![This is a fun game—and it has such potential [XSX Review]](https://external-preview.redd.it/JjouwqVVIDrB6k5-0maP-TbsJAn300pq4Fehn-9TgqU.jpeg?width=960&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=6d304b6eba298f594d01eb380b836b6e8872a0ac)
This is a fun game—and it has such potential [XSX Review]
Hey all—
Just finished a run through of this game on the 'explore' mode—that is, the least combat difficulty; I really enjoy exploration, less so combat that I perceive as soulslike (emphatically not a fan). That stemmed from my (largely correct) assumption that the combat was a bit jank on controller, given what I had experienced in the demo. I managed to both learn the combat better and adjust the inputs so that it was less so, but more on that later.
Some context—I'm mostly an FPS player (Destiny 2, W40K: Darktide, Battlefield, as of late), though I have some time in other puzzle-y games like Outer Wilds, Abzû, RiME, Prey, etc.
I really enjoyed my experience with the game—though it goes without saying it's far from perfect. I'll try to keep >!spoilers!< to a minimum, but will mark 'em if they come up.
##The Excellent
— A common note, I see: I loved the atmosphere of the world, in a holistic sense. In particular:
The sound design in the game is so, so good. Easily my favorite noise in the game is the sequence of noises that is made when you clear the final Timeloop Guardian in a given area. Sent shivers down my spine every time. The weapons feel weighty and impactful, and the charge up noises for various glyphs are superb too.
The music does an excellent job of keeping you on edge. If there were times I had to actually pause the game for a minute or two (answer a text or something) I would use the pause menu instead of just idling because the music was that good at setting the tone. The departures made >!during the key boss fights!< were also a really nice touch, even if I wouldn't necessarily listen to some of it casually (>!looking at you ecstasy!<).
The world itself, of course, is beautifully realized. While many of the posts in the subreddit talk about Lake Cynon—which (it goes without saying) is wonderful—I think every destination had its own charm and distinct feel, which is no small feat. A Destiny YT'er I particularly like has said for years that the game is at its best location-wise when it makes the player feel small; Hell is Us does this so often in so many different ways, it's superb. I don't know if the art team had architects on board, or consulted with architects, or just had outstanding vision—each of locations has a 'real' feel to it (as in, each of the towns feel like actual towns where people live(d)), and the big, 'showstopper' locations (>!Acasa Tower, Lake Cynon, Eye of God, Auriga Museum, to name a few!<) can take your breath away in their scope and design.
Character design is also believable and grounded, even given the setting. Modern troops in ponchos vs. eldritch manifestations of our worst emotional moments, what's not to love?
I straight-up adore the datapad visual interface. So well-thought-through, believable, and reflects a lot of time and effort on the part of the designers on how it would be organized and function (down to the startup screen and specs of its internals!). The psuedo-vector graphics for the weapons was an inspired choice. I would buy one IRL in a heartbeat (a minor note as a typography fan, I can't tell you how much I admire that the studio commissioned a whole new typeface for the datapad and credited its designer in the credits. Serious, serious props).
All this art direction and effort comes together into something greater than the sum of its parts: the vibes in this game are really outstandingly excellent.
— Loved the exploration and the rewarding of, 'search every inch of this map and you might find something fun/cool/useful'. As an 'explorer'-type of gamer, I really appreciate being rewarded for inquisitiveness, and this game does so unflinchingly and often. In addition, it's awesome how much of the story and context is revealed via items you find.
##The Good
— I don't mind the combat, honestly. I agree that towards the latter half of the game it can get a bit old hat, but it's never not enjoyable. However, a caveat is of course that I was not playing on a difficulty of any seriousness; it was only when I started regularly running into T3 enemies that I noticed weapons had a defense stat. But beyond that, the variations in playstyles felt fun even if I did settle into a preference after some time. Would've loved to see a more meaningful reason to swap between weapon types, though.
- I guess this begs the question, do you all feel as if this combat is 'souls-like'? I used that term in the intro because I feel it fits, but I haven't played any Souls-games specifically because of their combat feel and loop. I am more than happy to put this down to PEBKAC, but was just curious.
— The writing, overall, feels ... nontrivial/appropriately weighty. As in, there aren't any characters that are ridiculous pastiches of evil, or uncomplicated paragons of justice; they're just people put in an awful situation, and the diversity of responses to that situation on both sides makes sense and makes the characters more real. Even within a given group there are a believable range of reactions—by way of example, you have the Sabinians occupying Jova. There are, of course, blatantly evil folks—Vaas and his 2nd—but plenty of the various one-line soldiers have misgivings about both him and what has happened in Jova. Not to mention several who are just scared shitless at the entities (fair).
