Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones

This game has a lot going for it: - Premise - Setting - Story! - Art style - Atmosphere - The sheer insanity (in a good way) Unfortunately, the experience is marred by several combat breaking bugs which render the game unresponsive. Combat therefore becomes a chore, as you are constantly forced to restart scenarios or even load a savegame to be able to get through them. This is exasperated by the fact that there is no way to manually save (only way is to "save and exit", which means you have to reload whenever you want to save). A lot of users have reported completing the game without encountering significant bugs, so you might get lucky, but I am in no way alone in experiencing these issues. It's clear that sufficient testing and QA was not undertaken, resulting in the game feeling like a beta or even late alpha experience at times. The other major problem with the game is its abrupt ending. The game ends in the middle of a questline, which leaves you feeling cheated. I am quite certain this could have been handled better. It's a shame the game has these issues, as it's clearly a labour of love, and you can truly sense the passion that has been put into it. The world, story and characterisations were enough to keep me hooked, and to persevere even through the arduous difficulties posed by the combat related bugs. In short, the narrative is the real star here; it's a hell of a ride. I would suggest waiting for a patch release before indulging; it will make your experience that much better. As it stands, I can't with good conscience give it more than 3 stars. The bugs are just too severe and frankly, unacceptable. If they sort out the bugs, it's a definite 4. And if the ending had been handled in a more satisfying manner, I might even have hazarded a 5. There's a big difference between a cliffhanger and taking away your popcorn when you're only half done.

Positives: - Great art style - Dense atmosphere - Nice soundtrack and sfx - Suspensful - Numerous "deep-dive" Lovecraft references - Decent writing (albeit there are numerous spelling mistakes. Grammar mistakes are rare. - Interesting, fleshed out companions - Fun, lore-friendly itemization - Multiple approaches to quest solutions. - Mechanically encouraged roleplay (ie. filling sanity by roleplaying your belief system) - Viability of different character builds/RP opportunities Negatives: - Numerous - some times game-breaking - bugs - Loading-screen simulator. - The game's UI is frequently unresponsive. - Gated content. The game feels on-the-rails, with areas, NPCs, and quests only becoming available in very specific orders, connected to completion of other quests. I imagine this will greatly reduce the replayablity factor in the game, and this couples with... - ...the game having very few outcomes for your choices. Sure there are multiple ways to handle a given scenario, but the outcomes are rarely different. If this is not "illusion of choice" then I don't know what is. - Lack of dedicated save/load option. What's the point? The game already eliminates the only reason why this should ever be implemented in an RPG (to block save-scumming) by allowing for multiple auto-saves. - Game mechanics are obscured to a fault. - You cannot utilize your companions' skills outside of combat. Eg. you cannot get the Outsider to craft you drugs using his Medicine skill. This makes putting points in that skill nearly useless for said character (it's his tagged skill, no less). - Game is Lovecraftian in appearance but not in 'spirit'. The "Cthulhu Elements" are so heavy-handed and gaudy that it completely throws out all of Lovecraft's subtlety and allegorical writing out the window. - Slog-fest Turn-based combat. It's your run-of-the-mill indie-quality rendition of the system, and it sucks like every other one.

I honestly can't recommand this. Even though I'm a fan of Lovecraft's work and I do believe this is one of the best attempts to recreat the horrors of the mythos, the visuals in the game achieve the desired effect and recreate the atmospheres perfectly, despite being only a 2D game. I have to give special mention to the sound designers. Even though those tended to glitch in my game, causing an unending sound of high volume howling winds that required a restart to fix. And here comes one of the reasons for my low score, the bugs, I never found anything gamebraking, but I found a good amount of UI glitches and sound problems, such as the game not registering the use of the keyboard to open the menues. Then there's the general game design, even though the game makes use of statistics, weather it's during combat or exploration, you are never told weather your states will effect your actions, such as your chance to hit or if that locked box requires a skill check plus an item to open. You are always left to ponder weather some interactions are not working because of a decision from the developers or you're just not good enough. This goes even into the actual game animations, spells in particular and some enemies have long winded animations that drag on longer then one would like. Finaly there's the matter of the ending, I am aware the devs said in a dev blog that the game would end in a cliffhanger, but usualy one expects the story to reach a conclusion, in this game the journey just stops. The goal and the main mysteries set up from the very beginning of the game are not addressed. Sadly, this last part puts the cherry on top of it all, the game can become really grueling at times and without a satisfing conclusion one is left only with disappointment. The technical and design decisions don't help. I strongly suggest people to wait a few months before buying so they can fix the glitches and bugs or maybe when they finish the story.

Great game with serious flaws. Could be AAA, but there is a lot of bugs, unoptimized moments, awful save system (developers could definitely avoid this, but they didn't on purpose as I could imagine), long animations and AWFUL ENDING - it seems that big part of game was left inside narrator's mind. But I can still recommend this - it's the greatest attempt to recreate rich Lovecraftian (or typical Barker's) world with strong narrative and interesting Fallout-style RPG base. Cannot say anything about replayability - it's really not so different, it's roughly 12-15 hours of gameplay for one run, so here is you to decide. Got this game on another platform, already finished it with one archetype, tried to play with another character and got a nasty bug, which prevented me from using one of main narrative occultist spells - so dropped it on second run.