Personal blog

The world is vast and the character agile, but the menus are awkward and the size of the world is used as an excuse to recycle assets, so much so that you seem to explore the same place over and over. The main problem is the plot and the dialogue, weak and unclear, with flashbacks that could be better and only a few music tracks. Extraordinarily promising, it remains a nice experiment that, especially in its dialogue, could have been improved enormously.

The pilgrimage-like atmosphere, with death as excommunication and Guilt to atone for at the altars, is accompanied by Spanish and sacred music and exquisite pixel art. It looks harder than Dark Souls, but damage and exploration are well balanced and only the final bosses raise the bar. It is perhaps too cryptic and has to be pieced together bit by bit, but I strongly recommend it to genre veterans with quick reflexes.

The world is grim, polytheistic and individualistic in the Western tradition, the storytelling is gripping and the environments are hand-painted. It is ruined, however, by gameplay full of flaws, with confusing and counter-intuitive abilities, chaotic stronghold time and verbose dialogue. My advice is to play Pillars of Eternity 2 instead.

Studio Ghibli's animation and the soundtrack are of the highest quality, and the real-time combat does not require too much grinding. The battles, however, are chaotic, the allies unresponsive, the plot flat and the side quests reduced to repetitive fetch quests. It entertained me without offering a deep experience, and much could have been cut, but the Studio Ghibli cutscenes are untouchable.

Nolan-style flashbacks and flash-forwards, together with the manuscripts, piece together a Stephen King-like plot, while the maps, true to the horror genre, try to make you lose your bearings. To understand it fully you almost have to finish it twice, but it is a game with a very literate and intelligent plot that anyone who loves this kind of writing will appreciate.