical benefit that majorly changed my gameplay options and turned my characters into unstoppable juggernauts. Every layer of the game is working overtime, with fantastic gameplay and entertaining stories enhanced by masterful level design and beautiful environment art that sang together in absolute harmony to offer one of the most immersive game worlds I've ever experienced.
I was so engaged in every minute of playing it that by the last stretch…Well, I was honestly burning out to a degree, like my mind had too much of it (granted, that was also due to my compulsive need to click on every book). The game probably offers a great experience to non-completionist playthroughs, and the people who replay it to find things they missed and be surprised on a second go have a lot to look forward to. Having done nearly every quest (I think I only missed completing 3), it did reach a point where I didn't feel like I was improving my experience in terms of pacing by playing so much content. However, since the game hides many of its best moments in so many corners, I also couldn't risk missing anything. Some of my favorite RPG encounters EVER are in parts of the game that are entirely optional.
But the consequence is that the game targets BREADTH by a considerable margin over depth. There are dozens of quests and scores of NPCs, and while every location might have a basement full of expository books and corpses with pocketed convenient notes, any given minor quest generally only has one essential outcome (complete the quest, sometimes with or without bloodshed) and some other pretty chaotic outcomes (kill or refuse any number of people and simply don't do anything helpful). Rumors inform me that these more chaotic outcomes, at times, also unfortunately literally break the game (mainly in Act 3).
So, let's dig into it...
World and Plot
Like the Forgotten Realms tends to be by design, everything is here to be a circus of melodramatic interactions and outcomes with a world-building style that feels like hyperactive teenagers throwing every idea that they have into a pot (though the ideas of the hyperactive teens do filter through the finesse of relatively skillful RPG writers). Faerun may have an actual hell, but the world itself is also hell, so littered with murderous cultists that I'm pretty sure a player finds more interactive corpses that their actions did not cause here than in any other game ever created. Regardless of what little effort the writing makes to have some grey areas, evil and good are literal forces in this world that talk to the player, and they are not here to make the player wax philosophical. They are here to provide the player the context to gleefully engage in battles to the death with scores of individuals without batting an eye about it.
So D&D can't be more than it's designed to be, nor can the Forgotten Realms. Take that as a given, see the game as the giant adult-themed Saturday morning cartoon that it is, and there's a lot to love! I was consistently surprised by the developments of both the macro plot and the micro stories. Even when things went exactly as I expected in a general sense due to knowing how the Forgotten Realms operate, around every corner, there was always some detail, some character moment, or some choice that kept me on my toes or made me shout (as I said above) "hell yeah!" The plot isn't mind-blowing, even though it's about blowing minds, but the heights of the heroic adventure it provides are some of the highest the genre of the Western Fantasy RPG can offer by the end of the game.
The limitations of the Forgotten Realms will be a breaking point for many who want more serious fantasy. Hell, typically, I also want more serious fantasy! But given the nature of this game world and how fun the game was to play (more on this below), I uncharacteristically did not have trouble "turning my brain off" as it were and being less preoccupied with nitpicking the lore and ethics and drama to death like I usually do.
Branching Story Paths (Good vs Evil)
In terms of structuring the game around choices, Larian takes on an approach I haven't experienced in any game quite like this one—they created a cast of NPCs who accumulate over the course of the game and follow the same road the player follows. Many of these NPCs arrive in Baldur's Gate when the player does, which blossoms into further developments and quests with these characters due to earlier events.
While maybe I've seen something like this before (NPCs mattering from early in the game until late in the game), Larian then blows up the formal nature of quest scripting by making it possible that any one of these individuals might NOT be there in later parts of the game based on the player's choices (many of which would have to be chaotic by nature, but some of which might be due to failing to complete a quest). What that means is that Larian has effectively designed the content primarily for completionists who will do what they can to keep everyone alive and fulfill everyone's needs. This makes sense because it's a heroic D&D campaign, so the "default" experience a player should want is to "save the day."
However, it runs contrary to the purpose of a BRANCHING narrative game where players want to express their characters through meaningful choices that change how the story plays out. Many of the alternative and generally "Evil" choices a player can make will lead to the deaths of several, if not literally dozens, of NPCs, and rather than opening up the door to an equal number of different (presumably evil) NPCs whom they may have sided with, it generally just means there is no alternative path (particularly because many of the evil NPCs can't be in Baldur's Gate).
Unlike Bioware's philosophy in Dragon Age: Inquisition, where the player chooses one of two sides in a (somewhat) morally grey political scenario, in this game (like I said above), most paths are strictly GOOD (be a hero), EVIL (kill everyone for no real reason), or AMBIVALENT (don't do anything). This binary choice matrix has plagued RPGs like this since they were first created. While Forgotten Realms can hardly do better than this by design, D&D definitely can, as can a branching narrative game using D&D (even if a great deal of combat is inevitable).
So even if I loved playing the game on the default heroic gameplay path where I "do all the right things, save all the people, and always win in every way," I have to admit that if someone wanted or expected more emergence, freedom, and flexibility in the storytelling, they would be justified in being disappointed in the game. While the game might seem like it's doing that sometimes, it's not doing so in the way, for instance, Disco Elysium does, and it won't fulfill the needs of players with more complex desires.
Characters and Quests
The companions are, across the board, expressive, fantastically performed and directed, and incredibly fun—and that's clearly the design pillar underlying all of them: be FUN. Unlike Bioware's best writing, this game is not about the nuances of culture or upbringing. It is instead about the epic and bizarre tribulations of a collection of classic heroic D&D characters with just enough nuance to their tragic backstories to dig the hooks in and invest the player in helping them solve their problems. This is what the game's setting allows for, so it's for the best that the writers didn't strive for a level of nuance in the companion stories that this universe would fail to support. There are moments when a savvy player might think or hope the game is setting them up for a more mature read on Faerun lore, but I think that's more in the heart of the player and less in the text of the game.
The NPCs varied in their level to grip my interest. Because there are so many of them (again, breadth versus depth), the meaning they provide in any given story beat is limited to their relevance to that story beat, which at times can be frustrating because so much is happening around some of them at all times and some of it affects them more than Larian had the scope to account for in their astronomically large dialog recording allotment. Even with that said, almost beyond belief, here are all the things that Larian decided to put their narrative scope towards when counting things that are entirely non-interactive dialog:
- Groups of NPCs have fully voiced looping ambient conversations in the world.
- Every background NPC has 1-2 fully voiced cinematic lines, the second of which only triggers when talking to them a second time (a thing most players wouldn't even do!). (Also note that while the city of Baldur's Gate introduces non-interactive background NPCs, there are still 5-20 interactive NPCs per building/area).
- Some background NPCs have more lines, including 2-3 dialog choices that the player can make to learn more about them or influence their lives (in ways that are not quest-relevant).
- Many major quest steps completed near a group of NPCs end with every single NPC in the area (whether background or more important) having 1-3 NEW fully voiced cinematic dialogs in reaction to the event.
- Many major quests and steps in those quests result in granting every single companion 1-3 fully voiced lines in reaction to that event.
Again, this dialog involves ZERO player agency other than choosing to listen to it. While I believe some games have a larger scope of recorded lines for this type of dialog, I would not be surprised if this game has the highest scope of non-interactive dialog that actually conveys meaningful information about the emotional and cultural state of literally scores of NPCs that have no gameplay relevance to the player's story or quests at all.
