An excerpt from a logbook:
"It's day 3, I have run for what seems like forever, I cannot tell if the beast is chasing me no more, the land around me seems strange, I no longer hear when boars attack me nor the explosions that occur when I give swift death to these mutated creatures, is it the radiation? Is it the ungodly amount of morphine running through my bloodstream? Or am I just tired? I am no longer a man, every single medkit is 10 bottlecaps to me. It is on the very rare occasion that I bleed that I remember the feeble flesh I have hidden beneath this armour. Why do I keep running? Why can't I pause?"
-Vlad--
The game has now reached its potential for the time being (the knight has no crossbow yet), none of the issues mentioned earlier are there. Would love a pause button. Take this with a grain of salt though as I now own a RTX 4060 and not the iGPU I had earlier.
[u]Original Review:[/u]
Let me get this straight. I enjoy this game - [b]a lot[/b]. I enjoy the community a lot. The discord is quite active and Thijs (the developer) actively communicates with the players. But be warned: this game is a flawed masterpiece.
Every death just entices you to run again, try a bit better, learn the patterns and maybe try out a different build. The difficulty follows a nice curve and progresses quite well. You feelyourself gaining control and rapidly, you turn from the hunted... to hunter. There are a lot of nice skins. The gun feels very snappy, and the gameplay is quite unique from most runners where your brain can turn off. (You can't use Incaved Runner footage to satisfy your nephew's forced ADHD; I tried).
Then why don't I recommend the game?
Because of the little things. While there are a lot of players out there who have managed to score some absolute Saiyan-tier runs, I unfortunately have not been able to. The best I could do was about 10k. And sure I could get better but when you die and you know why you did, that's fine, lesson learnt. But when you die and you know why you did,[b] and [/b]you know it is [i]not your fault[/i], it is completely unacceptable.
There are a few problematic areas in Moss Hollow that [b] will [/b] kill you sooner or later, sometimes the buttons don't register when running through the bandit camp and sometimes you get thrown underground so you just die because you only had a heart left. This could be an issue of hardware, I[i] am [/i]playing on a DELL Latitude where only the space works on the bottom key-row, but with many complaints already being issued about this, I doubt it is a hardware limitation.
This game kills any joy or momentum you had whenever stuff like this happens. For a run or two, forgivable. But this is a constant issue for me.
I understand gamedev is hard and watching DualWielded's devlogs pains me to write this, like I suggested that the area beside the acid pools in Hollow Moss be slippery, yeah... game design is not for me. But it pains me to play a game that is so close to being Balatro or Slay the Spire levels of addictive, and yet flail miserably like a fish out of water.
There is one more update coming out and it could probably fix all of my issues, but as of now:
[b]I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS GAME[/b]
Will probably play another 1000 runs and get that 100% Completion.
Also please give the knight a crossbow.
TLDR: Good game with a few frustrating bugs.
