Recent reviews by Nafaryus Destiny

Gris won't let you fail. It's a peaceful experience that doesn't overstay its welcome, instead filling the runtime with excellent camera work, sound design, and choreography.

I had few complaints with Gris: the runtime is extremely short, and the replayability is very low. There are some collectibles, but even with the chapter select they are tedious to seek out. The themes were also very overt, and sometimes the gameplay literally put me to sleep.

I would never pay full price for a game as short as Gris. $5 feels appropriate for what you get, which amounts to a fairly well done art piece.

Achilles is a low-budget souls-like presented from a top-down perspective with some superficial RPG mechanics thrown in. It doesn't provide the level of depth I've come to expect from either genre, but by embracing its simplicity, I enjoyed my time with it.

I played on the hardest difficulty and found the combat pretty satisfying. The first few hours were definitely the hardest, but after you gain access to skills and upgrades, the difficulty becomes trivial. There are, however, some very challenging "co-op challenges" found outside the main game with some additional unlocks for those interested. Exploration was largely straightforward, with most side areas providing a minor reward, or bonus skill points for defeating a boss or activating an altar. The skill tree, though, seems completely unfinished. Most constellations completely lack any skills other than stat boosts, leading to some fairly boring progression.

Some achievements are buggy, so I had to use SAM to unlock them. The dialogue is paced so dreadfully slow that I can't find it in me to care. Every character speaks like they're in a middle school Shakespeare production, wasting 30 seconds of my time to say a single sentence.

I wouldn't recommend Achilles unless you have an affinity for its setting. Fighting some iconic monsters and following the heroes journey was fun, but the gameplay did very little to keep it engaging.

Wolcen is a mess of a game. I recently picked it up after they announced Online Play was being shuttered. As such, this review treats Wolcen as a singleplayer experience.

Wolcen has a solid foundation. It has decent moment-to-moment gameplay with satisfying combat and movement and decent character progression. The skill tree has an interesting "rotation" mechanic, allowing you to rearrange it to suit your needs. Your active skills have modifiers to their behavior that can be freely switched at any time, similar to Diablo 3's skill system. This opens the doors for lots of experimentation and varied behavior in skills. Gear crafting was almost cool, but the complete lack of transparency made it more frustrating to use. Voice acting made the admittedly cliche story much more engaging. The post-game has a cool "city-builder" gameplay loop, but it doesn't feel fully fleshed out.

The progression system's negatives begin to show themselves in the endgame. Many mechanics like multiple projectiles don't work properly, pets are an after thought, a loot filter is sorely needed, and leveling past 70 is a snooze without using cheats. Most stats are "score based" in their design, meaning they become less effective at higher level zones to artificially increase the difficulty by making your character weaker. Your crit/resistances/dodge rate/ailment application all get less effective the more you progress, bricking builds that rely on them. Enemy resistances also scale this way, with no way to shred them, which makes life leech less and less effective as you progress. You also cannot swap weapon sets, or save loadouts for skills/transmogrification, which would have been a great QoL addition.

There's a lot holding back Wolcen technically. The final cutscene of the game fails to load, skipping you to the credits. The UI doesn't always behave, where you can't pick up items or select certain UI elements, sometimes locking you in a menu. Animations are rough around the edges. The difficulty of the campaign needed to be cranked up a ton. It just got boring quickly even on max difficulty, despite the scenarios and maps being fairly well done.

For most people, I don't recommend picking up Wolcen. If you're morbidly curious, or starved for ARPG content, it's good value when discounted under $10.

While Iratus was interesting at the start, the gameplay loop devolves extremely quickly. Within the first floor or two, your team and strategies will be set, and the rest of the game plays itself. You simply go through the motions of combat, incremental upgrade, repeat. It desperately needs more progression systems at later stages of the game to keep things fresh.

Important information for new players: When you start your own solo game, edit the server settings. DISABLE "Teleport Bound Items". All other settings can (and should) be tweaked at your leisure. The game is balanced for competitive PvP play, and has so many time wasters built into it because of that. You can fix most of these issues in the server settings, but the default settings are pure ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

V Rising has an extremely solid foundation that is completely ruined by the game's default settings. After changing almost every aspect of the game's balance through the server settings menu, it actually becomes a fairly enjoyable metroidvania-style loop: fight bosses, upgrade your castle, unlock new abilities, and repeat.

This very loop becomes V Rising's worst enemy. Your character's power is determined solely by your gear level. You can only get more powerful gear by defeating bosses. There are no other avenues for character growth. If you get stuck on a boss, you cannot get more powerful then come back. Your only choice is to continually throw yourself at that boss until you master its mechanics enough to win. This isn't actually a bad thing on its own, but coupled with V Rising's resource management, it sucks. In addition to long walks back to the boss, each death will drain you of precious blood and potions, forcing you to take a break every few attempts to restock or grind more materials.

It's really a shame, because some of V Rising's bosses are exceedingly fun and well designed encounters. But there's no reason to revisit them after you have mastered their mechanics. There are no unique drops or special materials to be farmed from bosses. One victory is all you will ever need. Similarly, you will avoid combat altogether after a few acts, only ever fighting bosses and raid encounters, because there's nothing worthwhile to be gained from the more mundane enemies.

