God, western RPGs are exhausting. Every time I try to give them a fair shake I end up with a massive timesink of tedium.

I heard this game had interesting characters and tactical combat where you manipulate the environment to your advantage — sounds cool! What this game actually is is a tedious, exhausting slog where you have to constantly reset because poking the wrong NPC breaks quests and/or gets you killed with no warning. Were you wondering what was up with that kitty? Well if you talk to the wrong NPC in the starting area they kill it and you miss out on that subplot. Talk to the NPC you were told to talk to to advance your quest? Have an unskippable persuasion check and if you fail it he murders you. The quest design is just incredibly hostile to the player. The combat isn’t much better: It’s a system where movement and positioning are extremely important, yet instead of anything easy to parse like tiles it uses a bizarre free-movement system where if you’re a pixel off your attacks will get blocked by terrain, which is just immensely frustrating.

And the item economy is awful. There is a crafting system, so you have to hold onto every shell and twig and scrap of garbage in case it might be useful for something, and boy howdy is there a lot of garbage to pick up! In addition to items being scattered across the map, there are also tons of containers, which are usually but not always empty, so you have to search every single one and I just do not have the energy for this. There isn’t skill involved in searching every nook and cranny, it’s just tedious busywork.

It also suffers from trying to be a “You can do anything!” sim that, as always, just results in being dizzying and confusing. You can pickpocket or kill absolutely everyone, and in fact all the guides advise you to do so. (Specifically, it encourages you to help them for the quest XP and then turn around and murder them to get maximum XP, which is so horrifying I had to stop and stare at a wall for a few minutes.) As far as I can tell XP and gold are finite resources, so… how can the game possibly be balanced when the resources available to the player can vary so wildly? Why am I punished for trying to engage with the narrative and view characters as people instead of pinatas?

So what about that narrative? Well, the worldbuilding seemed interesting — there are evil lizard people but they’re sophisticated evil lizard people who are very prim and proper about their racism and slavery, and elves can apparently read memories by eating people. There’s also some sort of cosmic horror thing going on. I have no idea where any of it’s going, because I somehow managed to sink 20 hours into it without even completing the first act and at that rate the Sun is going to burn out before I finish.

Everything about this game just feels like torture for completionists. Content can just be suddenly locked off from you at any time without warning, so I have to proceed at a snail’s pace while constantly cross-referencing a guide to make sure I don’t miss anything, and God forbid I do miss anything because enemies annihilate you if you’re underleveled.

I can’t help but smell the stink of D&D on this. I knew the worst of D&D’s combat mechanics got ported over to console RPGs, but I didn’t realize the worst of its campaign design also wormed its way in here. GMs get sick of players who are just out to break things, they push back with incredibly punishing campaigns that break if you do anything wrong, this continues for decades until everyone thinks it’s how games are supposed to work and not a deeply miserable experience for everyone involved. A little bit of streamlining and railroading is not always a bad thing.