72 reviews liked by proximete


nigga this shit better than pokemon nd i can have dreads too

Sort of confused by the hate bandwagon when it's not too dissimilar from any other Bethesda game since Oblivion, but as it goes on it steadily wastes more and more of your time.

Bethesda games really rely on sort of putting you in a trance more than they do doing anything actually fun, but this continually breaks your trance with constant loading screens, menus that don't work, and way too many procedural environments. There are compelling concepts and little nuggets of ideas scattered all throughout the game that are so disconnected it results in nothing compelling at all. Staging a space game is insanely hard, but I think they probably could have just gone the (still unsatisfying) Outer Worlds route of having a solar system of planets each with one area to explore. Instead you are treated to miles and miles of fucking nothing, and all of the actually interesting handcrafted areas are all one offs that you never come back to and are not allowed to build settlements on.

Comparing any given sidequest area to the rest of the procedural ones on the same planet is almost like night and day. During one companion quest I was brought to a beautiful tropical planet but found I couldn't build the one settlement I wanted to build there. Then, upon going to another procedurally generated area found that it was actually a shithole swamp planet with nothing to actually offer. This happened multiple different times on multiple different planets. Fallout 4 had a terrible settlement system but this somehow surpasses it, the existing habitats are all somehow uglier than the scrap shacks and vault assets in F4, you are not allowed to build anywhere pretty or of interest, and every settlement has limited storage which is usually makes any attempt at building or setting up a mining network not worth it in the slighest, and you can do pretty much everything on your ship anyways.

Combat is also more boring than Fallout 4, this being thanks to them having to build a number of different basic enemies types for each planet. The most it tries to offer are the endgame "starborn" enemies who annoyingly warp and duplicate themselves at random to waste your time instead of offering a challening fight. Space combat is also incredibly simplistic and you'll probably have reached the upper limit of what you can do with it before you're even a quarter of the ways through the game.

Starfield is so insanely scared of you finding out how shallow all of it's systems are that the entry points to basically all of them are locked behind perks that require you to grind settlement building and planet exploration to get anything done. The ability to sneak is now a perk that barely does anything because on top of all the usual terrible Bethesda stealth, everything you do makes noise that attracts enemies, and almost every major questline has at least one stealth section. Basic features of things like crew management, shippbuilding, settlement building and crafting are all locked behind multiple different perks that take forever to get. And most combat perks could be easily mistaken to generic bullshit perks from a Ubisoft game. "Take 15% less damage from energy weapons." Like that.

The story is not entirely devoid of charm, but the advanced facial muscles combined with Bethesda's signature procedural animation make every NPC seem less real than even Oblivion. I found my eyes wandering to the subtitles more often than not to escape their hideous gaze. There are lots of fun little characters scattered around who are more interesting than any of the main ones but ultimately only get 2 or 3 lines of dialogue. Why give me the option to focus on these interesting characters when the game doesn't want me to?

Towards the end of the story the game throws you into a different dimension and emphasizes that you can see the differences in all the choices you made by replaying all of your quests. This is of course a lie because none of the quests or decisions you make have any actual consequences. One major questline I did involved me joining one of the game's many pirate factions as a double agent, but ultimately deciding to betray my government superiors for threatening me with imprisonment. In the process, I killed the high ranking general who hired me, was forced to give his ship to the pirate fleet and made them one of the richest and most powerful factions in the universe. Keep in mind, despite all of these characters and locations being targetable and attackable from my ship, I was not allowed to attack them until the end of the questline as they were all essential. Almost every NPC even vaguely involved with a quest is essential despite the fact that game spends its entire later half emphasizing how none of this matters and you're going to leave it behind anyway. Anyways, after becoming the (second) most powerful pirate in the galaxy and basically declaring war on the game's main faction, I was able to return back to the main city with absolutely no consequences besides all my companions giving me a very subdued and measly argument on why I shouldn't have done that. Later on I got an insane bounty from the same pirate faction for killing a bunch of their guys for guns (despite me killing all the witnesses and the game acknowledging that in text) and none of them attacked me or mentioned it whatsoever.

