Wytchwood
Could not finish it. The first few hours are very well done - the game is intriguing and the art style is beautiful. However - as the game dragged on, my patience got less and less once I realised the game is just a long string of fetch quests. From the artwork and part of the description I was expecting Don't Starve, but it's actually a linear story game where you have to craft items to progress. The story revolves around capturing the souls of 12 evil animal characters in a world of humans, by outsmarting them and crafting something to catch them. Eventually I gave up at The Wolf after the quest in the Darkwood has you wandering blindly for half an hour trying to find a way through.
Pros
- Beautiful art style
- Really nice dialogue. The game plays much like a fairy tale, where you have to outsmart a greedy or selfish creature, like those stories with "The moral of the story is..."
- There's a portal system to get between areas (which you'll be doing a lot)
- The subtle animations on everything in the world make it feel alive
- While it's not a complicated game (and the puzzles are really just "walk here collect this"), it is satisfying to complete the quests
- Lovely music (especially The Dock, which has a shanty remix of "Spanish ladies"... well, until I heard it 10 times on repeat).
Cons
- There's no quick way to see "if I need to defeat this monster, what do I need to craft?" - you have to walk back there and look at the monster, find out what you're missing, then walk to the area where you collect the thing to make the item to defeat the monster
- Some crafting ingredients are really specific and only used to make one thing
- The last third of the game is tedious. One giant fetch quest. Admit I gave up eventually when I just wasn't having fun anymore
- I think this was introduced in a recent patch, but the mouse cursor now constantly bobs up and down. It's incredibly distracting and annoying.