When combat balance goes wrong, though, it goes very wrong. Bosses punish melee entirely too much, with skills that 1-shot characters in melee range. There is no invulnerability period after taking damage. Dodging has an 8 second cooldown. Life leech and recovery are worthless stats due to how damage scales. The worst part, though, is the stupidly overtuned final boss. I could have lowered the difficulty and tweaked the server settings to make it an appropriately challenging fight. But after 30 attempts, it left such a sour taste that I decided completing the game wasn't worth it.

I'd only recommend V Rising to those willing to dig into settings and put up with some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ while you figure out what works best for you. There's a really fun and unique game hidden here, but Stunlock Studios doesn't make that easy to find.

Fun for an afternoon or two. After that, it gets repetitive. But for $5 or less its a good budget survivors game.

The Pale Reach is only $6, and adds about 2 hours to the game. It fits in well about halfway through the game, so its best to pick it up early if you're enjoying DREDGE. If you've already finished the game, it doesn't add much worth doing.

It's a simple loop: go fishing, sell your fish, upgrade your boat, and search for mystery and treasures across the seas. A dash of Lovecraftian horror sets the tone, and so DREDGE sucks you in.

DREDGE doesn't overstay its welcome. My 18 hours is pushing the limits of what can be squeezed out of the game, and, with a less completionist mindset, it only would have taken 10. The time spent is relaxing, exploration is rewarding, and uncovering mysteries is satisfying. I enjoyed playing 100% of the available content, with 1 glaring flaw.

The time. Up at the top of the screen, there's a constant reminder of how many in-game days have passed. This lead me to believe it was important how quickly I progress, that the world would change as time goes on. The pressure was on to manage my time, so I prioritized efficiency over fun at times. HOWEVER, nothing in game depends on the day counter. The passage of time only ever effects day/night and the spoilage of fish. You are free to explore the world at your leisure with no negative effects whatsoever. It would have been nice if this was relegated to a menu somewhere instead of prominently displayed at the center of the screen at all times, so I wouldn't have felt pressured.

I still recommend DREDGE. Ignore the day counter, take it at your own pace, and enjoy the atmosphere. It's a nice casual diversion into the horror of the seas.

The Pale Reach is only $6, and adds about 2 hours to the game. It's fits in well about halfway through the game, so its best to pick it up early if you're enjoying DREDGE. If you've already finished the game, it doesn't add much worth doing.

I felt like I was missing something while playing Dragon’s Dogma. There were moments that something great shone through, but those moments were few and far between.

The best part about Dragon’s Dogma is fighting large monsters: Griffons, Cockatrices, Hydras, Beholders, Ogres, Golems, Cyclopes, and, ofcourse, Dragons. Unfortunately, that list is exhaustive. The entire game boils down to those 8 monsters. Fighting them is extremely fun, satisfying, and varied, but everything else you have to deal with makes me just wish I was playing Monster Hunter instead. Climbing monsters, casting spells, and creating Pawns aren’t enough to make up for the shortcomings in story, animations, classes, quests, and world design.

These are my major gripes, and the reason I don’t recommend the game. The class system is very bare bones and unrewarding. Quest design is convoluted, with story hidden in missable side quests. The narrative isn’t told particularly well, with poor voice acting and animations. There’s some sort of “romance” system in place that somehow decided my character is gay and in love with a prince I met once when I killed him. The world is just big enough to be annoying to walk across, while also being just small enough to be boring. The whole post-game system was almost interesting and finally provided a challenging level of difficulty in The Everfall, but it was impossible to navigate the (seemingly randomized dungeon?) effectively. Mechanics are never transparent, so the wiki is encouraged if you want to delve into the post-game and min-maxing a character.

However, the mechanics that caused me to drop the game is savescumming. Savescumming is an intended mechanic in the post-game, to the point that the final boss rewards you with a suicide item to expedite the process. The whole game encourages you to exploit mechanics as much as possible, and the DLC (Bitterblack Isle) is balanced around doing so. I hated this, so I tried to avoid it, but it just makes the game very very grindy and time consuming.

I don’t recommend Dragon’s Dogma unless you’re looking for a retro experience. There’s better RPG’s and better monster hunting games with more clarity and focus. It’s unfortunately a relic of its time.

Dave the Diver doesn’t have a clear focus, which is simultaneously its biggest weakness and greatest selling point. No one mechanic ever feels fully fleshed out, but they come and go so rapidly that it doesn’t really matter.

The day-to-day loop of diving for fish then managing a sushi restaurant gets abandoned pretty fast. While the game initially appears to be an “upgrade” style tycoon game, it starts mixing in new experiences and minigames really quickly. You start going on rescue missions, collecting pokemon, taking safari pictures, feeding cats, farming, raising chickens, meeting ancient underwater civilizations, fighting neolithic era monsters, playing rhythm games, raising tamagotchis, playing a mini-version of Dredge, and even going on spy missions.

While this kept the experience fresh, it never felt like it had any depth to it. The moment a mechanic approaches satisfying complexity, it gets swapped out for a new one.

Recommended at a discount to make a fun couple weekends. It makes for a poor tycoon game, but still a strong overall game if you can embrace the absurdity.