— Enemy design overall I think is great. I'll echo a few folks here in saying that more diversity would've been more good, but the evolution of each of the enemy types through their tiers made many fights feel different, and the 'emotional core' pairings provided a interesting combat challenge. They felt spooky and otherworldly, but also meaningfully connected to the atrocities that allowed them into the world.
- Would've loved to see >!the giant guys before the final fight. They were SO COOL and you only got to see them once!!<
— The voice actors in English are consistently good. Special credit to both The Interrogator and Talia. I speak la Français très conversationelle, so I wanna give those folks a shot with subtitles (and curious to see if there are any noticeable writing differences; I would guess the game was originally written in French?).
— I really truly appreciate that the game treats you like an adult and does not shy away from explicit depictions of the untold horrors of genocide and ethnic cleansing. I don't 'like' them in the sense of they're good acts, but it's very much to the game's credit that they are neither hidden nor sanitized—>!I was particularly struck by the child murder in the Acasa Tower timeloop; often, even in other games that depict awful things like this one, children are absent from the violence. 'Refreshing' to have that there to drive home how horrible the genocide was.!<
— I do appreciate that a lot of stuff in the story is simply ... not explained. Some of it may just be lore bits I missed but ... who's the Interrogator? Why's he look like that? Iunno. What parts of our reality are real and what aren't? What year is it? (c. 1993, no? Though I could've sworn I saw a birthdate attributed to 2009, though that might've been my American eyes interpreting two-digit September as 2009).
— The executions are cool as hell. A bit inconsistent to trigger, but I love how each weapon has a couple different variants.
##The Fine
— The story ... I feel as if in its attempts to illustrate that horrible things have happened on both sides, it fails to take a moral stance beyond 'bad things bad', which like, sure. And I'm not necessarily saying that every story needs to have a clear-cut bad guy and good guy, of course not. But, 'everyone sucks here' is not a particularly satisfying conclusion. I would've preferred an ending that more resembles (shocking to be citing this as an example of good writing) Halo 3's—'I can't ever forgive you for what you've done to my people, but I can thank you for [uniting with me against the common enemy]. >!It would've been much more satisfying to see Hadeans uniting against the Ziel Council after the end of the game and Talia's articles being published, putting aside the horrific acts on both sides to destroy that which would've killed them all for profit. Especially since the unity of Hadeans—all Hadeans—is discussed extensively throughout the game.!<
— The world doesn't reflect the changes that happen over the course of the game particularly well, which is a shame. Some examples include how even after completely clearing a given area of timeloops and entities, no one's like, 'whoah hey I won't be ripped apart going for a walk'? Or people will die and not much happens after that? >!Vaas is ripped apart by demons!< (huzzah), and Rémi never thinks to mention it to Victor (not to mention >!what happens to Jaffer and Rebecca?!<) And poor Marta! Sliced and diced, and every time you leave Vyssa Hills you nearly squish her body with the APC.
— My willing suspension of disbelief was challenged at times. The initial one was 'team of soldiers prepared explicitly for this thing are clowned by one (1) of the most basic type of this thing, and me, who have never seen these things before, can rip through them with zero training'. Obviously my combat difficulty choice reinforces that (and I know Rémi has a military background), but I can't think of a single place in the game where OSMIF soldiers weren't slaughtered by the entities—>!including in Auriga Musuem, the friggin' training facility!!<
In addition to that point, Rémi's puzzle-solving skills leave one of two conclusions to be reached: either he's fuckin' Batman, or everyone else in this world, including generations of a secret order whose primary job was to figure this stuff out were complete morons.
Now, backs of giants and all that, but in the Watcher's Nest for instance, Gildas wasn't trying to solve it while Vitalis was out and about? I mean, obviously, >!being systematically eradicated by the shadow gov't puts a damper on your problem-solving skills, but.!<
The puzzle difficulty felt ... fairly good, but some of them were more just, 'has no one ... read these?' The only one that really gave me trouble was >!the safe in the interior ministry, but part of that was that I wanted to figure it out before talking to the assistant. The, 'I wish time ran backwards' bit was very clever.!< Mostly it felt like matching x, y, and z to y, z, and x. Though I do also appreciate the ones that take a bit of inference, like >!the circle symbol vault under Jeljin!<.
I'm willing to look past most of this for gameplay and story's sake, of course, but sometimes I have difficulty believing that no one else would've thought to translate all the ancient Hadean lying around the world. >!And did no living person go to the Plains of Mist for like ... a thousand years or something?!<
— Upgrade system was there. I liked the different aspect variants of each weapon, though again I would've preferred more reason to use certain weapon types in certain situations and playstyles (btw, DO aspect weapons that correspond to the same type of emotional entity do more damage, or was that entirely placebo?). I also understand that that may have been a mechanic at higher difficulties.
