I guess I'm glad, in an oblique sense, that this game exists. I'm not glad I decided to play it.
it'd be an interesting game, if I hadn't played a dozen other things that have implemented its constituent parts better. it'd be a fun game, if it wasn't tuned so unkindly. it'd be a good game, if only, if only, if only.
where do I start on this? the degenerate strategy of the gameplay? the anchoring baked into the tuning? the thematic mush?
I've already spewed plenty of words on my skill issue around parry timing. this, too, is a parry game. the timing windows are largely tolerable in one-on-one encounters, but that's the crux of the problem. it's never just one-on-one. there are always more dudes. there are always more dudes. where sekiro made parrying a string of attacks by a singular target the whole conceit in a way that made me completely unable to deal with it at the best of times, unsighted leaves each enemy in an encounter to enter a circular queue around you to set off their next singular attack before another queue number is called and the next enemy gets to take a swing at you. if you perfect parry, your stamina refills, but if not, you get whittled down as several enemies alternate each step of their multi-hit combos at you, and you slowly run out of options as you take hits or whiff parries.
and you will see this queue in essentially every room, and in every boss fight. every boss that could've been a cool 1v1 has an add phase that repeats, if not infinitely, enough to beggar belief at the limits of finite spawns. every sorrow compounds itself, every mistake beats more out of you, and all of this bears down on you as every character, including you, runs out of time to live.
the only direct upgrades your character gains are more slots to equip chips for various bonuses, and extra permanent healing syringe capacity. no HP gains, no defense gains, no nothing. enemies will beat the shit out of you and your mostly fixed single-digit HP from the beginning of the game to the end. when enemies do 2-3 damage (a regular state in early to mid game here) and you're at 7 by default, dying in ~3 hits creates a painful balance, especially when your sole healing option is minimally available. it was rare to ever see my syringe refill from regular combat, and rarer still to see a well-placed syringe refill tank when I actually needed it.
I said there's anchoring baked into the tuning, and I really feel that; good friend ammy (who had a better time of this game than I did) pointed out that she felt like the game was tuned around finding a defense chip and never removing it. I shuffled my chips around to accommodate the defense chip, bringing the average chump enemy from 2-3 damage to 1-2, and, indeed, it bolstered my survivability significantly. subsequently, I also got multiple permanent healing syringes courtesy of a dummied-out recipe (that nonetheless still works) instead of spending 3 meteor dust a pop on them, and instead spent 3 meteor dust on the character who would've made them for me, getting a chip to refill syringes over time. between having more total heals, more consistently available heals, and taking significantly less damage from enemies, my experience improved dramatically.
but like... the game could've been tuned so enemies didn't 3-shot you at a base statline. the healing refills could've been more generous. the healing items could've been something that wasn't locked behind spending the meteor dust used to keep people alive, in a situation where the local fairy bot didn't inform me this was an option by patronizing the shit out of me for dying in the first dungeon. me feeling better after the game slapped me around and then gave me slightly better terms for getting slapped around is not really admirable. I prefer opt-in difficulty, not opt-out, and I don't think that's unreasonable. give me chips that, idk, make me take more damage but also make me deal more damage. reward me for risky pla-- oh you mean those are also already in the game? cool. make those stronger and give me better base defense, please.
in the game designed to have the timer looming, the player death costing time makes sense. but it should also be reasonable to let the player build to be survivable at the cost of combat efficiency, so that it can become a balancing act where they're taking longer on boss fights but they're not as at risk of death and having to do the whole thing over again. this game doesn't put the player in a position to really lean into that conservative playstyle, which would've been a nice option. but the base stats simply do not bear out to make that reasonable. it's risky or riskier because you're still going to get wombo-combo'd by like four extra dudes that the boss spawned because even if you fully build for offense, you still can't kill the first set of two dudes that this shitty fucking crab spawned last time before the goddamn cycle started again and what do you mean I can't PARRY THIS FUCKING CRAB LET ME DO CRITICAL DAMAGE
W H A T D O Y O U M E A N THERE'S ANOTHER WORSE ONE LATER
I'm so, so, so very grateful that explorer mode exists so I can turn off the timers on the NPCs. it doesn't, however, change the effect that knowing the timer exists has on my perception of the game. every obtuse puzzle, every janky bit of platforming, every bit of friction that needed more polish grates all the more when a real timer hangs over the player's head. in my sekiro DNF post, I said:
and on top of all this, the game has the gall to try and guilt trip you for being bad at the game and dying! every "real" death risks spreading the dragonrot, which halts all questlines for affected NPCs and makes them cough at you when you talk to them. [...] if you're going to make a threat, follow through on it instead of neutering it. fucking cowards.
I stand by it! fromsoft were cowards about this. unsighted is not. full respect to the devs for making this annoying decision with their whole chest. if they didn't have explorer mode I just straight up would not have ever played this game but I'd have respected that decision from a distance.
worse still is how this game's vibes entirely based around that ticking clock just... don't work for me, in the end. where the weight of time hangs off the premise, the final boss is instead completely detached, and the secret final boss and its associated unlock process is actually antithetical to any of the credit I was giving this game.
spoilers, I guess, for the final boss and its secret, worse, third phase as part of the "true" ending below.
basically every component of the process of unlocking the "true" final boss is a waste of time, both mine and every NPC's.
- step 1: fight an optional boss that only actually fights you if you tell them to reap themselves for their time instead of taking anyone else's.
- step 2: get into the final dungeon to use the keycard the optional boss gave you, and also wander into a hidden corner of a room to find a mysterious blueprint.
- step 3: find three completely unmarked fake walls in assorted rooms around the world. they're off in corners you can't really get to without double hookshots, so it's going to be all backtracking.
- step 4: go fight the second worst boss in the game, a crab with way too much goddamn health and the least tolerable adds ever, for the last piece of the recipe.
- step 5: make the recipe, and slap the resulting clock into a dead end hallway nearby.
- step 6: ????? step into the portal of time?????
- step 7: you're back at the start of the game like someone used the song of time in majora's mask. for some reason. and this unlocks the third phase of the final boss?? for some reason?
the final boss is the... alien? god? random pissy lifeform? living in the meteor that the entire game is based around. it's mad that humans (which alma isn't, for the record?) corrupted its power, anima, and it wants to leave and fuck back off into space; however, it picks a fight with alma first, claiming that it will lay to rest in another world until "the cycle is broken", and then... alma fights it and it claims that love was her answer? sure? the final boss gets even worse if you did the true ending prereqs, refilling its entire health bar, making all of its attacks More, and just generally turning into a fucking disaster.
so, hey, I'm gonna lay this on the table for you: you didn't earn this. you didn't earn any of this. deus ex meteor doesn't carry any weight to me. the "true" end containing a mechanism where you can waste a shit ton of extra time on an obnoxious fetch quest (and an even more obnoxious optional boss, really, fuck that crab) to completely reverse time to the start of the first day undercuts everything about the vibe of the pendulum of damocles which is the entire goddamn premise. robot lesbians were not enough to save the vibe for me here.
for a game about making the most of your limited time, you sure wasted mine. I hope your next game is good because it looks vaguely like mega man legends and that's pretty neat.