The CrabJesus (Cjcomplex) special - he forced me to do this D:
Jokes aside, both games are wins from CJ, and in both cases I’m thankful for the opportunity and the game. Even if I consist of 85% regrets, 14% confusion and 1% unspecified PTSD regarding Everhood. In a nutshell, it’s a lazily low-graphics game with a story that is badly paced, a rhythm game combat system that is actually a reflex game that doesn’t follow the music as it’s delayed, some Im14andthisisdeep philosphy and psychedelic visuals every now and then. I didn’t know about these when I went in because it really looked like Undertale, and I liked that. Welllllllllllllll… also the game has 95% positive reviews so maybe I am the backwards trashmonkey who can’t appreciate “mudern” games. I think I never will understand / “underfeel” what they tried to convey, so better start working on trying to forget it.
My review seems to be the 2366th on Steam, and the 98th negative one, as the game sits at a whopping 96% positive review rate. As far as math and meme reviews go, it should be outstanding. And for whatever reason I really, really doesn’t feel like that. And I feel so weird about this that I have to write it out of myself. So please, treat this as a very subjective, very personal rambling of “wtf and why”, not a proper review.
Everhood is a game where you walk around and talk to people/monsters, and if it’s needed, fight them by defeating them in reverse-guitarhero.
I have two things of note about the combat: why there are no rebindable controls? The game uses 4 directions, E and escape on the map, and the 4 directions in fight. Even the classic NES had 4+2+2 buttons, why are we stuck to hardcoded 4 in combat? It’s so weird to dodge/attack with movement buttons in a quite chaotic manner.
Second: what is up with the pacing? At the beginning you have no idea where you are, who you are, you are thrown into 2-3 fights in mere minutes, then barely anything follows it up throughout the game, until the point where the game turns into almost only constan fighting.
With that aside - I liked the story, but it felt so little and so insignificant in the hours that I spent playing the game. The characters are flat and one-dimensional, there is no real time to build them up, which makes the ending feel incredibly flat. I liked the storyline, but I genuinely dislike how badly and ineffectively everything led up to it. From the goal that you get when you get your arm back to the endgame “plot twist” all I could think about was “I understand the implications, but why should I care?”. I don’t want to spoil much about the story as at least as an idea it’s pretty neat. Let’s just say how should I feel the weight of changing something that was unchanged for eons, if I’m just thrown into it and a few hours later I’m told to do it, with no other options? I can understand it, but I can’t sympathize, especially that the game made it pretty clear at many points that this world does not think the same as we do.
So I just pushed through the game, then the big reveal was that X is actually Y that was mentioned maybe twice in the whole game.
I genuinely don’t know what to think of this game. It may be the biggest rouse about emotions fading from an eons-old world, and making every character flat every reveal weightless and me not caring is the biggest meta-achievement a game ever done, or it just sucks and was made to be pseudo-deep for a demographic… I’m not sure. It has stuff like achievements for superhard no-hit fights, grind like 150 000 jump rolls or “troll” achievements for walking for hours in a corridor. I don’t think a game is focusing on multi-level hidden messages with such arbitrary goals that are exactly the other way as thinking about the message would be.
I frankly disliked the game and felt relieved to finally finish it. Can’t think of it as maybe two paragraph’s worth of fortune cookie-wisdom, with lots of subpar and unfun gameplay slapped to it, but judging from the reviews I’m in vast minority with it. So go, look around a bit, read more reviews because there are a lot of people who liked the game a lot more than I did.
On the other hand Stardewfarer was a nice mix of build your home - talk with NPCs - collect resources - buildyourbase game. While trying itself in a completely different angle, Spiritvalley has lacked the intensity of another game that I think you can guess at this point.
It was beautiful at points, it had pretty nice minigames, but while the game improved a lot since its first few hours, it never really went into “full focus game” mode. It’s a game where you watch a series in one eye, or listen to a podcast, because there are SO MUCH DOWNTIME. And I don’t even know what is the uptime at this point, because there are travelling between islands, there are nights while travelling when you can’t move (or look at the map, for whatever reason), and you can get a new, relevant line from your spirit passengers every few days on average. And while waiting, you can cook that can take even a day to finish (you can cook multiples of the same food, so blame only yourself for that) or tend your gardens, which consists of running around and watering them, then waiting them to grow.
