>>720049301
Action-adventure, like a weird sci-fi Indiana Jones. You play as a guy investigating a mysterious a civil-war-torn country with its own fictional history, religions and lore. You explore modern areas and ancient ruins, discover artifacts, and help NPCs in more traditional RPG fashion (small narrative fetch quests).

Main influence is obviously Souls (stamina and lock-on combat, intricate branching level design), but it’s not trying to be a straight copy. There are tweaks to formula and it mixes in other influences, especially Resident Evil (or more generally, point-and-click/escape room) type of progress gating/light puzzle-solving (bring item to door, matching symbols, odd mechanisms, passwords in documents, etc.), though more open-ended and spread out map-wise.

The world is semi-open (not one big world, you teleport to hub regions) and non-linear, backtrack-heavy, with a mix of larger areas, tighter dungeons and NPC hubs.

Combat is more forgiving than Souls, but also more focused on crowd control and with some novel mechanics (timing-based healing). I find it fun but downside is lack of enemy variety and no bosses, gets repetitive.

Promised slightly less guidance than modern equivalents but doesn't fully commit to the bit. Not challenging by any means unless you're brain-damaged but it's just more rooted in 90's standards than 2020's constant handholding. Expects you to explore thoroughly, pay attention to details, remember unsolved points of interest to backtrack to later, mentally map branching/slightly mazey levels. Light puzzling and dungeon crawling, don't expect deep eureka moments or really getting lost, just perhaps 10 minutes of mild confusion at times. Nothing mind-blowing but pleasant and satisfying.

Atmosphere, art direction, environmental storytelling, worldbuilding and attention to details all great, but a bit tonally inconsistent. And you can feel it's made on a smaller AA budget. Made by former art director from Deus Ex HR/MD.

>>720033059
>Ain't JJB the art director for this? Quite a step down from nuDeus Ex desu.
He posted 3 examples + perhaps some suspicions of AI on some of the portraits.
Graphic design overall is so good.
My disappointment is all those items and documents for the most part aren't actually important and containing critical clues you have to study and decrypt. I was disappointed the language is auto-translated too.

They made all those gorgeous parchments, maps, etc. and they're just fluff instead of conveying clues. There's that one drawing for the blue flower lake and it's ruined because NPCs still spoonfeed you too much. It can't just be you finding a clue and deciding to act on it, the game still has to have dialogues to direct you to follow up.

Actually it's kind of crazy how much effort they put into some small details, but didn't think to add more enemy variety, wrong priorities. When you remember the director is an art director rather than a game designer suddenly it makes more sense.

There are a lot of details that haven't mentioned but for example when you help the two NPCs at the chapel, after they vanish, there's one less car in the parking lot. Or when you give the UN woman a change of clothes, her uniform is left behind. Tiny background drawings in some rooms and they all seem handcrafted, the calendars say 1993 even though you can't zoom in, all the different sigils that contribute to worldbuilding and environmental storytelling, etc. So many details like that.

But then it also has baffling obvious misses like dialogue options not taking into account things you've already found. Like you can't tell the library stoner that his colleague is dead but you can keep asking him where he is instead.

So much wasted potential to make a real detail-oriented archeology/detective adventure/mystery.