So, with all that laid out, I admit that I am quite a bit disappointed in the lack of depth with some of the NPCs that stick around for a lot of the game's run time! I would have preferred to have more conversations with layers of interactivity or even just expanded exposition rather than have the ability to click on 200 refugees and Baldurians and hear 1-2 lines. Larian evokes the scale and reality of the world to the player, again, through immense breadth (the player genuinely knows how scores of people in the world feel about what's happening in their city) but with little depth. I can't even have a casual friendship with a single one of these people. At best, I can save their lives so they're devoted to my cause or give me an item, and then they might as well not exist.
Is this different than most other RPGs? Absolutely not, there are only a couple of exceptions. If nothing else, it is more extensive than the average. Did Larian leave me wanting more because the breadth of their game made me able to imagine a similar game that was deeper than the one in front of me? Yeah.
"Romance"
I’m going to keep this brief because I don’t think 125-hour epic RPGs need to be preoccupied with solving the intricacies of how to deliver compelling, well-considered, and deep representations of romantic relationships. Flatly, the delivery of this idea here is incredibly flawed, easily the most frustrating and annoying part of the experience in my mind, and is unlikely to satisfy the average player, not just in terms of poor execution but also in terms of how broken it has been for millions of people playing on release (with even the developers admitting it was somehow tuned incorrectly on launch). It is utterly baffling that these companions fall head-over-heels in love with the player simply based on whether the player has the same morality as them as it regards dealing with goblins and tieflings and druids. There is simply zero narrative design overlap between the actual content of the game and this tacked-on “relationship system.”
This system’s shallow implementation appears to me to be a way to justify putting a bunch of softcore sex scenes in the game more than to allow for an equal distribution of interesting companion relationships to the player. These scenes are entertaining and titillating at best and just funny at worst, but my own experience (with Halsin and Karlach) and the experiences I’ve heard from others do not in any form or fashion sound to me like an even mildly interesting implementation of a dating or relationship system. I’ll even put aside how the characters throw themselves at the player going 100mph both sexually and romantically, in most cases it simply is not good or believable writing and it feels like nothing more than horny fan service.
Role-Playing Mechanics
I've already implied that the role-playing mechanics are pretty limited in story branching, but I must detail the D&D systems Larian ties to this content in the narrative trees. Like several RPGs of its kind, this game offers "Charisma" checks that influence the outcomes of conversations (Persuasion, Intimidation, and Deception). This system originates from D&D mechanics but, of course, hardly captures the same design utility through the sheer fact that the structure of the dialog trees can never be as creative as a real player. The narrative designers at Larian try their best to offer creative outcomes sometimes, but it's a mixed bag.
The Charisma options feel quite lazy at many critical moments of the game. Throughout Acts 1 and 3, they generally allow for mind-controlling characters to do whatever the player would want in an ideal world to accomplish their given objective. Throughout Act 2, that went in a bizarre direction, as succeeding Charisma checks often meant just mind-controlling characters into doing things actively harmful to themselves. While playing Act 2, I kept wondering why it felt like Larian didn't have the scope to write creative secondary options for solving quests beyond just "succeed one Charisma check to end it instantly," but having finished Act 3, it's pretty clear they simply didn't have the time because there were too many quests! Yet ANOTHER example of breadth over depth.
Again, the obvious point of contrast is Disco Elysium, a game designed from the ground up to prove that RPG stats can influence a branching narrative in a way that allows all stats to have equally compelling use cases in complex storytelling. And, again, D&D simply isn't equipped to do this, as nothing about the game system serves this end by design. It is only through the application of a good Dungeon Master and player creativity that anyone can bend the minimal social rules that the game provides into many possible narrative outcomes, and often the greatest depth in D&D storytelling is a result of improv and has nothing to do with the game systems themselves.
D&D Mechanics
So, unlike Dragon Age or (by far more deeply) Disco Elysium, while I may have been entertained here, I wasn't enraptured by the ideas of the world, the cultures on display, or the thoughts and feelings of the characters. But…none of that mattered to me much because the melodrama, gameplay, and exploration were so incredibly fun! What a mind-blowingly exemplary implementation of the most popular TTRPG into a video game! Despite all the little rule changes and all the fiddly bits that might not do exactly what one expects, playing with pre-existing deep D&D mechanics knowledge felt so rewarding.
I am on the record of having finished almost no turn-based strategy games in my life because I suck at them and often feel frustrated by them. In this case, with an immensely copious use of quick saves during every combat, it felt like any weird misclick I made or ability I failed to understand could be fixed with a quick load the same way it would be if I were negotiating what happened with my DM in a tabletop session. I get about as annoyed at moments like that as I do by a rude attack in Monster Hunter—will I yell, "What the fuck is going on!" sometimes? Yeah, but that's part of the fun. I am led to believe that some players save infrequently and accept the consequences of misclicks or misunderstandings of the mechanics they choose to use, and I can't say how good the game is from that angle. I have to assume it's much worse than many tactics games out there, and I frankly don't believe the designers intended the average player to get through the hardest encounters without at least some amount of reloading (if even just to start over entirely).
Lastly, the default difficulty offers a power fantasy with much more overpowered PCs than one would ever get in tabletop D&D, but that also made me love it more. Rather than scraping by, worrying about resource attrition or action economy like in other strategy games, here I could quickly make decisions and exercise a lot of mechanics in fun and creative ways without much stress. With all the potions and scrolls and (actually good!) magic items, the game gave me 5x more than I needed, and I actively avoided even using a lot of the things because there was no reason to.
Exploration
Last but absolutely not least, exploring this game world is SO GOOD. The level design is impeccable, and the use of elevation, intelligently considered architecture, and genuinely believable naturalistic environments are, bar none, the BEST an isometric game has ever accomplished. Is there some awkwardness with companion pathing, traps, and seeing through doorways? Yeah, there is, and some of that genuinely could be improved. However, for me, those minor issues were ripped apart like tissue paper by the immense beauty and meticulous design of the game environments. The art is UNBELIEVABLY varied, gorgeous, and consistent across a MASSIVE game world, and it's frankly absurd to me how little I see this brought up in any discussions of the game.
That said, the beauty of the world was doing a lot of work for me that may do nothing for a player who doesn't care about that as much. Much of the exploration content leaves things to be desired in terms of gameplay due to, yet again, breadth versus depth. I read or skimmed nearly every book, opened almost every bookshelf and 50% of the boxes and barrels (less so the later I got), and probably unlocked >80% of the chests in the game. Did I enjoy doing this because I'm a neurotic Roomba vacuum of a player? Yes. However, after a certain point, the rewards wear thin, and the narrative context gained from reading the 50th dead man's diary fails to evolve my conception of the stories or game world in a meaningful way. (Shockingly, it turns out a murder cultist really likes to do murders!)
Conclusion
At the end of this, I admit my love of this game feels like a backhanded compliment. I could nitpick it to death. I could make a 2-hour YouTube video recapping the most unhinged, broken, and bizarre issues I encountered in gameplay to make it look like nothing but a mess (including a moment where I was forced to make my companion jump off a bridge so that I could revive him in order to remove clown makeup that the game failed to remove from his character model). I could also make a 2-hour YouTube video capturing the heroic quests I went on and how I managed to turn the choices of who I deployed in battle into moments that felt like I was tangibly expressing my story even if the game didn't require or reward those choices (with Karlach the barbarian jumping off a wall in the middle of a siege and her allies following after to overcome the evil drow Mizora).
