The Eraserhead baby of Dark Souls and Breath of the Wild, lacking the core of what made each of those games fun. You run across giant, badly textured Unity maps at half the pace of a Dark Souls character playing 1/4 of an RPG stretched out to an entire RPG's runtime. Minimal character progression means entire character identities are just items. Basically no traversal options means going anywhere is a slog. Ubisoft node based stock gathering and crafting system slapped on the top and ship it out the door. The story is rushed and poorly delivered, basically nothing but fetch quests and the gamefeel of an MMO designed by communists. Magic is needlessly convoluted and basically inaccessible in the fun fantasy adventure title. No pause option and no load option, even in single player. You're not even permitted to take a piss while playing, unless you want to do it in one of the multiudes of times you'll be standing around waiting for gameplay elements to happen in the gameplay loop of this title.
Ultimately, it's just not fun. Everything is a chore. You'll spend 30 minutes delving a dungeon and get a sword that has purple particle effects and takes 17 hits to kill a standard enemy instead of 18 and a single gem. Doing basically anything requires prior knowledge that it's basically impossible to have so you're set up to fail over and over unless you spend your entire life cross referencing a wiki. There are about a dozen adventure games I would recommend someone play before this one that don't punish you for just wanting to play and have much richer environements to explore. You're actually permitted to see while you're playing in most of them as well which is a nice novelty when you've got a tension headache from trying to squint into the bad artwork and poor comprehension of volumetric lighting that the delusional seem to think was an intentional design choice. There is better signposting and lighting in Duke Nukem, a game that has no way to light up it's 2d environments and had no other games to reference.
An artistically bankrupt frankenstein's monster of better games, ♥♥♥♥ out in the cheapest engine available. There is not a single thing in this title that hasn't been done much better elsewhere, and the parts chosen to cobble together the mess weren't even the good parts from the other games. I really just wish that the game didn't take so much of it's runtime getting to the point of the gameplay that I can no longer refund it, because even at 7 dollars I feel like I was ripped off. If, like me, you think; "Oh this is okay it's going to open up to some interesting systems and..." no. Just no. What you experience in that first hour is what you experience again and again and again... and again... And again. With very little variation. You'll get an active skill or two and the number will be bigger. The combat is so bad that you get stat checked out of encounters anyway so it doesn't really matter what skills you choose unless you have the item that you need to fight this enemy, located 2 maps away in an unmarked dungeon. It's so lazy there is just a self contained tutorial on the main menu like this is a platformer from the 1990s because designing a ramp up in your adventure title is too hard. It just starts at 1 pace and remains that that pace for the entire runtime, while talking heads tell you boring ♥♥♥♥ about the politics in a region you don't care about because the game made no attempt to endear you to the place through quests and character interactions, kind of like an adventure game. It is no exaggeration that some of the first adventure games ever made are far superior to this. Ultima Underworld and Daggerfall are much better games. Unless you have a friend and a lot of spare time, play anything else. Play Dora the Explorer because at least there is a ramp up in mechanics and actual progression and not just a diarrhea of slop scattered across the worst map you've ever seen, with random objects just pasted on to the scenery with no thought or reason to them being there. No it's fine it makes perfect sense there is a bandit castle 500m from my tribal village with more living people in it than my entire town. Everyone inside the town lives perfectly normal and happy lives because there is a loading screen between them and the bandits so there is no threat. A fence on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere? Thats fine. That's what fences are for. Being next to roads. Just piles of white rock that don't match the rock in the region and don't even begin to make up the ruins of a structure? That's fine I'm sure they mined the rock 2 maps away where your friend specifically said it an extremely dangerous journey (even while not carrying a rock the size of a person) and then carried those rocks all the way here, and then the starving peasants just repurposed those rocks to make strucutres that aren't in the game. I'm sure it just the ruins of the recent calamity everyone keeps mentioning. The monsters carried off the rocks in this disperate, poorly designed scenery. How did I not think of that sooner? They weren't there to kill and corrupt everyone they were there to take exactly 7/8ths of every single structure. They're very fond of floorboards and mortar you see.
This title reminds me a lot of something that someone I know did where they asked an AI to make Elden Ring with whatever it could find on the internet and then took what it ♥♥♥♥ out and adapted it to actually work. But this is worse. In hindsight all I needed to do was get to the character creator and I knew the exact amount of effort the developer was willing to put in to their players having fun, or play the first 15 minutes of the game to notice how desperately they wanted me to have to suffer their homebrew dungeons and dragons campaign that they can't find a single soul that wants to actually play at the table. Utterly embarassing.
