31.8 hours played
Written 21 days ago
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Introduction
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Weird and disturbing games if you take it litterally. The whole universe is filled with creepy-pasta like and many nightmarish creatures.
Past that, it's an RPG which mean turn per turn fighting. It's not overwhelming but you'll suffer a bit if you pick randomly and don't experiment a bit which companions to use. It does its job, as someone who dislike turn per turn it was fine. My biggest complain was the RNG, you could attempt difficult ennemy who have one shot move and either have a perfect scenario where the debuffs means the ennemy would litterally kill itself (Satan for one) or just bad luck and get your whole party decimated in a few turn. It's just grotesque and it may be how RPG works but it's quite annoying since all you get is wasted time and a game over prompt. Go at it again, save before your attempts and pray it goes well, not my favorite thing at all.
The theme of the game are quite heavy, depression, guilt from past childhood trauma. I recently played Max Payne 3 and it's always interesting to take a look at broken minds, lifes and how they evolve. It makes the playthrough very personnal even if you don't understand or align with the goal of Brad entirely.
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RPG and Pain Mode Issues
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While I enjoyed the game (again, on this 2nd playthrough) my only grip are related to either the RPG elements of the fighting or Pain Mode with the Definitive Edition.
As stated RPG can be very very RNG dependant, and Pain Mode on top makes for some annoying experience during the beginning of the game and the end.
My biggest grip first is... why do crows explode when you do not save because you prompted the menu by reflex. You end up wasting entirely your save point which is a big issue. Pain mode in itself is harder because you cannot just grind, buy item, gain level and then attempt a tough ennemy. My experience during Area 1 was to try entering Area 2 with the Victor Sweet Tea fight, which is a ridiculous 2x9000 hp ennemies, who does full aoe of nearly 500+ which can nearly result in Terry dying every couple of turn on top of the absurd damage at that level. So you'd think, ok I need to prepare better, but you don't have any crows left. Thus, on my playthrough I ended up grinding a few level and attempting it again with nearly 1 hour of non saved played, and ended up having a really lucky RNG on the debuffs resulting in the ennemies killing mostly themselves. Had it not worked I would had needed to grind again for an absurd amount of time with no saves.
Once you realize you need to use Save point very strategically, I think its fairly interesting but absurdly punishing on a few scenarii : 1° If you enter a brad 1v1 unique fight when Brad was left with very little hp and you didn't know (first time player wouldnt know) / 2° Falling of the map because a tons of ropes or elevation are placed near instant fall off. If you only miss one button (you have to move a lot sometime around the map) you may simply loose 20-30min+ of played time, to do it all over again...
Last, when you get to area 3, if you want to do the secret boss on Definitive Edition, a big issue arise from the fact you need to kill Satan + train your crew at EWC, this ended up being a 2 hour grind for my play since I wasnt sure of the difficulty of the Secrete Boss. Had I fell off the map by mistake on my way to save, its 2 hour of lost time...
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Pain Mode fix
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In my opinion to fix pain mode : Add at least 1-2 saves in Area 1 close to Sweet Tea / 1 save in Area 3 before the boat at least. Also, one more crows in the Secret Boss universe so you don't have to do 20min of RP to get into the fight every time...
Verdict : 10/10 unique but painful experience
Pain Mode is not worth it unless you know how to plan ahead your Saves perfectly (I did my 2nd play after 4 year of my first so I improvised while searching on the Wiki for saving places). If you want to 100% clear the game and its ennemies + content then just go normal.