In breaking down the 125 hours I played this game, I could say so much more than I could have ever said about most other games that took me 125 hours to play. I adore Baldur's Gate 3, and from the first few hours I started playing it, I've wanted nothing more but additional silly, heroic, and wildly fun D&D 5e content presented in precisely the format this game offers, whether deep or broad.
Caveats on Experiencing "Unfinished" Games
First, I must acknowledge that not everyone will have the same experience with this game in more ways than I have EVER seen in gaming history. Not just different stories or experiences of gameplay mechanics but also wildly different amounts of bugs and experiences of how quests can fall apart if a player doesn't play carefully and willingly reload over issues. The "best case" of the game requires avoiding triggering chaotic outcomes arising from the number of opportunities that exist to provoke violence with NPCs unintentionally or how easy it is to play the game like a deranged murder hobo even though it's not written or scripted to make that a fulfilling experience. I personally ran into <5 actual bugs that affected my progression, most of which I could fix or workaround; otherwise, my only technical problems were varied UX issues (with inventory, combat mechanics, navigation, stealth, etc).
All that said, I had a FANTASTIC experience, and this is EASILY my favorite combat-focused RPG ever made, which is saying a lot, given how rough the edges are on release. I hope Larian can continue cleaning up the issues and add another layer of polish in a definitive edition so that more people can play without problems. (Though some of the possible chaotic outcomes in this game are genuinely impossible to remove given its systemic and complex nature.)
Overview
I don't think I've ever felt so mentally consumed by a video game with such a long runtime (~125 hours). Most of the other games I play that go >100 hours are just raw gameplay in a way that makes time evaporate (PvP games, Monster Hunter, etc), whereas this felt like an immense journey crammed full of memorable experiences. I don't think I've ever shouted "hell yeah!" as many times as in playing this game, always as a result of some whacky and wild story beat or incredibly cool piece of loot or mechanical benefit that majorly changed my gameplay options and turned my characters into unstoppable juggernauts. Every layer of the game is working overtime, with fantastic gameplay and entertaining stories enhanced by masterful level design and beautiful environment art that sang together in absolute harmony to offer one of the most immersive game worlds I've ever experienced.
I was so engaged in every minute of playing it that by the last stretch…Well, I was honestly burning out to a degree, like my mind had too much of it (granted, that was also due to my compulsive need to click on every book). The game probably offers a great experience to non-completionist playthroughs, and the people who replay it to find things they missed and be surprised on a second go have a lot to look forward to. Having done nearly every quest (I think I only missed completing 3), it did reach a point where I didn't feel like I was improving my experience in terms of pacing by playing so much content. However, since the game hides many of its best moments in so many corners, I also couldn't risk missing anything. Some of my favorite RPG encounters EVER are in parts of the game that are entirely optional.
But the consequence is that the game targets BREADTH by a considerable margin over depth. There are dozens of quests and scores of NPCs, and while every location might have a basement full of expository books and corpses with pocketed convenient notes, any given minor quest generally only has one essential outcome (complete the quest, sometimes with or without bloodshed) and some other pretty chaotic outcomes (kill or refuse any number of people and simply don't do anything helpful). Rumors inform me that these more chaotic outcomes, at times, also unfortunately literally break the game (mainly in Act 3).
So, let's dig into it...
World and Plot
Like the Forgotten Realms tends to be by design, everything is here to be a circus of melodramatic interactions and outcomes with a world-building style that feels like hyperactive teenagers throwing every idea that they have into a pot (though the ideas of the hyperactive teens do filter through the finesse of relatively skillful RPG writers). Faerun may have an actual hell, but the world itself is also hell, so littered with murderous cultists that I'm pretty sure a player finds more interactive corpses that their actions did not cause here than in any other game ever created. Regardless of what little effort the writing makes to have some grey areas, evil and good are literal forces in this world that talk to the player, and they are not here to make the player wax philosophical. They are here to provide the player the context to gleefully engage in battles to the death with scores of individuals without batting an eye about it.
So D&D can't be more than it's designed to be, nor can the Forgotten Realms. Take that as a given, see the game as the giant adult-themed Saturday morning cartoon that it is, and there's a lot to love! I was consistently surprised by the developments of both the macro plot and the micro stories. Even when things went exactly as I expected in a general sense due to knowing how the Forgotten Realms operate, around every corner, there was always some detail, some character moment, or some choice that kept me on my toes or made me shout (as I said above) "hell yeah!" The plot isn't mind-blowing, even though it's about blowing minds, but the heights of the heroic adventure it provides are some of the highest the genre of the Western Fantasy RPG can offer by the end of the game.
The limitations of the Forgotten Realms will be a breaking point for many who want more serious fantasy. Hell, typically, I also want more serious fantasy! But given the nature of this game world and how fun the game was to play (more on this below), I uncharacteristically did not have trouble "turning my brain off" as it were and being less preoccupied with nitpicking the lore and ethics and drama to death like I usually do.
Branching Story Paths (Good vs Evil)
In terms of structuring the game around choices, Larian takes on an approach I haven't experienced in any game quite like this one—they created a cast of NPCs who accumulate over the course of the game and follow the same road the player follows. Many of these NPCs arrive in Baldur's Gate when the player does, which blossoms into further developments and quests with these characters due to earlier events.
While maybe I've seen something like this before (NPCs mattering from early in the game until late in the game), Larian then blows up the formal nature of quest scripting by making it possible that any one of these individuals might NOT be there in later parts of the game based on the player's choices (many of which would have to be chaotic by nature, but some of which might be due to failing to complete a quest). What that means is that Larian has effectively designed the content primarily for completionists who will do what they can to keep everyone alive and fulfill everyone's needs. This makes sense because it's a heroic D&D campaign, so the "default" experience a player should want is to "save the day."
However, it runs contrary to the purpose of a BRANCHING narrative game where players want to express their characters through meaningful choices that change how the story plays out. Many of the alternative and generally "Evil" choices a player can make will lead to the deaths of several, if not literally dozens, of NPCs, and rather than opening up the door to an equal number of different (presumably evil) NPCs whom they may have sided with, it generally just means there is no alternative path (particularly because many of the evil NPCs can't be in Baldur's Gate).
Unlike Bioware's philosophy in Dragon Age: Inquisition, where the player chooses one of two sides in a (somewhat) morally grey political scenario, in this game (like I said above), most paths are strictly GOOD (be a hero), EVIL (kill everyone for no real reason), or AMBIVALENT (don't do anything). This binary choice matrix has plagued RPGs like this since they were first created. While Forgotten Realms can hardly do better than this by design, D&D definitely can, as can a branching narrative game using D&D (even if a great deal of combat is inevitable).
So even if I loved playing the game on the default heroic gameplay path where I "do all the right things, save all the people, and always win in every way," I have to admit that if someone wanted or expected more emergence, freedom, and flexibility in the storytelling, they would be justified in being disappointed in the game. While the game might seem like it's doing that sometimes, it's not doing so in the way, for instance, Disco Elysium does, and it won't fulfill the needs of players with more complex desires.
