Solid Creature Collector with a fair amount of content and compelling lore. Lots of unique creature designs that can stand up there with some of my favorites. It's just a shame a lot of the really awesome designs are held until the post-game Abyssals content.

I enjoyed the freedom to explore without being gated by story too often, sometimes to the game's detriment since I went to Palmaya before even going to Parum resulting in some confusion; however, this thankfully doesn't result in accidentally walking into highlevel zones since the world scales to you which I'll touch on later. The world isn't overly large, but there's plenty of biomes and exciting set pieces like a struggling war-torn settlement in the tundra, caverns, and eery gigantic bone structures that feel purposeful. Theres quite a few nooks and crannies with helpful rewards that encourage and reward exploration.

I found the progression to be a little overtuned in late-game, since the world scales to you, leveling up can mean more difficult encounters resulting in more friction; it can be rewarding to avoid leveling up if you have a strong team at your current level. I felt pigeon-holed into using a full team of legendaries by post-game because of the amount of damage the wild mons dealt even when I had type advantage. Grinding to overcome a difficult fight feels non-existant and the only point to grinding is to evolve or learn new skills. Leveling up creatures you caught earlier is challenging since they're too low level to fight anything themselves and switch-fighting or expsharing means your main mon will still gain exp and level which will continue to scale the world; it's usually better to just catch a new one with a scaled up level instead of stockpiling a bunch of mons in your pc for later.

Strategy in combat is near non-existant since enemies will usually not use any meaningful buffs or debuffs besides status effects and the game does a poor job telling you what buffs the opponent has; Late-game battles don't last long enough for setups to be effective and some late-game bosses seem immune to status effects so builds that rely on them are effectively useless. You'll lean towards mons with the highest base stats like Gekoko and Durtacles who can sweep Mid to Mid-Late game with their atk stats on par with legendaries.

The art is quite detailed and vibrant, making environments lush and lively. The character animations can sometimes be a little jittery, particularely during the running animation, and some of the creature animations noticeably stretch their sprites and their movement sometimes looks limited, but there's still plenty of movement to make the creatures feel alive. There are followers, but their pathing can become bugged when jumping up ledges.

The story revolves around the main character and their climbing the ranks of the guild while uncovering the secrets behind a war that could mean the extinction of humanity in a world in desperate need of leadership. There's a charming mix of serious and unserious dialogue and characters break the fourth wall frequently. While it is a sequel to the first game, it does a good job to roughly fill in the player on the events of the first game so that it's not a requirement to play it prior to this one. There are plenty of references to the first game which can be enjoyable for someone in the know. I know what you did to those Mandrasses.

I'm looking forward to the 3rd game which looks to be taking Nexomon into a promising 3D future!

This game's difficulty ramps up quickly and for good reason. Some of the later challenges require you to have such a solid understanding of the platforming and combat. The amount of time and effort you invest will be rewarded with incredibly rich lore, exploration and boss designs, and when you think it's over there's so much more. The amount of content makes the first game feel small. That being said, sometimes the platforming and combat feels designed unfairly and the balancing of the game's economy promotes grinding. If you can endure difficult games, I highly recommend it.

Revive Revive

I do recommend this game if you're into souls-likes and cats, the combat is great and the characters are cute, but I caution anyone looking for a more polished experience; it is a bit rough around the edges at the time of writing this review.

Currently the game feels held back by some technical issues and half implementations. It will be great if these get sorted out with more time in development; these things made it hard for me to get into the game and made it feel more like a prototype.

- The item description does not appear correctly in the menu when cycling between items in the inventory.
- I was unable to change between menu tabs in the skills and magic screens.
- Long load times and hitching despite being on an ssd.
- Enemies invincible in the tutorial area. The enemy used to teach backstabbing survived without taking any damage.
- Some stats appear to have no effect like equip load and their corresponding attribute did not appear to increase the stat. I was heavy load with 18/1 equip load and there did not appear to be any penalty.
- Armor does not appear to have any stats associated with it other than equip load.
- Sometimes while climbing I'd get warped to another window or ledge I climbed over earlier.
- I am a finesse build, but I couldn't tell if my weapon was scaling differently with the stat. I had a sword and shield, and claws which both appeared to scale equally with strength or finesse.
- Some interactions don't appear to have a prompt like interacting with the shops in the first town and some doors making it confusing which things you can interact with.
- Item pickups would sometimes be culled, making it confusing to locate them, such that upon entering the room it does not appear to be there and appears a moment later at long as you're looking in the general direction of the item.

While some of the denser environments were very detailed and appealing, the larger spaces feel like they are struggling to fill the space. The first town has so much unused space there are NPCs that serve no purpose scattered around in odd locations to fill it in.

The first boss arena lacks a strong atmosphere; I sort of wandered in without realising it was a boss arena until the cutscene started. It's just a raised piece of land in some water next to a small dock and a small lake. It would be nice to have some environmental details around that tell you about that enemy or indicate the enemy lives there, like maybe some shipwrecks or talismans. The boss itself was great and felt threatening at any distance with a toolkit of melee and projectile attacks that keep you on your toes, it would just be nice to have a more interesting environment.

The combat is a treat. It feels responsive and your attacks feel like they have impact. Enemies get staggered if hit. Stealth kills are strong. The telegraphing for enemy attacks gives you plenty of time to dodge, parry or block even if you get caught mid attack. Parrying and being aggressive enough lets you do a visceral attack for big damage. You can also get parried yourself if you aren't paying attention. It reminds me of Sekiro, but less parry spammy because it doesn't let you animation cancel as easily.

NPCs are fully voice acted and it's done well. It's enjoyable listening to Atreus talk about how bad I smell. There's also subtle references to other games with cat races, like Khajiits!

