ChuangTzu

The only explanation for reviewers giving this game 9/10 or more, is that they never played the classic text-based adventure games from the previous decades, and they thought this game is incredibly original. Admittedly, for a indie game developer came out of nowhere, this game is an impressive achievement, so it still deserves a positive review and might be greatly enjoyed by many. Some of the characters and quests are memorable, and the amount of fed-ex subplots is not quite zero (i.e. go to check those traps again...) but luckily still it is minimal. This said however, I find that the game has a number of crucial flaws. 1) As other reviews have pointed out, the wall of text is always pretentious and unnecessary, a good 2/3 could have been cut out; 2) The skill check system, which has been designed to make the story flow, often obtains the opposite outcome and forces you to save constantly; 3) The dialogue workflow, although quite clever overall, is far from perfect and sometimes doesn't fit with what you have progressed in the story so it makes you wonder why some reviews scored this as a 10 as it's objectively not perfectly done; 4) The clothes system to increase stats is very time wasting and boring. Although I have fulfilled most of the plots, the majority of my skills had still 0 points assigned, which forces you to constantly swap the clothes and scroll several lines of them at some point - unless you memorize their associations with the skills which sounded quite stretched to me so not really that obvious. 5) The controls are a little clunky - again not a huge problem and not too different from the majority of these kind of games, but still not the masterpiece many claim this game is. Finally, a personal subjective comment, I was not a fan of the political tone of the whole game, which will only appeal to a leftist - a radical one even, but this is not an objective issue with the game. Admittedly, it does fit quite well with the general feel of the game, but still it seems to regularly take hits at people who think free market and law have a place in society, and also made the plot development to me at least quite predictable.

If you loved 80s platform games such as Megaman or Duck Tales, then you have to try this. Shovel knight is a brilliant revival of the genre in crisp full HD, with inspiration also from the first Zeldas (the inventory and the cities) and several others of the best 8-bit games.