I also would've liked the ability to reassign weapon aspects (maybe at a nominal cost, though unless you tweaked the spawn settings there might not actually be a way to get infinite shards); several times I found a copy of weapon + aspect that I had already crafted.
Smaller shards also become downright useless once your weapons are at a higher tier; perhaps some way to consolidate them into larger shards (eg., 10 small = 1 medium, 5 medium = 1 large)?
I would've also liked to see more differences between the T2 and T5 version of a weapon; perhaps the transformation to an aspect weapon could've been more gradual across tiers?
##The Not-Great or Odd
— Not-great: who in god's name designated the original controller input schema? It felt like an afterthought, sort of, 'oh shit right we want to release this on consoles, too', not designed from the ground-up, as in, 'how does one play this type of game on a controller'. I think this is enough of an issue that it may be a hard stop for controller-main players.
I'm coming from Destiny, which—surprisingly, lol—has swordplay and well-thought-out swordplay controls, even if they are quite basic. I ended up remapping the controls to mirror those of Destiny: left trigger to block, right trigger to quick attack, even though that required rejiggering of much of the entire input schema (if anyone's interested, I can elaborate on what I settled on; there's only one truly 'jank' input).
Again, happy to chalk that up to skill issue, but the lack of thoughtfulness in the controller inputs resulted in my not engaging with the deeper combat abilities (glyphs, heavy attacks, and drone usage (telling about the explore difficulty that they're broadly unnecessary)) till Act 2, which roughly corresponded to me straight-up being good enough at combat (after fixing the inputs) to have the time to figure out those abilities and integrate them into my fighting.
I guess I'd need to actually go play some soulslikes on controller at some point to compare, but is there anything the game can take from how those games structure their controller inputs?
— Not-great: definitely possibly a skill issue, but I felt as if the healing pulse was under-explained (or I flat-out missed the tooltip). I discovered broadly by accident that one has to wait for the circle to be solid to engage it fully, and before that, I was baffled about why it would just dissipate, even if I had 'charged' it enough in the health and endurance bar. This led to me hyper-prioritizing health regen items to the exclusion of others.
— Odd: audio balancing. I prefer playing most games with subtitles off; to properly hear Talia and Rémi converse I had to knock game audio and sound effects down to 75, and music down to 85. Rémi was the worse of the two, as he (admittedly like Talia) spoke diagetically, which meant that he was speaking in the opposite direction of the 'mic' so he was particularly hard to hear. Fun detail but slightly annoying from a meta standpoint.
— I understand that much hay is made of the game having no clues etc. but a bit more consistency or indications about what things are time-sensitive and those that aren't would be helpful. For instance, >!the starving baby under Jova can die if you don't find the milk in time (I didn't), but presumably the ending doesn't change if you spend in-game days dicking around doing side quests before heading to Lake Cynon/the Eye of God, despite mom still hanging around OSMIF?!<
— Definitely one of the endings of all time, and >!Mom's last line was ... both predictable, and predictably ... corny.!< I am holding out hope for a DLC that will expand upon it. Post-credit scene isn't particuarly egregious, but it does leave more questions than answers.
— Not-great: character customization. No new outfits, no new ponchos—setting aside entirely body customization, though I completely understand if that was influenced by direction/artistic choices/budget. Would've loved a 'poncho minus hat' variant, or the ability to pick up those absolutely wicked masks that the OSMIF use. The hats were for sure a let down, though I did giggle at the inclusion of the Quebec one. BTW, from the poutine hat, it turns out 'OG Burger' is in fact a real place. It's only about two hours from where I live. Hm. Maybe I should give it a shot.
— Odd: the title of the game. This ties a bit into my earlier criticism of the 'everybody bad' moral 'stance' the game takes, but also from a straightforward 'I wanna tell people about this game but the title doesn't really ... correspond to the game unless you wanna start with a five-minute explanation about the civil war and the history leading up to it and how it summons malevolent manifestations of our worst emotions and experiences'. I (obviously) can't think of a better title off the top of my head, but I think it could've used a bit more workshopping.
Overall, I really enjoyed this game, and am looking forward to going and backtracking a bit after closing it out. I will definitely be recommending it to others, and am absolutely holding out hope for DLC—the other aspects sound SO cool, and I'm sure the environments will be stunning.
If you've made it this far, thanks for reading, and let me know what you thought of the game, too!