Gonna call it a night and get a boss done in Khazan. Lot of cutscenes and menus but so far..
I forgot critics are pretentious and I get a whiff of pretentiousness in this, nothing repulsive yet or anything like that, all seems good but I suspect I will be cringing at some point or I might just be overthinking the style.
Graphics are surprisingly good and image quality is clean, quality mode is very playable so far and I can't think of a reason why it won't be later, camera is perfectly responsive and smooth, feels higher than 30 apart from when sprinting but it's still not terrible. There is a host of PP and motion blur to turn off, though I kept the vignette cause it seems it may be an artistic choice and the hair is pretty shit and lip sink is terrible but aside from that, better than most AAA games these days. I've spent more time in this stopping to look at details than I probably have in any game total since I got my PS5 during and I only started it 3 hours ago.
Music is fucking stellar, even just the background stuff. Atmosphere and vibes are just stellar, I'm depressed and this cheered me up. VA is stellar. Menus are Stellar. Artstyle is stellar. The world.... everything so far, apart from the terrible non existent lip sink I hope they can patch, I can think of is amazing me more than any AAA game I can think of this early on. Too early to say for combat, I'll need a few more battles. The game has a great feeling like you don't know what's coming next, a sense of wonder, like there are bits that are fucking weird but like a Kojima game I amn't questioning that strangessness, feels like the world exists and it just is the way it is but it's also very enthralling really, really similar to a Kojima game actually. It is all very Kojima/Miyazaki of FromSoft like but brighter in tone. If someone told me this was a Kojima game under a pen name I wouldn't be surprised. I'm going in very blind, maybe this won't surprise others.
Perhaps character movement is a bit weird but you get used to that apart from when a character shoots off like a bullet but they use magic teleportation so...eh, not a big issue and there are some flat textures to be sure, a tiny bit of ailising, unrounded edges. Stiff animations, a feeling like the animation is off and not just the lipsink at times. Small stuff. Like a guilt player doen't change chords, little details like that.
If I get up out of bed tonight to play this, I wouldn't be surprised, very impressed so far and I'd still be playing if Khazans pull wasn't so strong, it beats playing Oblivion anyway by a country mile, they got the the feeling of Oblivion better in this game, nice bright (even if not in colour sometimes) fairy tale world.
Last edited by LegitHyperbole - on 24 April 2025