The character customisation is pretty nice, giving you a choice of clan and various preset furs, even including hairless cats. The customisation won't let you get into facial or body structure details, but the variety of fur patterns should allow most people to recreate their irl kitties. I made mine to look like my irl ragdoll cat.

A charmingly ambitious indie game but it is unfortunately held back by inconsistent quality and lack of polish.

The game's performance is suitable in open areas, but abhorrent in buildings; dropping to 15 FPS in the starting house and crashing the first time I launched and got past the initial dialogue.

The narrative takes a while to get to the adventure, starting with a series of trivial tasks preparing for Gemini's birthday which require you to go between the town and home a few times. There is no skip button, so dialogue can feel slow if you read quickly or need to replay a section. There is one little peeve I have where it said to go to a forest in the South, but the actual objective was on a plateau to the West. A nice touch is the quest objective UI which helps the player keep track of what to do.

The level design relies on giant walls and nonsensical fencing to corral the player through a lot of areas and makes what would otherwise be a nice field feel claustrophobic and unnatural.

The minimap is a bit of a crutch for the aforementioned level design. Since you cannot turn the camera, various obstacles will obscure the view or nudge the camera.

The only bug I encountered was during combat; my creature had 4 mp left and the move I was trying to use, Stone Hurl, costs 4 mp; instead of using the last of my mp, it behaved as though I did not have enough mp to use the ability. I assume this is a logical error where instead of "if ( mpCost <= monster.mp )", it uses "if ( mpCost < monster.mp )".

BG Audio does not use seamless loops, so there is a noticeable gap when it restarts and footsteps don't always match the animation. The game does include some basic audio settings.

The visual style is wildly inconsistent and simply serves to get the job done.

The art style swaps between using flat colours and detailed textures, feeling like a bunch of assets mashed together. Edith's character portrait randomly changes styles after the first time you interact with them. Attack animations are pretty basic and uninteresting. There's also this funky little thing when the character blinks their eye pokes through the mesh which I found amusing.

The drawn chibi portraits are really cute but feel out of place juxtaposed to the character models.

The UI is functional but heavily relies on text which isn't always relevant and adds some clutter that could be simplified with more clever use of colour coding and icons. The attack descriptions are not ideal for determining which one to use in combat.

Had the scope of this game been a lot smaller, I feel like the dev could have spent more time adding juice to make the user experience much nicer. If you're in the mood for a humble creature capture adventure, I can recommend it on sale.

Unfortunately the update ruined the game for me. I consistently get a bug where the cursor is stuck on the screen and huge FPS drops in compounds and I'm constantly getting lost in the new UI between matches. I'm just not having fun and can't recommend it with the way the game is now.

I hope they fix it.

A really good initial entry into Indigo Park which introduces a very cute and likeable cast of characters and sets up the story and atmosphere of indigo park, although it's unclear why the player character would want to continue exploring after their initial encounter with a certain lion. There is a ton of clever artwork and merchandise throughout the park which makes it feel
authentic.

The gameplay is rather simple, being mostly walking around and picking up keys to get into new areas, with a single shape/colour combination puzzle which was relatively simple. There was an arcade cabinet platforming minigame that added some additional lore. I would've liked to experience more rides and have more to do in the park, which I hope to see in the next chapter.

Sometimes Rambley seems to ignore what's happening which felt a bit awkward; he just seems to keep pushing the player forward without acknowledging what's happened to his friends.

I'm really looking forward to see where this series goes with more funding for the next chapters

The lion and skunk are my favourites.

↓ ↑ ↓ ↑

The game had some moments that gave me chills and a very overwhelming atmosphere at first, but that quickly went away after the same scares were repeated again and again and I could differentiate between which sounds mattered and which ones meant nothing. It never made me jump at all.

It sort of feels like Phasmophobia with just the ghost box, but most of the interactions don't do much besides play a sound that doesn't mean anything or do anything useful; most of the sounds played through the voice commands don't have any visual to go with them. There are really only 2 useful voice commands. By the end I was just joking around with the voice recognition, asking the ghost to go with me to taco bell in the hopes it would recognise something and make anything interesting happen.

The visuals are very nice, it has a photo realism style that it's going for and it stayed consistent. I think it did a good job there.

The ghost is creepy and hearing it walk around in the dark was spooky, but didn't really feel threatening especially when it couldn't even see me over a lounge chair, and the game gives you a mic detection UI on the right when its hunting so it's never a surprise. I was only caught once sitting at the laptop and it didn't do anything besides a jumpscare sound. It even becomes more active by the end, but by then you already know the important audio cues and how to deal with it that it's never a threat.

I was really disappointed by the story and that it uses the trope of mental illness causing people do insane things. There are several inconsistencies in the environment details that didn't make much sense with the narrative. If it's just the dad and the daughter, why is the table set for four? If there's security cameras everywhere, why can't you just check the footage to see what happened? If I'm a detective, why cant I go into some rooms? These are things that could be explained and add to the story, but were left unaddressed and felt like unintentional inconsistencies. I was really hoping for something more interesting here.

My favourite part was where you had to keep the lights off, but it was a very short section before it just has you keep the lights on everywhere; I wish the game forced you to do more things that were uncomfortable like that. Unfortunately most of the game is just waiting by the laptop and looking at the cameras until the game tells you where to go next by flashing a light.

I didn't run into many bugs besides some cases where UI persisted or there was no UI for some interactions. The performance was fine running on High, I averaged 50-60 fps on a 2080 RTX GPU and i7 8700k CPU.

Overall, the game looks nice and plays alright, but the story and scares are disappointing with a really shallow game loop in the second half.

Edit: I was just made aware that this dev has a lot of drama surrounding them that I didn't know about before purchasing and I'm very disappointed.