alephnaught

A weird, wonderful, rough-cut diamond ****. A deep and fascinating setting - not our world, but analogous in its historical and ideological faultlines. All this explored through the lens of a deeply broken man - whose personality facets are represented by literal voices in his head, which also serve as the RPG attributes which you level up. The writing is absolutely phenomenal, some of the best I have ever seen. If you're interested in politics, philosophy, psychology, history, heck if you find the world or people interesting at all you'll love ****'s not perfect, and one shouldn't understate just how janky some aspects of this game are. Navigating the world is an absolute pain in the ass. While beautiful to look at, it's very bad at giving visual cues for where you can walk and where obstacles are, which means running around in circles a lot and getting stuck on stuff. The world is relatively small, but there's a lot of time spent trekking back and forth over the same ground, and the fast travel system is very limited and confusing (it wasn't until about half way through my play through that I even figured out where I could fast travel from/to!). There are no map markers, the journal is confusing, and it sometimes lists "checks" (tasks which have a dice roll attached) as available which are not. I had a few moments in my playthrough where I felt aimless and frustrated about what to do next.There's also a tension between the way the game presents your amnesiac protagonist as a "blank slate" and then slowly reveals details of your background to you. This would work okay if the character's backstory were more loosely defined, but getting told at one point that I used to be a gym teacher - hence my "huge guns" - was a bit odd given that I hadn't put a single point into Physique. There's a huge reveal-all backstory dump at the end of the game which is completely unnecessary.Still, the game's uniqueness and creativity shines above all that. It's impossible not to recommend, unless you're the type of gamer who skips dialogue to get to the action, in which case you might as well skip this whole game.

For me, it's just "okay". I like the art style. But the game is *very* easy, it lacks the scale and scope of the series' finest entries (MI2 for example, which has never been bested), and as someone who has enjoyed all of the games except for Escape the soft retcon vibe and super meta ending just felt a bit off and discontinuous with the previous games. It has its moments, but ultimately left me unsatisfied.

Honestly, it's a great game. Huge, living, breathing world to get lost in. Interesting stuff to find everywhere. Compelling characters. Great writing. Its problems aren't for a lack of anything, really. It's for the presence of so much obvious scaffolding for stuff that *isn't*"here. As a player, it's hard to experience that as anything other than disappointment - I want to experience that bit of story that was very clearly replaced last minute by this awkwardly rushed expository dialogue that explains all the things that just happened! A little longer in the kitchen and they could've easily filled in the cracks with a bit more delicacy, but many of these issues are pretty hard to fix post-release. So that's a shame. Once you accept that and immerse yourself in the world though.. wow.