fyrerise

This is a "game" that's not a game. Think of it as a series of little minigames (skipping rocks across a bond, skateboarding down a road, pretending to control your character as they float through a forest, etc.) interspersed with hours of the most pretentious dialog you will _ever_ hear as adult children in Australia write what they think middle America sounded like in the 80s and 90s based on what they saw in movies like "ET" and "Stand By Me", and with a healthy dose of their own political modernism blended in to reinforce the message. It's not fun, it's not clever, it's not original. It does have a very expensive soundtrack, as it was bankrolled by Megan Ellison, daughter of Oracle centibillionaire Larry Ellison. There's not much content here either — overall play time is 2 to 4 hours, although by the end of that you'll be thankful it's not any longer. Perhaps the most disturbing part of this debacle are the critic review scores which glaze the "game" undeservedly to a suspicious extent. Perhaps the most outrageous example is the perfect 10/10 assigned by IGN. No one who has _ever_ picked up a video game before could ever mistake this for a 5 or more out of 10. Whether it's a 1, 2, 3, or 4 is debatable, but it's objectively not a 5, and is galaxies away from a 10. So how did IGN get to a 10? Well, your guess is as good as mine, but a significant factor is that the game aligns the political priors and social objectives that game "journalists" push. However, that alone doesn't seem to explain it, and we shouldn't rule out some other kind of "sponsorship" for the reviewers in question. It's impossible to imagine any other way this blemish on human thought could get anywhere near a 10 otherwise. Even discounted 80 or 90%, this would still be a "do not buy". Don't waste your time.

I like the game's ambience and the shooting feels good, but I've never encountered a game so disrespectful of your time. It's punishingly difficult, single runs take multiple hours, there's few ways to replenish health, and so a single mistake anywhere burns your entire session. Almost nothing carries over between runs, so after you finish one, you're left with this empty feeling where you can viscerally feel the hours of your life it'd taken to get there just ... gone forever. I've given it good faith attempts 4-5 times over the years since it came out, and I never get passed the first biome. I'm not a great gamer, but I'm not particularly bad either. There's no way to grind or make the game easier, so if you can't build up the considerable skill required to get anywhere, you're just down $70 with no recourse. I saw that the same studio released a new game last month ("Saros") and I didn't consider buying it for even one second. I'm sure the guys at this studio think they're 1337 game designers or whatever by screwing over half their customer base, but eff them. You burn legitimate buyers by making games with big price tags and zero forgiveness in play style.