Jump to content
passwords have all been force reset. please recover password to reset ×
MFGamers

Lost In Random


Maf
 Share

Recommended Posts

Started this tonight. I’m about 2-3 hours in and am in the second town of presumably 6. It seems Ok so far, but I can’t lie I’m not loving it.

 

The set up is you play as a young girl named Even who lives in a dark Tim Burton/Nightmare Before Christmas type world. When a child in the world becomes 12 they are found by the forces of the Dark Queen and their fate is decided by a roll of the dice. Even’s sister Odd rolls a 6 and is taken away by the Queen, now Even goes on an adventure to rescue her. 
 

Dice and cards are the theme of the day. For names, concepts, game mechanics, etc. It all comes back to cards and dice. So far they haven’t done anything particularly clever with the idea, but it’s a fun enough hook to base concepts around I guess.

 

The first hour of the game is very slow. It’s mostly just pushing up on the stick while being constantly interrupted by an annoying narrator. It takes a good while before you find the companion character Dicey, who enables the combat.

 

Which for me is the most interesting part so far. The way it works is Even has a slingshot that can be used to knock energy of bad guys, Dicey eats up the energy, and when he’s full he generates cards (Weapons or items) which can be selected to fight. It’s extremely easy so far. The dodge mechanic is as generous as I’ve ever seen and the enemies are dumb as shit. But the whole thing works quite well, is fun to do and could get more interesting down the line.

 

Aside from combat, which is relatively infrequent, there’s not much to do in the game. Wander around cool looking areas and push A on stuff. It’s an extremely light weight action RPG.

 

My problem with the game is two things. Firstly it’s just not very well made. It doesn’t look that sharp, the art style is nice but the animations don’t match it, the game is full of little visual glitches, the way it stitches levels together is rough and feels kind of outdated. 
 

The second problem is it’s just not that interesting. I do like the fighting, some of the ideas and visual design is cool, but it’s not enough to hold my interest. I’ve already started mashing through dialogue, taking breaks to look at Twitter, looking at what the achievements are (Thankfully they look pretty easy)

 

I dunno. It seems Ok, but not really grabbing me. It’s a game that is placing massive bets on it’s combat, world and looks, but isn’t really excelling at any of it. I’ll keep playing because I don’t feel done with it yet. But it’s going to need to pick up massively to get more than a shrug and a meh at this point. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Finished the game this afternoon. Eh, yeah, not really any more positive on it than I was at the beginning.

 

It’s a nice little game. Reminds me of a AA X360 game. I think if/when it hits Gamepass maybe check it out that way, but I couldn’t recommend buying it. It’s a nice, quaint little game but with the amount of other interesting games out right now this one doesn’t quite rate. Glad I played it, definitely liked it, but not missing anything if you skip it.

 

One annoying thing is I missed one achievement. It’s for collecting all 10 story pages. Usually the way it works is you have to solve a puzzle which unlocks a door and you grab the page. In town 5 I found a room with two door ways and the puzzle. Did the puzzle, walked through the door that unlocked, and this one time the locked door is actually the critical path and the open door takes you to the page. and I couldn’t turn back once I went through the locked door. Bastards. I don’t know why I didn’t check first. 

 

I might play through it again next week just to get that achievement because it annoys me that there is only 1 missing. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

Just blew through the game again to get the last 2 achievements

 

FApoQWyXoAom8N-?format=jpg&name=large

 
Considering it took me 2-4 days to play through the game first time around. If you just go straight forward, don’t stop for nothing style I did the whole thing in about 41/2 hours. Didn’t truly finish it because I didn’t beat the last boss. Only had to play up until a little bit before to get all the collectibles. Still 90% of the game.

 

It’s good but I would never play through it again. This is a game to play through once just for the sights, sounds and story if you care. The gameplay is cool and interesting but not that interesting that it can hold up 2 playthroughs. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 5 weeks later...

Decided to start this yesterday as it made a nice little Halloween game (as in it reminds me of Burton movies). I'm quite liking it so far but before I write anything else I'd like to say this has by far the best art direction I've seen in a game this year. It's unfortunate the technical side of things holds it back a bit but when the budget allows them to go all-out, like in some of the early cutscenes in the prologue, this very much is a playable Burton-movie and visually like nothing else on the market. It's a shame there's no awards thing in the industry for artists because they'd deserve every price they'd get. 

 

Unfortunately, due to budget constraints, it can't really stay on that level all the time. The second town looks a lot more mundane than the first, most non-cinematic dialogue is wooden and stiff and Eleven's responses aren't even voiced. The narrator feels tacked on because they couldn't find a way to organically interweave the exposition into other elements. It'a bit of a shame but then again if this had been more expensive to produce we probably wouldn't have gotten it – or it would have looked like Fortnite. So if that's the price to pay, I'm okay with it.

 

Combat is more accomplished than I expected on the other hand. I was a bit skeptical about it despite liking the overall idea, but it works surprisingly well. As soon as your fingers start finding the right buttons and you have a certain amount of cards to pick from there's a good flow, too. Sometimes theres a bit of downtime, particularly when facing flying enemies which can only be damaged by certain attacks/spells, which due to the random nature might not be in your hand at any point in time, but overall I enjoy playing it just as much as looking at it. There also seems to be some pretty broken stuff – I beat the second boss by dancing around his minions while he was off-screen and letting the poison which I applied to him before that phase drain all of his health. I doubt this is an oversight, because the loading screen tips mention some broken card combos as well.

 

So far, so good. I'm now on my way to Threedom (not a sex pun) and really looking forward to seeing what else this has in store.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Making slow-ish progress as I only get around an hour per night to play this but I'm still really enjoying it. The board game in threedom was a bit dumb because it took forever and you had no reliable way to speed the process up, but other than that it's a very nice game I think. I might have preferred more frequent but shorter combat segments because they tend to just overwhelm you with opponents at times, but it's certainly not a dealbreaker.

 

One thing I noticed though is that the sheen and polish is very front loaded, the initial 30-45 minutes look really good and set up the narrative extremely well but it's very noticeably they didn't have the means the stay at that level as the following areas you visit, despite them being canonically richer and "better", just don't look as good and interesting and proper cutscenes are few and far between. Though in fairness I've yet to see Five and Six, I've just arrived in Fourbourg yesterday.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
 Share

×
×
  • Create New...