It was legit not a bad game, but it’s like me in my worst moments of stress and ADHD when I can’t keep my attention on anything for more than 5 minutes. It has lots of fragments of individually good stuff. Like if you force two differently coloured combs together so the teeth fill up the wholes. I know that they are entirely different games, but I feel like Stardew Valley got each of the social connections, the “do stuff every day”, and the building of your farm better. Or maybe it was the devs goal to do a little this and the little that and as you look up, your time is down, the story ends. Like how life is often portrayed. Or I’m just making stuff up at this point, I don’t know… everything can be explained :D
The movement and the platforming was outstanding - I think it was mostly what made the game a lot better for me at the end. I would LOVE to have a proper metroidvania with the same movement system
I wrote so much extra other than the review that I posted on Steam as well, because I guess here I don’t have to deal with fanboys and -girls defending their favourite game by shittalking others. Spiritfarer is a really nice game that is a little too relaxed for me, as it always had the little nudge in my mind that they could have done better. But I can see why people love it a lot more than I did - a more personal connection to characters, or simply just loving going around and building 20 orchards and be a fruit mogul or I don’t know. It has a lot of options :)
Spiritfarer is a huge game - howlongtobeat lists it as 23-36 hours long depending on completion, but can be a lot more. For me it was 48 hours spent with the game running, and likely 43ish hours playing it. And at some points during that 43 hours, I would have written a different review. It surely has its ups and downs.
For starters, the game begins extremely fast. You’re dropped into an unknown world and get your “job” in maybe 3 minutes. Then you’re gradually presented more options, more locations, more resources, more upgrades, new spirits, as the game goes on, in a loop, until the end.
Some things I wish I knew sooner:
Progress: The game is only as big as the currently unlocked map if you don’t follow the spirits quests. There are three milestones to get past: ice, rocks and fog. Game gets really nice after the ice, and stunning after the rocks, with many options and goals.
“Economy” don’t try to “break the economy” by pushing yourself farming resources or money at the beginning, the game will only give you more as it progresses, and it’s vastly better to collect whatever you can compared to buying.
With those out of the picture: I was miserable at the beginning of the game. So little to do, so few places to go, the ship stops at night. You see, I love my game mechanics, and there were barely anything to do. And while the spirits have stories, they only drop 4-5 blocks of story after progressing their quests, outside of it they are mostly there to demand food.
Then after I started focusing on the character stories, the game started opening up, which made it a lot better in many ways. New abilities are granted quite rarely (also linked to spirits’ stories) but new resources, buildings, resource-collecting minigames get unlocked. The game starts acting like a game with stuff to do, and I started to enjoy it a LOT more.
But as the game progressed, it became clear that it has some issues with storytelling. It’s not entirely sure if you have some adventuring done between story “segments”, or you get some story between adventuring. Many, if not most spirits don’t have a personality, they only have things that they say.. They still have a quite well laid out character, but they don’t really act it, because they have so few non-storydump dialogues. And what they have, most of that is linked to food.
Also an interesting issue of mine - the game’s narrative is like a reverse Murdered: Soul Suspect. In M:S.S. you are collecting info and memories that the main character knows but you don’t, and it breaks immersion. In Spiritfarer everyone treats Stella as they know her, which builds connection, but you have no idea who they are, and it comes off like you’re amnesiac and it’s kind of weird, it surely made me distanced from many characters. I want to like them for what they do now, not what they tell me about what they did. Game is pretty lacking in the “show, don’t tell” thing.
Overall, after the bad start and getting the game known better, it became quite a solid one, I ended up enjoying the second half a lot better than I expected from the start. Would give it a 7 or 7.5 / 10. It was great looking and pleasant -I liked to sit down and continue the game, but wasn’t thrilled to do so.