Character creation, 5 faces to choose from, none good, no body customization. Made me frown.
Beginning tutorial and start of story: shipwrecked, scrounge for things, townsfolk tell you that you owe them a blood price and if you don't pay it in 5 days you'll lose your home. Cool, I like the short intro, get me into the game, I want to explore!
Finally leave the town with a club I made and all the starting materials I could get. A weird bird attacks me, I almost die in two hits and I'm bleeding out. I smash the bird in the face, and it runs from me. It's too fast to catch, and walks onto the side of a mountain that I cannot reach, and is frustratingly out of my range. Lame.
I keep bleeding. It doesn't stop, so I spend what little money I have to buy linen to craft bandages. It takes all the bandages I bought to stem the bleeding and my health takes forever to regen. I go back outside, another big chicken attacks me, I block and dodge and don't get hit, it too runs up a mountain and I can't get it (as the npc's are less restricted in movement). I can't jump or jump attack, it's out of reach above me. More frowning.
Hyenas show up. I know that one bird almost destroys me so I run, right into bandits, and the hyenas and bandits kill each other. I loot the bodies and realize that this is probably the only way I'll be able to get loot because I can't actually kill anything without catastrophic costs in time. You see, to heal I need to rest, but I have a limited time-frame to get a large amount of money, so I can't rest. This puts me in the position of forced suck. I shrug and spend an hour wandering around trying to get things to kill each other to loot the bodies and make money. Not ideal.
I randomly die on a spike trap because I was crossing a bridge and my camera was faced up as I was navigating trying to escape from some awful creature. When you respawn from death your stats are severely restricted, which you must rest for hours in order to restore. There goes more time. Still can't kill anything.
At this point a friend joins me, nearly 2 hours in. And thank God too, because the difficulty of doing even simple things in this game is absurd.
We head out after he gets situated. One of us dies fighting bandits, and we realize we can rez each other. Nice. Except your stats go to a fourth of what they are normally, and only 17 hours of rest will fix it.
I get tired of running from♥♥♥♥♥♥ even though we find some better weapons and armor, and I suggest we get magic. We go to a mountain to get it. We spend a few hours trying to get through the dungeon. We take turns dying back and forth because the monsters inside kill us incredibly fast and we use each other as bait. Even simple encounters with one creature are brutal and unforgiving. Every hit is a massive drain on resources as you don't regenerate without eating or resting. We both end up dying a few times together and get transported back to the beginning. The amount of time spent sleeping, finding food and water after dying is obnoxious. Simply trying to survive in this game is a constant burden and when you die and respawn in dangerous areas with almost no health and your max health penalized by 75-80% with no way to regenerate it outside of sleeping literally 15 to 17 hours is nuts. Because then you're hungry and thirsty. Out of rations and water? Time to run out to forage♥♥♥♥♥♥ I'm too stubborn to quit so we keep going.
We finally find out way through the maze of death and misery and find the place to get magic. Yay. Okay now I have fire powers which is awesome. And for a short glimmer of time I found joy. Magic was awesome, it actually did damage, and with two people you could really position a foe well. We manage to start making some money.
My friend wants to investigate a place because we're feeling good that they game is actually playable now. We talk to some people and they lock us up in a mine and force us to work as slaves. He loses everything except a loincloth but fortunately, due to a bug, I have my gear. I kill the guards with fire magic as my friend uses his body as a meat punching bag and dies horribly. We get out, but now he's barely alive.
After we leave the place, for some reason, winter came. We end up getting attacked by a lighting mantis on our way back to town and my buddy dies, and I die from cold trying to rez him and make a camp fire (I should have made the fire first).
The game tries to throw us a bone and has a monster creature rescue us and we find the best stuff we've found so far in his cave. I make the comment that the game is trying to keep us interested by making 1 death out of a 100 beneficial. Would be cool except now we're in an awful position in the middle of winter with no health, needing to rest, but with no food or water in a frozen wasteland filled with monsters that can kill in 4 hits.
We die again trying to make our way to town because the game spawned us so far away from our goal. Not that we are weaklings at this point, as we murder many bandits before they finally claim our life. We are taken prisoner in a camp. Half of my gear is put into a chest and the rest is in my pack on the ground. We spawn naked in a camp surrounded by guards. The moment we try to pick up stuff we're rushed by guards and killed instantly. Then we spawn outside the camp with all of our stuff still inside. We're naked in the middle of a frozen wasteland with a sliver of health that we can't regen because you need to sleep to do that and you can't without a bedroll.
We charge into the camp to try and grab our stuff, and after dying several times finally manage to grab all of our possessions before dying again and spawn outside with everything. Every time you die, the game tells you how you somehow manage to find the strength to pull yourself somewhere and collapse, or you're saved by a friendly stranger, or people think you're dead and dump the body, or whatever. This is supposed to make dying interesting. In the frustration of potentially losing all of the gear that took hours of work to get, I skipped all the messages and basically only read them if I think I'm being captured and need to strategise what to do if I were to wake up naked.
We wander back to town, constantly stopping to make camp fires to stay alive, over-encumbered and our stats are constantly nothing, we are also disease ridden from the cold and monster which have bitten us. It's past my time limit and they sold my house and I'm homeless. We have to sleep near the forge on the sidewalk for warmth. We spent or discarded most of what we found only trying to keep the most important or expensive sounding things. The merchants only bought a few things off of us, the rest is worthless and we make just enough to upgrade our backpacks and buy some food so we can sleep literally 36 hours straight and it still doesn't repair our stats fully.
TLDR: This game has potential, and I did have fun, but it's almost impossible to play single-player and the completely unforgiving nature of LITERALLY EVERYTHING gets old fast. I'll change my review if I start having fun. Ciao.