Characters and Quests
The companions are, across the board, expressive, fantastically performed and directed, and incredibly fun—and that's clearly the design pillar underlying all of them: be FUN. Unlike Bioware's best writing, this game is not about the nuances of culture or upbringing. It is instead about the epic and bizarre tribulations of a collection of classic heroic D&D characters with just enough nuance to their tragic backstories to dig the hooks in and invest the player in helping them solve their problems. This is what the game's setting allows for, so it's for the best that the writers didn't strive for a level of nuance in the companion stories that this universe would fail to support. There are moments when a savvy player might think or hope the game is setting them up for a more mature read on Faerun lore, but I think that's more in the heart of the player and less in the text of the game.
The NPCs varied in their level to grip my interest. Because there are so many of them (again, breadth versus depth), the meaning they provide in any given story beat is limited to their relevance to that story beat, which at times can be frustrating because so much is happening around some of them at all times and some of it affects them more than Larian had the scope to account for in their astronomically large dialog recording allotment. Even with that said, almost beyond belief, here are all the things that Larian decided to put their narrative scope towards when counting things that are entirely non-interactive dialog:
- Groups of NPCs have fully voiced looping ambient conversations in the world.
- Every background NPC has 1-2 fully voiced cinematic lines, the second of which only triggers when talking to them a second time (a thing most players wouldn't even do!). (Also note that while the city of Baldur's Gate introduces non-interactive background NPCs, there are still 5-20 interactive NPCs per building/area).
- Some background NPCs have more lines, including 2-3 dialog choices that the player can make to learn more about them or influence their lives (in ways that are not quest-relevant).
- Many major quest steps completed near a group of NPCs end with every single NPC in the area (whether background or more important) having 1-3 NEW fully voiced cinematic dialogs in reaction to the event.
- Many major quests and steps in those quests result in granting every single companion 1-3 fully voiced lines in reaction to that event.
Again, this dialog involves ZERO player agency other than choosing to listen to it. While I believe some games have a larger scope of recorded lines for this type of dialog, I would not be surprised if this game has the highest scope of non-interactive dialog that actually conveys meaningful information about the emotional and cultural state of literally scores of NPCs that have no gameplay relevance to the player's story or quests at all.
So, with all that laid out, I admit that I am quite a bit disappointed in the lack of depth with some of the NPCs that stick around for a lot of the game's run time! I would have preferred to have more conversations with layers of interactivity or even just expanded exposition rather than have the ability to click on 200 refugees and Baldurians and hear 1-2 lines. Larian evokes the scale and reality of the world to the player, again, through immense breadth (the player genuinely knows how scores of people in the world feel about what's happening in their city) but with little depth. I can't even have a casual friendship with a single one of these people. At best, I can save their lives so they're devoted to my cause or give me an item, and then they might as well not exist.
Is this different than most other RPGs? Absolutely not, there are only a couple of exceptions. If nothing else, it is more extensive than the average. Did Larian leave me wanting more because the breadth of their game made me able to imagine a similar game that was deeper than the one in front of me? Yeah.
"Romance"
I’m going to keep this brief because I don’t think 125-hour epic RPGs need to be preoccupied with solving the intricacies of how to deliver compelling, well-considered, and deep representations of romantic relationships. Flatly, the delivery of this idea here is incredibly flawed, easily the most frustrating and annoying part of the experience in my mind, and is unlikely to satisfy the average player, not just in terms of poor execution but also in terms of how broken it has been for millions of people playing on release (with even the developers admitting it was somehow tuned incorrectly on launch). It is utterly baffling that these companions fall head-over-heels in love with the player simply based on whether the player has the same morality as them as it regards dealing with goblins and tieflings and druids. There is simply zero narrative design overlap between the actual content of the game and this tacked-on “relationship system.”
This system’s shallow implementation appears to me to be a way to justify putting a bunch of softcore sex scenes in the game more than to allow for an equal distribution of interesting companion relationships to the player. These scenes are entertaining and titillating at best and just funny at worst, but my own experience (with Halsin and Karlach) and the experiences I’ve heard from others do not in any form or fashion sound to me like an even mildly interesting implementation of a dating or relationship system. I’ll even put aside how the characters throw themselves at the player going 100mph both sexually and romantically, in most cases it simply is not good or believable writing and it feels like nothing more than horny fan service.
Role-Playing Mechanics
I've already implied that the role-playing mechanics are pretty limited in story branching, but I must detail the D&D systems Larian ties to this content in the narrative trees. Like several RPGs of its kind, this game offers "Charisma" checks that influence the outcomes of conversations (Persuasion, Intimidation, and Deception). This system originates from D&D mechanics but, of course, hardly captures the same design utility through the sheer fact that the structure of the dialog trees can never be as creative as a real player. The narrative designers at Larian try their best to offer creative outcomes sometimes, but it's a mixed bag.
The Charisma options feel quite lazy at many critical moments of the game. Throughout Acts 1 and 3, they generally allow for mind-controlling characters to do whatever the player would want in an ideal world to accomplish their given objective. Throughout Act 2, that went in a bizarre direction, as succeeding Charisma checks often meant just mind-controlling characters into doing things actively harmful to themselves. While playing Act 2, I kept wondering why it felt like Larian didn't have the scope to write creative secondary options for solving quests beyond just "succeed one Charisma check to end it instantly," but having finished Act 3, it's pretty clear they simply didn't have the time because there were too many quests! Yet ANOTHER example of breadth over depth.
Again, the obvious point of contrast is Disco Elysium, a game designed from the ground up to prove that RPG stats can influence a branching narrative in a way that allows all stats to have equally compelling use cases in complex storytelling. And, again, D&D simply isn't equipped to do this, as nothing about the game system serves this end by design. It is only through the application of a good Dungeon Master and player creativity that anyone can bend the minimal social rules that the game provides into many possible narrative outcomes, and often the greatest depth in D&D storytelling is a result of improv and has nothing to do with the game systems themselves.
D&D Mechanics
So, unlike Dragon Age or (by far more deeply) Disco Elysium, while I may have been entertained here, I wasn't enraptured by the ideas of the world, the cultures on display, or the thoughts and feelings of the characters. But…none of that mattered to me much because the melodrama, gameplay, and exploration were so incredibly fun! What a mind-blowingly exemplary implementation of the most popular TTRPG into a video game! Despite all the little rule changes and all the fiddly bits that might not do exactly what one expects, playing with pre-existing deep D&D mechanics knowledge felt so rewarding.
I am on the record of having finished almost no turn-based strategy games in my life because I suck at them and often feel frustrated by them. In this case, with an immensely copious use of quick saves during every combat, it felt like any weird misclick I made or ability I failed to understand could be fixed with a quick load the same way it would be if I were negotiating what happened with my DM in a tabletop session. I get about as annoyed at moments like that as I do by a rude attack in Monster Hunter—will I yell, "What the fuck is going on!" sometimes? Yeah, but that's part of the fun. I am led to believe that some players save infrequently and accept the consequences of misclicks or misunderstandings of the mechanics they choose to use, and I can't say how good the game is from that angle. I have to assume it's much worse than many tactics games out there, and I frankly don't believe the designers intended the average player to get through the hardest encounters without at least some amount of reloading (if even just to start over entirely).
Lastly, the default difficulty offers a power fantasy with much more overpowered PCs than one would ever get in tabletop D&D, but that also made me love it more. Rather than scraping by, worrying about resource attrition or action economy like in other strategy games, here I could quickly make decisions and exercise a lot of mechanics in fun and creative ways without much stress. With all the potions and scrolls and (actually good!) magic items, the game gave me 5x more than I needed, and I actively avoided even using a lot of the things because there was no reason to.
