Ridiculously fun and way more reasonable than anyone really expected.
The King of Muay Thai is back

Combat's a blast, music goes hard, levels are beautiful and generally huge
GotY is between this and Khazan, for me

Really want to like this game but it's excessively punishing and insanely confusing. I was expecting this to be a Papers Please-like, but it's not. It feels like it at the start when you just apply medicine based on a color correlating to isolated symptoms, but you'll quickly find you're not able to flow from patient to patient. The guessing when it comes to doses, at least up til the point I've gotten to is ridiculous.

Night starts, woman comes in and gives you a varying dose syringe. She leaves. Patient comes in. Says he has a sore throat. Give him Phlegm. But how much? 5? Damages the patient because that's a small dose and he needs a big dose. Assume I gave him too much, give him 2. Small dose, more damage. Run back to book to scrounge for the variable, find nothing. Give him 1 dose, dies. Second patient comes in, asks for a large dose. Give her 6. Goes from nearly dead to feeling worse, I think it means "Worse than previously", give her 8, goes to sick, give here 8, "Feeling better", give her 8? Nope, you don't have enough and give her 4 by mistake and damage the patient. Literally nothing to remedy this because you're all out and her card is filled so you couldn't give her anymore medicine if you had any. Send her off and get penalized for not seeing the eye in the window you never saw because you never had a reason to look to the right before. Cut to the next night when you get an upgrade to help GUESS how much dosage to give. First you give the patient a guess dosage, then you check their status, then compare that to the status horseshoe chart and get a range of -3 to +3, then adjust a cipher to find the magic dosage to make them recovery 1-2 injections sooner. No.

This game feels like a prank. There's a seemingly never ending list of pages, symptoms, and variables, which is fine, but you will always either have to guess or be willing to burn expensive consumables to figure the singular thing wrong with them out. It's like if Papers Please had a mechanic where you could run out of ink, the stamps could be broken if you pressed down on them too much, the stamp marks had gradients and you were punished if they were too light and not legible or too heavy and bled through the paper, And you had to study an actual map to know passport accuracy. There is so much fluff. Allergies have come up once and never again, I've seen symptoms that I've confused to be madness related (Because I was never briefed on them yet) and burned through the sanity drinks as a result, there is no reason to buy the magnifying glass and stethoscope until like day 20, some customers will come in and eat shot after shot after shot with 0 effect because it turns out they just wanted to see you, and so on. Honestly just miserable after playing this

About halfway through the campaign, and I want to say this is better than Wukong. The combat is snappy and beyond satisfying and the bosses are badass. My only complaint is you can't equip more than 1 weapon type at a time. As a Warrior wow player and general stance dancer, I think this is an extremely disappointing aspect. That aside, Phenomenal. Cannot recommend enough to anyone who like Souls-likes.

Update: Just finished and 100%'d it. 10/10. Game of the Year, unless Doom Dark Ages can top it

A relatively short and mild challenged action platformer with generally cool bosses, but not without a few nitpicks. The game forces you to use an analog stick for movement and it feels like ass. Might be the last game I can think of that made you forgo the D-pad. D-Pad is relegated to switching between types of plasma for the sword. Switching between them, whilst in combat is very jank, to say the least, and even if you're not switching between them as much as other games, it's still required for some encounters and it feels awkward at the very least. Damaging the bosses can also feel like a chore with how little damage you seemingly do to them. Lastly, to compound this, the game's generally pretty easy for what it is, but is very much punishing with a distinct lack of invuln frames after being hit and you can EASILY be combo'd to death by knockdowns or being frozen. All these pail in comparison to the final boss, which blemished the game as a whole for me.

A giant eldritch creature and kind of bullet hit. Okay. It has a ring of Gravitrons as the arena that each have their own gravity that inhibits the controls and you WILL get stuck crouching when you want to keep running. Okay? The altered gravity persists until you get close to another one, meaning you are unable to recover comfortably and can even get knocked out the arena. Tf. There's a phase you need to attack the bosses limbs as they get stuck hitting the Gravitrons. Okay. The bosses attack pattern might as well be random, going on for an inconsistent number of attacks and in either direction, preventing you from preemptively positioning yourself, and you have a limited time to make it to the limb. Tf. The attacks from the limbs sends out multiple orbiting shock waves around the Gravitrons and can chain you to death. The ♥♥♥♥ is this fight? Never before has a game gone from pretty decent to one of the most overly designed pieces of personified frustrations as this boss

That ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ aside, the game on a good sale is worth the ~$5 I spent on it, but I don't see future playthroughs with The Creature Whom Rips My Controller From My Hands And Sexually Violates It While Trying To Kill Me In A Blink Of An Eye at the end of every run. If there were an "Ehhhh" recommendation option, I'd pick that

-Horrible pacing and unskippable slow-walk segments. Killed 2 monsters in the first 3 hours and both of them were dead in 6-10 minutes.
-(Spoiler) The final boss of Low-Rank is a nothingburger. It never comes up again and doesn't even have it's own loot. No equipment, no Armor, Nada.
-(Spoiler) The Final Final boss of High-Rank is Just Arkveld, Again. There are no Elder Dragons in the Game.
-Gore Magala but No Shageru
-Frenzy is not a Mechanic, it's only on 3 designated monsters
-The food ingredients are consumable and have no consistent way to acquire or to farm
-You are limited to how many Camps you can have in a zone, and nearly all of them can AND WILL be destroyed. They're usually not worth the points you dump on them.

The newcomers are fire, but there's not enough of them and the game is THE most railroaded wannabe-movie slop I've ever seen. Give us the ability to skip the Walking segments, and make the ingredients infinite once you find them, and you'd have a worthwhile game on-sale. Play either of the other games on Steam

New high-point of the series for me. Love the challenge that was surely lacking in the base game.

Should be in the Season Pass. Simple as.

Bought for the Bosses, Dungeons, World, Weapons and Difficulty, and the game more than delivered. Only regret is not getting the chance to fight Placidusax or Bayle in their Primes

The Story's great, Exploration is rewarding, Combat is fun, Lots of choices for leveling up, and it runs like a hot knife through butter. Very clear why it won Player's Choice in 2020.

Sucks Sony has to hold multiplayer hostage, even after the Helldivers 2 incident, just to artificially inflate their PSN numbers. Also; "You don't need a psn account to play single-player", tell that to the countries who can't even purchase the damn thing. They want the money for selling it on PC, AND to inflate their lacking PSN numbers, because people are waking up and buying PCs than their overpriced paperweights