kazanova_Frankenstein wrote:Don't get too excited - I have read a few reviews critical of the run animation not being quick enough. That being said it will hopefully be faster than the walking one.
Yeah, it's not lightning fast, but it does feel better.
Spent a bit more time with this yesterday, and I'm really enjoying it. The setting is really interesting, the sets are fun to explore and examine, and the characters really feel substantial and characterful. The claymation models and physical sets they've built for this really add so much to the feel of the place, and it feels so unique for a video game.
I've skimmed a few reviews of this, and I think I have to agree with what appears to be the biggest point of criticism, but I don't think it bothers me honestly. There's not a lot of "game" here. You're really just moving from point A to B then back to A again to trigger conversations. There's not much in the way of puzzles or other activities, and it feels more like a visual novel than anything else. You might see people argue that this could have been a movie or TV series, but then you'd lose the immersion that comes with inhabiting this place yourself. The PDA feels diagetic too, even if it does take you out of the game world and seems to pause time while you look at it. It's neat that Harold's sketches of what you've been up to are also childishly bad cartoons, feeling like they fit the character, rather than the artistically competent efforts you would find in the journal in Red Dead 2, for instance. The menus in it also appear to be full of superfluous information that feels like nonsense, but presumably means something in universe.
It all feels like a full world, ready to be explored, and I'm sitting here at work just thinking about doing more of that. There's definitely shades of Rapture to the underwater space station you're on, only without the chaos of the plasmids, but there's the same hand of libertarian isolated capitalism pulling the strings. It's definitely a game more for the people who heard the pre-fall of Rapture audio diaries in Bioshock and thought they wanted to spend more time exploring that.