The Sea Eternal

I'd love to recommend this game, but I honestly can't. There are some good things about it - the setting is interesting, the writing is elegant and descriptive and it packs a lot in, but where it suffers is both in terms of the pacing and indeed the extent to which there's three or four stories all struggling to breathe in such a short period. Accepting that one can go too far the other way, the speed at which you're thrust into the game means it's very hard to really care about your protagonist, especially when most of their past decisions have been made for them, and by the time you're beginning to form a personality for them, the game is already over and you've got to start again - my first playthrough maybe took 40 minutes and my second took a lot less once I'd waded through the unskippable establishing plot points. Equally, the issue is that because there are so many different threads to be pulled, you maybe have time to pull one of them every playthrough, and equally it's not clear what sort of playthrough you have to do in order to get them apart from by trial and error, especially when most of the non-status quo endings are hidden behind a very specific set of checks which force you to play in a very specific way, and which equally seal off all the other arcs behind you. I don't mind the concept of wanting to encourage a player to replay a game to get the full effect, but the amount of faff you have to put in for the rewards you get in a second or a third playthrough isn't worth it. All in all, worth a look if you adore the writer's work or you like mer-stuff, but for someone who bought more on the reputation of the studio than anything else, it was a disappointment.