janusz_gg's reviews

Dropped · PlayStation

I played about nine hours and stopped, and I've thought about why for long enough that I'm comfortable writing it down. I did not enjoy a single minute. Not in the way where a game is bad — it's obviously not bad, it's made to a standard almost nothing else reaches. I mean that the experience of playing it was relentlessly unpleasant by design, and somewhere in hour eight I realised I was doing homework. Every encounter is grim. Every story beat takes something away. There is no relief anywhere in it, and after a while the absence of relief stopped feeling like craft and started feeling like a lack of range. I know this is the point. People keep telling me it's the point. I'm not sure "the point" is a defence when the result is a thing I actively did not want to pick up. A D is me being honest about the experience rather than the achievement. Plenty of people will rate this an S and I understand exactly why.

On Hold · PC

I'm rating the current state of the game, which I think has drifted a long way from what made it work. The original design had almost nothing in it and that was the point — a handful of blocks and a day-night cycle, and everything interesting came from the player. What's been added since is mostly content rather than systems: more mobs, more biomes, more decorative blocks, more structures with loot in them. Each addition is fine. Cumulatively they've turned a sandbox into a game with things to go and do, and the things to go and do are not very good. The mob votes crystallised it for me. A community voting on which single feature gets made, annually, for a product owned by Microsoft, is a content strategy, not a development one. Performance on the Java version is also genuinely poor for what's on screen, and has been for a decade. A C for the current version. The 2011 version is an S and I'm aware that's an awkward position to hold.

Completed · PC

I want to be careful here because a B from me is not a dismissal. The first twenty hours of this game are close to the best twenty hours of anything in the last decade. The problem is the other eighty. Somewhere around Altus the game stops introducing ideas and starts reusing them, and it does it at a volume that's hard to ignore once you've seen it. The same catacomb layout. The same Erdtree Avatar. Three separate dragons that fight identically. I counted eight reused bosses before I stopped counting, and that's before the Consecrated Snowfield, which feels like it was assembled rather than designed. Performance is the other half. A 5. Shader compilation stutter on a 3080 two years after release is not a small thing and the reviews that waved it through did readers no favours. Great game. Not a flawless one, and I think the discourse around it has been allergic to saying so.

Dropped · PC

This game is sold as relaxing and I have never found it relaxing for a single minute, and I've come to think that's a design fact rather than a me problem. There is a clock. It runs constantly. Everything you do costs time, days end whether you're finished or not, and seasons expire with crops in the ground. That is a pressure system — a gentle one, but a real one — and the entire cosy-game framing around this title papers over it. I'd get to 6pm with three things left undone and feel the same low-grade anxiety I get from a work backlog. The writing is lovely, the art is charming, and the systems are elegantly interlocked. None of that is in question. A B because a game that gives me a to-do list and a timer is not the thing the culture around it says it is, and I think a lot of people who bounce off this game bounce off for exactly this reason and assume they're wrong.

Completed · PC

Act one is a masterpiece. Act two is close behind and tonally the best thing Larian has written. Act three is a different game made by people running out of time, and I don't think the year of discourse around this has been honest about that. The density that works in the first two acts turns into noise in the city. Quests that don't resolve. Companions whose arcs stop mid-sentence. An ending that gives several characters a single line and calls it closure. Some of this got patched, which I'd argue proves the point rather than fixes it. And the performance in the lower city was genuinely poor for months on hardware that should not have struggled. I understand why people rate this a 10. For two thirds of its length I would too. But a game is the whole thing, and the whole thing is uneven in a way that a B captures better than an A does.