Exploration
Last but absolutely not least, exploring this game world is SO GOOD. The level design is impeccable, and the use of elevation, intelligently considered architecture, and genuinely believable naturalistic environments are, bar none, the BEST an isometric game has ever accomplished. Is there some awkwardness with companion pathing, traps, and seeing through doorways? Yeah, there is, and some of that genuinely could be improved. However, for me, those minor issues were ripped apart like tissue paper by the immense beauty and meticulous design of the game environments. The art is UNBELIEVABLY varied, gorgeous, and consistent across a MASSIVE game world, and it's frankly absurd to me how little I see this brought up in any discussions of the game.
That said, the beauty of the world was doing a lot of work for me that may do nothing for a player who doesn't care about that as much. Much of the exploration content leaves things to be desired in terms of gameplay due to, yet again, breadth versus depth. I read or skimmed nearly every book, opened almost every bookshelf and 50% of the boxes and barrels (less so the later I got), and probably unlocked >80% of the chests in the game. Did I enjoy doing this because I'm a neurotic Roomba vacuum of a player? Yes. However, after a certain point, the rewards wear thin, and the narrative context gained from reading the 50th dead man's diary fails to evolve my conception of the stories or game world in a meaningful way. (Shockingly, it turns out a murder cultist really likes to do murders!)
Conclusion
At the end of this, I admit my love of this game feels like a backhanded compliment. I could nitpick it to death. I could make a 2-hour YouTube video recapping the most unhinged, broken, and bizarre issues I encountered in gameplay to make it look like nothing but a mess (including a moment where I was forced to make my companion jump off a bridge so that I could revive him in order to remove clown makeup that the game failed to remove from his character model). I could also make a 2-hour YouTube video capturing the heroic quests I went on and how I managed to turn the choices of who I deployed in battle into moments that felt like I was tangibly expressing my story even if the game didn't require or reward those choices (with Karlach the barbarian jumping off a wall in the middle of a siege and her allies following after to overcome the evil drow Mizora).
In breaking down the 125 hours I played this game, I could say so much more than I could have ever said about most other games that took me 125 hours to play. I adore Baldur's Gate 3, and from the first few hours I started playing it, I've wanted nothing more but additional silly, heroic, and wildly fun D&D 5e content presented in precisely the format this game offers, whether deep or broad.
2013
A good exercise demonstrating some solid ideas, but ultimately very shallow on most axes. The storytelling is barebones, the UI/UX could be much better (the way information is distributed across the UI is just annoying, going in and out of menus to answer simple questions like "how much of X resource do I have?"). I tried this looking for a more narrative incremental game, but it's not an incremental game really (it requires constant player inputs), and it's pretty short and not deep.
2023
This is either the worst good game I've ever played or the most creative bad game I've ever played. If it weren't for the immensely cool art and some really bold swings that the designers made in the dungeons, puzzles, and class designs, I would rate this a 1/5 on the balancing of the gameplay experience alone. I can't invest the time into fully laying out all of my thoughts on it because most of them would be negative and honestly the list of nitpicky, lack-of-polish issues I have is beyond my ability to recollect without scrubbing through my recordings of playing through the whole thing.
Having played a full Veteran Campaign with 2-3 player co-op, and having jumped around some friends' campaigns, I got a good sense of most of the bosses, different quests, and general game balance. A handful of bosses are good, but a lot of bosses are just straight up the rudest, least interactive, and most annoying bosses I've ever seen in a video game. Also, a lot of the game is full of bugs -- the worst I encountered was that my entire town of NPCs had their dialog trees reset in the last act of the game! And this bug is common! I work on video games, I know how save states work, and I deeply fear the codebase that allows that to even happen. However, the end of the game's story literally doesn't matter or have any weight, so I guess really the bugs had ludonarrative relevance.
The game is also pretty much incomplete -- I expect a TON of balancing and economy changes to be added between now and the inevitable DLC. This is not a live-service game with a battle pass and steady stream of content, so the absolutely busted balancing and item economy being fixed after launch isn't really something that feels acceptable in my eyes. Most players play a game in the first month and do not return to it, and this game probably should've just been in early access for 6 months in order to release in an actually tested and balanced state.
The dungeons, puzzles, and quests have a lot of really cool highlights and also some of the dumbest bullshit I've ever heard of in a game. The creativity is off the wall, but the wildly inconsistent methods through which various secrets are hidden means that probably >75% of players will simply be using guides through the ENTIRE experience. I personally like puzzles that feel like I have a good chance of being able to figure them out on my own, but in this case, literally entire sub-classes are hidden behind interactions that no one would ever organically discover. There were 2 specific weapons I wanted to try out a specific type of build, and it turned out it was nearly impossible to even get the conditions to spawn in the biome necessary for one of those weapons, so I gave up after 2 hours. Additionally, you literally CAN'T use public matchmaking to seek out more obscure puzzles and rewards because there is NO method to communicate inside the game itself.
My closing thought is that this game has NOTHING fundamentally in common with the experience of a Soulslike game in some VERY crucial ways. The most important issue is that NO MATTER WHAT, regardless of your grinding, regardless of your progression, regardless of your build, you WILL die in 1 hit to MANY boss attacks throughout the ENTIRE experience of this game on Veteran or above while playing co-op. You WILL die in 2 hits to almost ALL OTHER boss attacks. Additionally, there is NOTHING you can do to get a pause or cooldown in any boss fight, they will NEVER stop attacking, you cannot get away from them, and you cannot see everything that they are doing to damage you at all times.
This is NOT the experience of a "hard but fair game," this is an experience that only maintains its co-op "hard game balance" through a grueling and unforgiving slog of endless attacks, endless arena-spanning hazards, and damage values that constantly try your patience. No sweat to anyone who LIKES that experience, but it cannot be said that this is ANYTHING like the experience of any other product found in this game's DNA.
Having played a full Veteran Campaign with 2-3 player co-op, and having jumped around some friends' campaigns, I got a good sense of most of the bosses, different quests, and general game balance. A handful of bosses are good, but a lot of bosses are just straight up the rudest, least interactive, and most annoying bosses I've ever seen in a video game. Also, a lot of the game is full of bugs -- the worst I encountered was that my entire town of NPCs had their dialog trees reset in the last act of the game! And this bug is common! I work on video games, I know how save states work, and I deeply fear the codebase that allows that to even happen. However, the end of the game's story literally doesn't matter or have any weight, so I guess really the bugs had ludonarrative relevance.
The game is also pretty much incomplete -- I expect a TON of balancing and economy changes to be added between now and the inevitable DLC. This is not a live-service game with a battle pass and steady stream of content, so the absolutely busted balancing and item economy being fixed after launch isn't really something that feels acceptable in my eyes. Most players play a game in the first month and do not return to it, and this game probably should've just been in early access for 6 months in order to release in an actually tested and balanced state.
