Lots of nostalgia novelty value here but the actual game here is honestly pretty bad lol. Gave up like 34/50 levels in.

Every puzzle is generally comically easy, but the execution of these solutions is either similarly easy, or so finnicky and precise and down to physics engine luck that even one "mistake" (which often happens due to a Meebling bouncing in an unexpected way considering they are a weird offset egg shape) can cost you a full restart, no inbetween. This might not seem bad for a flash game but considering how patient you have to be in slowly tapping the pushes and pulls it can be much more frustrating than I care to bother with on a random 4 AM nostalgia trip. Add to this a seemingly completely random difficulty curve (it was not uncommon to be stuck on the mechanical execution of one level for 5-10 minutes and breeze through the next 3 in 10 seconds each) and yeah this kinda sucks

gameplay-wise about as pristine as you can get. same exact gameplay loop and mostly the same map as botw but with all the harsh edges sanded off and somehow this works. played probably between 60 and 70 hours* and was only really just starting to maybe get bored of it. definitely one of the best open world games ive played to date? usually i get bored of these 30 hours in and drop them/rush to the end but i did not do that here, not by a long shot.

[nitpick paragraph feel free to skip]
maybe unsurprisingly, the worst parts here are the bits that deviate from that main gameplay loop. dungeons are better than in botw but are still largely underwhelming. story remains kind of bad/forgettable, with a couple of bits that seem like they might be kind of cool until you remember nintendo has no balls. i remember next to nothing of the story in BOTW, i guarantee i will remember about as much from this in 6 months. voice acting is even more miscast this time on the few occasions you hear it, i will never understand the decisions that led to matt mercer doing matt mercer voice as ganon, and there was not a scene where rauru spoke where i did not imagine some guy in a VA booth reading off his lines.
[nitpick paragraph end]

thankfully all of these are minor nitpicks in a game where 95% of the time is spent fucking off to some unexplored part of the map and exploring it, but they do kind of serve to remind you that this is a toy first and an artistic work second. its weird to see elements as halfassed as the story put next to gameplay as polished and thought-through as this, but this isnt particularly out of the ordinary for what most AAA games want to be anyways. something you see in many AAA games is a drive to be as enjoyable as possible and most games fuck up somewhere but TOTK really never does, not in any major way. if something you value in a game is its ability to kill time, this is very good at that

*idk the exact number because i moved off my switch to an emulator partway through because of joycon drift problems lmao, and that was at around 40 hours. sidenote: if you have a beefy computer (rtx 3000 series or above) yuzu is at the point that with a couple patches its definitely a better experience than playing on hardware on account of the increased framerate and resolution lol

jesus fucking christ howly

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writing's less tight moment-to-moment and i have a hunch that the hard pivot to psych horror with only a bit of psych drama left might result in this leaving not as lasting of an impression as echo, but still very good and an essential play for psych horror vn fans and especially echoproject fans. lots of super indepth and uncomfortable descriptions here as always from howly, and the music and CGs add a lot to the experience as well

ironically, might be better than echo for onboarding non-furries lol. considering this completely ditches the slow burn of echo and is also only about 4-5 hours long if you binge it