I think all I expected from this game was for it to be the game between F4 and ES6, somewhere on the level of the Outer Worlds, disposable but holds your attention. I had to actively try to beat it because it was just that boring. I think I would be more forgiving if it was not also confirmed that they shut down potential TES and Fallout games by Obsidian while powering ahead to push out this slop. Microsoft would be wise to put the hammer down on the braindead practices of all the shitty companies they acquired, but I think the rushed release of Redfall confirms they're perfectly complicit in keeping these games as awful as possible in the hopes they can trick their players.

when i played this game 7 years ago on my shitty excuse of a laptop, i loved it. of course my 11 year old ass didn't understand it fully, but i still somewhat grasped the core themes.

7 years later, with 7 years worth of fuck ups and experiences, i fully get the message. and ive held onto it ever since.

This game inspired me to make my own ghost hunting kit and I brought it to my friend's haunted farm and we used the Ouija board and the ghost in the Ouija board said his name was "penis" but I'm not entirely convinced that wasn't my friend moving the glass thing on his own. Still threw holy water everywhere, always pays to follow proper procedure

Tunic

2022

Tunic is a mess. It's an extreme puzzle soulslike zelda 1 mix that uses an antiquated gimmick, an in-game manual, as the main progression mechanic.

Tunic is too hard of a puzzle game if you want to play a soulslike, and too hard of a soulslike if you want to play a puzzle game. The Zelda comparison is fair, but only if you're talking about The Legends of Zelda, first of its name. I spent hours being lost not having a single clue where to go only to find out that I was simply walking past a door or a turn I was supposed to take.

The puzzle design in Tunic is frustrating, because the entire game is based on purposfully obscuring or not giving crucial information to the player. If you were to beat the game legitemately, you'd have to go through a lot of trial and error, not only on the soulslike part, but also on the puzzles. The game has 0 feedback for most puzzles you do, only vaguely indicating what you're supposed to be doing in the manual. The true ending, without a guide, is IMPOSSIBLE. There is no way someone can possibly find everything needed for the true ending without spending endless hours looking through every nook and crany of the map. Some people are into that, and it's their type of game, but I'm definitely not.

There's a crucial difference between Tunic and games like Outer Wilds. Outer Wilds guides the player via a command board that recaps not only what you already know in clear english, but also indicates connections between things you know in case you've missed them, while also guiding the player where to go explore next. You can look at the board, and figure out a destination. Tunic doesn't tell you where to go, only giving you slight hints, in a cryptic language in the manual. At some point, this becomes very discouraging, and I personally just used a guide. I'm very happy that I did so, because I would not be able to figure out what I'm supposed to do without a guide. To add insult to injury, after getting everything required for the true ending, the game bugged out and gave me the regular ending.

The soulslike elements of the game are lackluster as well. There is no variety of weapons, equips or items. There are a few useful items, and a few spells, and one sword. The equips you get are either gimmicky, either completely useless, either so good that you'll only be using a few given equips the entire game. Without the damage up defence down equip, I wouldn't have beaten the game in the time I did. The equips don't have a description, to fit the gimmick of the game, and are only vaguely described in the manual. This is a very bad thing, as most of the time you're unsure whether an equipment is even working properly. The bosses are all uninspired, the only boss I found enjoyable was the final boss. There are 0 humanoid fights, meaning that most of the time you'll be running around dodge rolling until the boss eventually lets you attack it. Only on the final boss do you get the chance to weave in attacks and dash out mid-combo when needed.

Overall, the game is just frustrating. It feels like it wasn't playtested enough, and has rough difficulty spikes and confusing puzzles all over. It felt more like I was fighting against the game the entire time, rather than playing it.

Tunic

2022

so my mom is Toby Fox okay got it now I know who to beat up

Pretty fun zelda game that gives a sea for you to explore and wake the wind lol

This was kinda fun until a dracky said that it was scared that me and the townsfolk had iced it's fellow monster and it made me cry so I stopped playing

Truly the product of an evil time and culture. One of the most Iraq War era games of all time. Where James Bond quips become rape jokes and saving the world is as easy as calling terrorists retards. The gold AR trophy referencing Saddam is an insane inclusion. And as always in video games, we must suffer a bunch of nerd's ideas of how hot, badass people would talk, as if they've ever met any. I really love that this game exists. The craziest thing about it might be that they stuck with calling their superspy, assassin protagonist Mike. So funny lol. Mike the spy.

One of the best I’ve played this past decade