The dungeons, puzzles, and quests have a lot of really cool highlights and also some of the dumbest bullshit I've ever heard of in a game. The creativity is off the wall, but the wildly inconsistent methods through which various secrets are hidden means that probably >75% of players will simply be using guides through the ENTIRE experience. I personally like puzzles that feel like I have a good chance of being able to figure them out on my own, but in this case, literally entire sub-classes are hidden behind interactions that no one would ever organically discover. There were 2 specific weapons I wanted to try out a specific type of build, and it turned out it was nearly impossible to even get the conditions to spawn in the biome necessary for one of those weapons, so I gave up after 2 hours. Additionally, you literally CAN'T use public matchmaking to seek out more obscure puzzles and rewards because there is NO method to communicate inside the game itself.
My closing thought is that this game has NOTHING fundamentally in common with the experience of a Soulslike game in some VERY crucial ways. The most important issue is that NO MATTER WHAT, regardless of your grinding, regardless of your progression, regardless of your build, you WILL die in 1 hit to MANY boss attacks throughout the ENTIRE experience of this game on Veteran or above while playing co-op. You WILL die in 2 hits to almost ALL OTHER boss attacks. Additionally, there is NOTHING you can do to get a pause or cooldown in any boss fight, they will NEVER stop attacking, you cannot get away from them, and you cannot see everything that they are doing to damage you at all times.
This is NOT the experience of a "hard but fair game," this is an experience that only maintains its co-op "hard game balance" through a grueling and unforgiving slog of endless attacks, endless arena-spanning hazards, and damage values that constantly try your patience. No sweat to anyone who LIKES that experience, but it cannot be said that this is ANYTHING like the experience of any other product found in this game's DNA.
2022
The fundamental premise is very cool, and I think it has a lot of promise, but it's not quite there right now. I may open this up again when it's out of early access and see what kind of content was added, but as it stands, it's pretty shallow, it doesn't feel like there are very many viable builds, and there also just aren't that many builds available in the first place.
A lot of the balls and a lot of the items are a combination of uninteresting and completely worthless, which gives the sense that the designers just don't have a super good sense of how to make the game exciting. I won my first few runs where I got past Floor 1 pretty easily. After that, it was either a random chance whether I could even beat Floor 1 (it's basically an auto-lose on Mini-Boss rooms on Floor 1), and then it's random whether I could get all the tools required to survive the last boss. It really appeared that the only viable survivability build was stacking health regen on refreshing the board.
A lot of the balls and a lot of the items are a combination of uninteresting and completely worthless, which gives the sense that the designers just don't have a super good sense of how to make the game exciting. I won my first few runs where I got past Floor 1 pretty easily. After that, it was either a random chance whether I could even beat Floor 1 (it's basically an auto-lose on Mini-Boss rooms on Floor 1), and then it's random whether I could get all the tools required to survive the last boss. It really appeared that the only viable survivability build was stacking health regen on refreshing the board.
2021
A+ movement physics and an AMAZINGLY cool webbing system (catching flies is SO fun). However, none of it is tutorialized and requires a lot of trial and error to understand exactly how you're supposed to do things. Everything about the game is also MUCH easier with a mouse and keyboard rather than a controller. The levels/world are quite chaotically laid out, and some of the puzzles designed for the gameplay just feel clunky in execution. I think there's a lot of promise for the core mechanics to be taken further than what's offered here, but they were so cool that it was hard to stop playing in spite of the flaws.
2022
OVERVIEW
"Dave the Diver" is a buffet of micro gameplay experiences served at a constantly compelling pace without a single lull in the experience. The scope of gameplay loops packed into a single game is nearly unparalleled. Watching the trailer, one might expect some exploration, fishing, and restaurant management, but these core loops are paired with what feels like an endless introduction of new minigames and additional mechanics over the course of 30-40 hours. The only thing holding the game back from being a 10/10 experience is that the team's ambition begins to bite them as it wears on. Having a new mechanic introduced every hour or two means there's no way these mechanics were all thoroughly tested and polished to equal measure, and they become increasingly flawed as the game goes on. Another thing weighing the game down is the introduction of more difficult combat encounters without increasingly versatile player tools in combat, leading to many frustrating and unfun scenarios by the end of the game. In spite of the flaws, it perfectly scratched the itch of what I specifically want as a player out of something on the boundary of "cozy management games," as its overall gameplay and UX design allowed for an intense, efficient, and fast-paced engagement rather than the tedious/slow feeling I get out of many similar games.
OVERALL: 8/10
Combat Design: 5/10
Exploration Design: 8/10
Management Design: 8/10
Minigame Design: 8/10
UI/UX Design: 8/10
Story / Narrative Design: 6/10
Art / Animation: 10/10
Audio / Music: 9/10
HUNTING MECHANICS
Much of the gameplay time is devoted to "fishing," but this game loop is actually better thought of as "hunting." The player's main tool is the harpoon, which remains quite satisfying to use from the start to the end of the game despite being the weakest option available. Beyond that, there is a large variety of...(checks notes)...GUNS...that Dave uses to shoot his prey. Both the harpoon and guns can be finicky to get used to with the game's restrictive cone aiming (meaning the player cannot aim straight up or straight down, but only in a cone to their sides). It's not immediately clear what the optimal way to use some combat tools is in the first third of the game, as the ocean is as full of as many predatory fish and sharks as it is normal fish to collect. These predators will hunt Dave to the end of the ocean and KILL him easily if he doesn't run away or kill them first.
The game leaves it up to the player to decide what hunting strategies they'd like to use, though it does introduce a three-star rating mechanic which requires a small handful of specific tools (nets and tranquilizers) if the player is interested in chasing a collectathon of the highest-rated fish. As the game goes on, more tools are dolled out, and the progression here is decently handled, but ultimately there is an overabundance of weapons most players will likely never use (this is one of the several ways one can see the branding of Early Access on the game design, as some progression depth was probably added solely for players who were grinding in an unfinished game). It is worth noting that the aggressive fish and sharks kind of ruin the entire experience of just trying to hunt for normal fish or do more relaxing side quests a lot of the time, as the player literally MUST kill these threats if it's not an option to just run away.
COMBAT DESIGN
As mentioned above, many of the fish in the sea want to kill Dave, and one of the game's first big surprises is that this escalates to...BOSS encounters. In the first half of the game, these are relatively easy, well-designed, and a fun time. As the game goes on, however, the designers start wanting to make the game "harder," and their only method to do this is with incredibly rude design choices that mean the player will take an immense amount of damage and die multiple times in an effort to understand where they're allowed to swim in order to avoid damage in the (very simple) combat arenas.
The main reason for this clunky combat experience is that there is no way to "dodge" in this game. Dave can "sprint," but this is quite slow compared to the rapid attacks of many of the later bosses, and the player WILL just get hit over and over again in many of these encounters until they figure out how to just hide like a coward and get shots in from as far away as possible. Ironically, the last boss fight DOES give the player a dodge mechanic, as the designers finally realized that's the key to fun combat design. Unfortunately, this is a one-time thing. These frustrations percolate down to late-game sharks and other threats, which can move so fast and attack so chaotically that Dave, again, literally can't avoid them, which leads to a singular ideal play pattern against them (equip a tranquilizer rifle, shoot them until they fall asleep, use the drone to carry them away OR...just desperately run away from them).
RESTAURANT + MANAGEMENT MECHANICS
The restaurant management gameplay loop is quite satisfying. It is just as challenging and deep as necessary given that it's only <15% of the playtime -- it is essentially just a minigame that expands in difficulty as the game goes on. A player might think there's not enough depth to it early in the game, but it turns out that the longer the game goes, the more time Dave spends doing other things. The player comes back to the restaurant so infrequently by the end of the game that it becomes a rewarding respite that one deeply looks forward to after doing so many other chores (and fighting a giant prawn that can punch Dave at the speed of sound). The restaurant phase is also periodically punctuated with VIP guests and special events, and these often provide amusing cutscenes and rewarding animations when a dish is served, which gives satisfying goals to constantly strive towards.
