Withering Realms

I dunno how far I am or how long the game is generally but I think this is a pretty well designed game. I played Withering Rooms and it's kind of interesting to see a direct sequel so distinctly different, while maintaining most of what I liked about that game. Unlike the first, which felt like a 2D survival horror a lot of the time, this is a fully 3D action game. Starting off I didn't know if I was gonna like this game because you don't have a whole lot of options to approach encounters. The combat is slow and your move speed feels relatively slow for the size of the arenas. When you have a few weapons you like combat is still very slow and metered, but satisfying. I would still like the not-in-combat move speed to be a little faster, but there may be an item that changes that. Some nice quality of life elements to the gameplay are here, like automatically healing when you hit zero health, so you don't have to juggle items while focused, saveable loadouts and teleportation to important entrances and landmarks to make backtracking less of a pain. I also like the use of random elements in the open field areas of the game, although a lot of the open fields feel too much like gigantic square rooms rather than organic outside-y nature bits. Also some enemies have pretty hard to notice tells and I've been trapped in the corner more than once. I think the story and atmosphere of this game is the most interesting part of it, being a direct continuation of a game that I have trouble directly contrasting with a single other property. Outside of obvious homages to things like Silent Hill (and with the presence of a cultist town and a plucky private investigator making it feel a bit alone in the dark-y) it's kind of a unique mix of country, time period and supernatural elements, with nothing feeling out of place. I was surprised how much was familiar from my time playing withering rooms (which I never finished and should get back to) The customization that I liked from the first game is all still here, and now you have three characters you can customize. The little girl seems to have the least options since she is always green and doesn't have any slots for accessories outside of hair and dress, which is fine, because the third character gets all the cute dresses. Overall, other than some combat hiccups and a few enemies I frankly despise, this has to be the best corpse automaton dressup game I've ever played.

[Early Access Review] I haven't played an action rpg which is this refreshing since the PS2 era. It has the soul of that time but it's modern and feels wonderful to play. Games like Shadow Hearts, Koudelka and Rule of Roses come to mind in terms on visuals/style. Dark Souls style mechanics giving you challenging gameplay and interesting levelling. Old school style Zelda map/levels with a huge world to explore. You want a challenge? You want weird builds? You want a decent story? You want a full game that's early access? You want a little poo to come out because something came out of the dark at you and you're on 1hp? Yeah it's got all that. But it, play it. It's criminal how cheap this is for the quality of game you're getting.

good

Has a real 'PS1/2 era' feel to it. Still playing through so hard to exactly say how it compared to the original but so far, it's a very different game. I really miss the curse mechanic of the original and I'm not sure that I enjoy the art and progression as much. That said, the world is interesting and compelling. There is an intersting horror/occult theme an aesthetic. If you're buying this game, don't expect a clone/upgrade of the original. The game is quite original and a continuation of the original in story only. Expect something that feels a bit more like something between PS1 Harry Potter, Medievil and 'Bully'. Definitely worth a buy.

I played 24 hours of this in like three days. It's fantastic. Almost completely fantastic. It's really just got the sauce.

The game is great everything that I expected ton of loot mystery and lore to keep me interested for hour the difficulty will scare away all the normies that didn't play withering room 1.0 it was pain

Played the ♥♥♥♥ out of Withering Rooms so I've been waiting patiently for Withering Realms to come out since its announcement. It's an amazing game and the amount of content and build potential available from day 1 of early access makes it easy to overlook whatever might still be missing. Performance could be better in some areas and certain combat encounters could be tweaked to be more tolerable, but that's what the early access period is for and there's absolutely no reason to wait on buying and starting the game if you're even slightly interested in its vibe.

Don't be turned away by the early access for this one. Its one of the few that's complete beginning to end. If the balance gets wacky or something really bad I'll change the review. However for now if you can live with some Dark Souls 1 esc combat jank (it's made by one person, it's not even bad) it has a very similar kind of charm/nostalgic atmosphere to go with it, making it well worth it. As for the general gameplay, it is very enjoyable, and even though it has souls style level progression and mechanics, even on normal difficulty it is less punishing on death than typical souls-likes, if that kind of thing bothers you. Combat feels tight and you can see some good examples of character build variety in the first 2 hours. Exploration is rewarding and intriguing and offers a balance of pacing ranging somewhere between older resident evil games/silent hill and Dark Souls 1. Creative direction is the most impressive thing here in my opinion. Very cool setting and levels that stand out due to the devs care and effort to create memorable encounters and environments. Btw if you want to make use of fsr for performance reasons, but want newer versions, optiscaler and fsr 4.1 work on my 9070xt, so if you have used it in other titles on your setup it will most likely work here. I am using the latest optiscaler build.