Faris_V5 Reviews

It's not the Wurst unless it's Boarst Wurst There's something special about the Fallout style of CRPG ending slideshow. It seems so basic, almost like it's cheating. Just putting a big list of endings together with some half-hearted and occasionally buggy notes about the players actions. You know, ask the playtesters if they find a solution you didn't think of and squeeze it in at the last minute sort of energy. Maybe add some fun final notes on the lore and tie up whatever loose ends are left as the credits roll. Backed by nothing more than pure text, images, and the occasional pre-rendered cutscene. It's not even necessarily as an excuse for accounting for some hundreds of player choices you've hypothetically put in the game. Oftentimes each ending scene only has a handful of options, all pre-determined by the quest endings and 90% of the time the player will just be getting the good ending to everything, not even necessitating a difference in animation or...

  Yeah one of these random editorial article types was coming eventually. I've been playing Arx Fatalis lately, and I've been having a blast. Expect a review of that once I'm done because for all it's jank, it's essentially a successor to Ultima Underworld and similar Classic style dungeon crawls. Complete with endearingly janky combat, oddly extremely detailed and engaging magic system, and all the secrets and non-mouselook interactions with the world you could hope for. Then I reached the major city of the game, Arx, and felt this feeling of dread in my stomach. I spent about 30 minutes hopping around, trying to keep a mental note of locations while I talked to literally every NPC I found. The guard had told me to talk to Carlo, see. But Carlo was in a nondescript door right next to the entrance no more noteworthy than the other 10 locked ones around me. So I ended up finding the king before I found him. Which added another layer of confusion as I picked up at lea...

VOTV dropped it's 0.6 update about 10 days ago, as soon as I realized I was reading the changelog and eager to dive in. Then, as I got overwhelmed by new features, changes, and secrets or news before I even clicked download, I was reminded why I don't touch games in early access anymore. So, let me go on a spiel for a moment here.  The usual cycle of an early access game is one I'm all too familiar with, them being all the rage on steam for the longest time. It's about the peaks and valleys, moments of downtime as the devs are working hard punctuated by big, flashy updates that drastically shake up the gameplay, systems, areas, or really any number of things. Then as the players explore and experience the update, it gets balanced and more additions at a steady pace, perhaps petering off at times at least in mood, before eventually another big number drops and everyone's eating it up again. Wait, my bad, I mixed up my spiel about early access with my spiel about li...