The longer the game goes on, the more mechanics are served, until the player eventually has a literal farm as well as a fish hatchery. These are, however, the weaker elements of the management mechanics, but...they're fine. The fish hatchery could REALLY use a button to "sell/use all but 2 fish of each type" so that the player doesn't have to go through every fish manually to accomplish that. The farm feels like something that would be nice to let it manage itself, because adding "water the plants, pick weeds, and harvest the vegetables" to every day's list of things to do on top of diving and pursuing many other quests wasn't an addition that I personally wanted to deal with.
MINIGAMES / MICRO GAME LOOPS
This game is loaded with constant servings of so many other mechanics that are either literal minigames or more like what I'd call "micro game loops." The latter category is things one might expect to do multiple times in any other game, but the player actually only does them once or a few times in this one.
Actual minigames include:
- Pouring beer or cocktails for customers.
- Taking photos of various fauna in the ocean.
- Using a welding torch to break into a sunken shipwreck.
- Participating in a cooking competition where the player prepares a meal using well-timed quick-time events.
Micro game loops include:
- Sneaking through the base of an eco-terrorist organization to steal their diving technology.
- Stealthing past a maze of underwater monsters.
- Solving simple puzzles while in underwater ruins.
- Literal micro games on Dave's cellphone, including a rhythm game and a fish Tamagotchi.
The quality of these moments varies wildly, some are satisfying and really well-designed, some are just a serviceable change of pace, and a few are tedious and feel like an early design draft rather than something put in a production-ready game. The reality is that if a team is going to put literally dozens of micro game loops and minigames into a single game, probably not all of them are going to be good!
STORY / NARRATIVE / FLUFF
While I can't say the story is particularly GOOD, let alone great, it is...cozy, it's satisfying, and it does what it needs to keep the game moving forwards at a good pace. The best attributes are the animations and character designs, which are immensely expressive and constantly littered with micro-cutscenes that capture the essence of the characters perfectly and always feel rewarding to watch. Many moments of systems progression or story beats are highlighted with a cute and funny animation -- such as a character tasting a meal Dave prepared just for them and transforming back into their childhood self. The constant cadence of small moments like this does a lot of work to define the game's charm and make it easy to get invested in the experience. As of writing this review, I actually finished the main story but still have some remaining quests to do, and I plan to go back to do them just to see how many more moments like this the game has left outside of the main story experience.
CONCLUSION
It's a great game, one I hope the devs consider expanding on with future DLC or doing similar games in the future. I spent a good amount of the time wondering if this would be my game of the year for 2023, and I'm quite bummed that it got more and more rough around the edges as it went on, but I still struggled to put the game down in spite of that and loved the time I spent with it.
"Dave the Diver" is a buffet of micro gameplay experiences served at a constantly compelling pace without a single lull in the experience. The scope of gameplay loops packed into a single game is nearly unparalleled. Watching the trailer, one might expect some exploration, fishing, and restaurant management, but these core loops are paired with what feels like an endless introduction of new minigames and additional mechanics over the course of 30-40 hours. The only thing holding the game back from being a 10/10 experience is that the team's ambition begins to bite them as it wears on. Having a new mechanic introduced every hour or two means there's no way these mechanics were all thoroughly tested and polished to equal measure, and they become increasingly flawed as the game goes on. Another thing weighing the game down is the introduction of more difficult combat encounters without increasingly versatile player tools in combat, leading to many frustrating and unfun scenarios by the end of the game. In spite of the flaws, it perfectly scratched the itch of what I specifically want as a player out of something on the boundary of "cozy management games," as its overall gameplay and UX design allowed for an intense, efficient, and fast-paced engagement rather than the tedious/slow feeling I get out of many similar games.
OVERALL: 8/10
Combat Design: 5/10
Exploration Design: 8/10
Management Design: 8/10
Minigame Design: 8/10
UI/UX Design: 8/10
Story / Narrative Design: 6/10
Art / Animation: 10/10
Audio / Music: 9/10
HUNTING MECHANICS
Much of the gameplay time is devoted to "fishing," but this game loop is actually better thought of as "hunting." The player's main tool is the harpoon, which remains quite satisfying to use from the start to the end of the game despite being the weakest option available. Beyond that, there is a large variety of...(checks notes)...GUNS...that Dave uses to shoot his prey. Both the harpoon and guns can be finicky to get used to with the game's restrictive cone aiming (meaning the player cannot aim straight up or straight down, but only in a cone to their sides). It's not immediately clear what the optimal way to use some combat tools is in the first third of the game, as the ocean is as full of as many predatory fish and sharks as it is normal fish to collect. These predators will hunt Dave to the end of the ocean and KILL him easily if he doesn't run away or kill them first.
The game leaves it up to the player to decide what hunting strategies they'd like to use, though it does introduce a three-star rating mechanic which requires a small handful of specific tools (nets and tranquilizers) if the player is interested in chasing a collectathon of the highest-rated fish. As the game goes on, more tools are dolled out, and the progression here is decently handled, but ultimately there is an overabundance of weapons most players will likely never use (this is one of the several ways one can see the branding of Early Access on the game design, as some progression depth was probably added solely for players who were grinding in an unfinished game). It is worth noting that the aggressive fish and sharks kind of ruin the entire experience of just trying to hunt for normal fish or do more relaxing side quests a lot of the time, as the player literally MUST kill these threats if it's not an option to just run away.
COMBAT DESIGN
As mentioned above, many of the fish in the sea want to kill Dave, and one of the game's first big surprises is that this escalates to...BOSS encounters. In the first half of the game, these are relatively easy, well-designed, and a fun time. As the game goes on, however, the designers start wanting to make the game "harder," and their only method to do this is with incredibly rude design choices that mean the player will take an immense amount of damage and die multiple times in an effort to understand where they're allowed to swim in order to avoid damage in the (very simple) combat arenas.
The main reason for this clunky combat experience is that there is no way to "dodge" in this game. Dave can "sprint," but this is quite slow compared to the rapid attacks of many of the later bosses, and the player WILL just get hit over and over again in many of these encounters until they figure out how to just hide like a coward and get shots in from as far away as possible. Ironically, the last boss fight DOES give the player a dodge mechanic, as the designers finally realized that's the key to fun combat design. Unfortunately, this is a one-time thing. These frustrations percolate down to late-game sharks and other threats, which can move so fast and attack so chaotically that Dave, again, literally can't avoid them, which leads to a singular ideal play pattern against them (equip a tranquilizer rifle, shoot them until they fall asleep, use the drone to carry them away OR...just desperately run away from them).
RESTAURANT + MANAGEMENT MECHANICS
The restaurant management gameplay loop is quite satisfying. It is just as challenging and deep as necessary given that it's only <15% of the playtime -- it is essentially just a minigame that expands in difficulty as the game goes on. A player might think there's not enough depth to it early in the game, but it turns out that the longer the game goes, the more time Dave spends doing other things. The player comes back to the restaurant so infrequently by the end of the game that it becomes a rewarding respite that one deeply looks forward to after doing so many other chores (and fighting a giant prawn that can punch Dave at the speed of sound). The restaurant phase is also periodically punctuated with VIP guests and special events, and these often provide amusing cutscenes and rewarding animations when a dish is served, which gives satisfying goals to constantly strive towards.
