September '20 Play Log

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this game. The story was quite good.

Pros:

• Good story
• Enjoyable graphics and atmosphere
• Most of the powers you get are quite useful, and you can choose which ones to get to suit your play style
• The medals to play without being seen, without killing anyone, etc, can increase the challenge
• If you go back and replay earlier chapters you still have access to powers unlocked later

Cons:

• I predicted the ending fairly early in the game
• The end chapters were exceptionally difficult
• Playing on medium difficulty, chapter 2 felt overly difficult, like they just throw you in the deep end without ramping up the difficulty slowly
• I had trouble figuring out how to go back and replay chapters

Verdict: 8/10

For the most part a typical Artifex Mundi HOG, though the story was entirely predictable.

Pros:

• Most of the minigames aren’t too bad
• Most of the HOG scenes involve trying to find parts for something that will be useful, rather than the ‘find this specific junk in a pile of junk in order to get a completely unrelated item’ type of scenes

Cons:

• For the most part the voice acting is amaturish
• Predictable ending
• Some of the minigames boil down to trail and error
• Collectible achievement, but you can’t go back to all areas. I missed 2 in the castle, and was really glad you end up going back later in the story. For no obvious reason though, you can’t go to places in the castle from the beginning, so I still missed the achievement.

Verdict: 6/10

Overall a very good P&C game with a surprising amount of replayability. I highly recommend avoiding walkthroughs.

Pros:

• Very well voice acted
• When talking you see the characters face zoomed in. It’s well animated and conveys the characters emotion very well.
• Different conversation choices change your personality alignment, which changes how your character is perceived. This can subtly change the story. Of course most of it’s still the same so if you’re like me chances are you’ll click past it before realizing it had changed.
• Different personality alignments change which power gets unlocked. This in turn changes how puzzles have to be solved, adding replayability.

Cons:

• There was one puzzle where I never would have found the answer without a walkthrough. Even after knowing which hint is supposed to give the answer, it still doesn’t make sense.
• No manual saves. If you’re trying for a different overall personality and realize you’re going to miss it, you have to start the game again.
• No choices after day 2, so after that point you can no longer affect which your personality to change which achievement you get.
• There was at least one aspect of the story that didn’t make much sense/wasn’t explained, though it was relatively minor.

Verdict: 8/10

The weakest Artifex Mundi game I’ve played so far.

Cons:

• I really wasn’t a fan of the story
• Badly written dialogue
• Voice acting was even poorer than usual, especially the main character

Verdict: 3/10

Brilliant game. It’s one of the few games with platforming elements I’ve enjoyed. It reminds me of RiME. Its biggest weakness is the fixed camera which often has poor camera angles.

Pros:

• Gorgeous graphics
• There are spots in the game you can interact with to just enjoy the scenery; great for screenshots
• The combat is straightforward, neither too challenging nor too easy (at least until you get the 3rd sword upgrade)
• The puzzles are challenging without being frustrating

Cons:

• A not insignificant amount of the challenge comes from battling unfortunate camera angles
• There is supposed to be a story, complete with lore rooms, but I didn’t really get what was going on beyond the very basics. I’m not sure if that’ intentional, or if I just couldn’t interpret the symbols in the lore rooms the way they were intended.

Verdict: 8/10