The longer the game goes on, the more mechanics are served, until the player eventually has a literal farm as well as a fish hatchery. These are, however, the weaker elements of the management mechanics, but...they're fine. The fish hatchery could REALLY use a button to "sell/use all but 2 fish of each type" so that the player doesn't have to go through every fish manually to accomplish that. The farm feels like something that would be nice to let it manage itself, because adding "water the plants, pick weeds, and harvest the vegetables" to every day's list of things to do on top of diving and pursuing many other quests wasn't an addition that I personally wanted to deal with.
MINIGAMES / MICRO GAME LOOPS
This game is loaded with constant servings of so many other mechanics that are either literal minigames or more like what I'd call "micro game loops." The latter category is things one might expect to do multiple times in any other game, but the player actually only does them once or a few times in this one.
Actual minigames include:
- Pouring beer or cocktails for customers.
- Taking photos of various fauna in the ocean.
- Using a welding torch to break into a sunken shipwreck.
- Participating in a cooking competition where the player prepares a meal using well-timed quick-time events.
Micro game loops include:
- Sneaking through the base of an eco-terrorist organization to steal their diving technology.
- Stealthing past a maze of underwater monsters.
- Solving simple puzzles while in underwater ruins.
- Literal micro games on Dave's cellphone, including a rhythm game and a fish Tamagotchi.
The quality of these moments varies wildly, some are satisfying and really well-designed, some are just a serviceable change of pace, and a few are tedious and feel like an early design draft rather than something put in a production-ready game. The reality is that if a team is going to put literally dozens of micro game loops and minigames into a single game, probably not all of them are going to be good!
STORY / NARRATIVE / FLUFF
While I can't say the story is particularly GOOD, let alone great, it is...cozy, it's satisfying, and it does what it needs to keep the game moving forwards at a good pace. The best attributes are the animations and character designs, which are immensely expressive and constantly littered with micro-cutscenes that capture the essence of the characters perfectly and always feel rewarding to watch. Many moments of systems progression or story beats are highlighted with a cute and funny animation -- such as a character tasting a meal Dave prepared just for them and transforming back into their childhood self. The constant cadence of small moments like this does a lot of work to define the game's charm and make it easy to get invested in the experience. As of writing this review, I actually finished the main story but still have some remaining quests to do, and I plan to go back to do them just to see how many more moments like this the game has left outside of the main story experience.
CONCLUSION
It's a great game, one I hope the devs consider expanding on with future DLC or doing similar games in the future. I spent a good amount of the time wondering if this would be my game of the year for 2023, and I'm quite bummed that it got more and more rough around the edges as it went on, but I still struggled to put the game down in spite of that and loved the time I spent with it.
Pretty cool, mostly into just the neat physics puzzles, fun vehicle stuff, and good open-world design, but nearly everything else (including combat, writing, art direction, art quality, animation quality, UI/UX quality, traversal mechanics, mounts, and crafting mechanics) is less refined and less engaging than other major modern action-adventure games. A far from flawless game, I still deeply dislike the terrible menu systems, tedious cooking mechanics, and combat controls from the year 1999 where your character doesn't even move when they attack. Why are apples and mushrooms in the "fuse items to arrows" menu? It's not actually funny enough to justify getting in the way of good combat.
I can't imagine I'll care enough about the game to write a full review when I'm done (whether that's from getting burned out on traipsing around or actually forcing myself to do the critical path to completion). I am not saying it's a bad game, it just doesn't land much for me, and the overwhelmingly positive response to something that still feels this clunky and dated honestly feels weird at this point (I know it's actually because of the safe and universally appealing simple design sentiments that risk so little that the game alienates no one). This is hardly better than any other major AAA action-adventure game, merely equally good at best (and everything is really clinging by a strand of glue to the physics-building mechanics to keep up).
I can't imagine I'll care enough about the game to write a full review when I'm done (whether that's from getting burned out on traipsing around or actually forcing myself to do the critical path to completion). I am not saying it's a bad game, it just doesn't land much for me, and the overwhelmingly positive response to something that still feels this clunky and dated honestly feels weird at this point (I know it's actually because of the safe and universally appealing simple design sentiments that risk so little that the game alienates no one). This is hardly better than any other major AAA action-adventure game, merely equally good at best (and everything is really clinging by a strand of glue to the physics-building mechanics to keep up).
2023
Sorry to the dev, they are a VERY brilliant level designer, but I can't in good conscience "recommend" this game because it's just not going to be accessible to the vast majority of players, even people who love and play a lot of platformers or even first-person platformers. There is a small audience of players who either: 1. are good enough to not make mistakes consistently, 2. have the patience to replay content dozens and dozens of times when they do make small mistakes.
This is the first time I've tried a game like this knowing it would probably try my patience too much, and I did really enjoy the time I spent with it, but it's disheartening to me to feel like I'd be another 15+ hours of replaying the same content to get to the end because I don't have the ability to not make small mistakes in games (I'm 32, I know what my hands are capable of, they make little slip-ups once per 10-15 minutes, it's just how things go).
I got to ~290m after 13 hours of playing, and I'm just tired of replaying some sections of this game too much to consider continuing. My friends who are still playing are at 300-350m and regularly falling back down to 150m, requiring hours of replay just to get to the last failed jump. That's by design, obviously, but I don't think very many people will have the patience to get to the top if it takes 15+ hours of mostly replaying previous content to do so.
Great game feel, great camera setup, and, as stated above, absolutely brilliant level design. Looking for shortcuts is pretty fun, many sections I've replayed a dozen times I absolutely loved for some amount of time, but emotionally the negative feeling of falling to 100m-150m has grown to the point of completely ruining any enjoyment of playing the game.
Would love to play something similar from the developer that has a different approach to losing progress or gives more difficulty options or control to the player, their level design sensibilities are immensely good.
Level Design: 9/10
Locomotion Design: 8/10
Accessibility: 1/10
This is the first time I've tried a game like this knowing it would probably try my patience too much, and I did really enjoy the time I spent with it, but it's disheartening to me to feel like I'd be another 15+ hours of replaying the same content to get to the end because I don't have the ability to not make small mistakes in games (I'm 32, I know what my hands are capable of, they make little slip-ups once per 10-15 minutes, it's just how things go).
I got to ~290m after 13 hours of playing, and I'm just tired of replaying some sections of this game too much to consider continuing. My friends who are still playing are at 300-350m and regularly falling back down to 150m, requiring hours of replay just to get to the last failed jump. That's by design, obviously, but I don't think very many people will have the patience to get to the top if it takes 15+ hours of mostly replaying previous content to do so.
Great game feel, great camera setup, and, as stated above, absolutely brilliant level design. Looking for shortcuts is pretty fun, many sections I've replayed a dozen times I absolutely loved for some amount of time, but emotionally the negative feeling of falling to 100m-150m has grown to the point of completely ruining any enjoyment of playing the game.
Would love to play something similar from the developer that has a different approach to losing progress or gives more difficulty options or control to the player, their level design sensibilities are immensely good.
Level Design: 9/10
Locomotion Design: 8/10
Accessibility: 1/10