i've been tricked, this game made me feel things

It feels almost disrespectful that I got this for free.

This game shows its age in multiple ways. Even if you fight through all the unique crashes just to get it running (and you'll bump into many more crashes afterwards too), so much of the game is just clunky. The survivor AI is more braindead than the zombies (you're very likely to lose them once they get stuck on a random wall), the RPG-esque combat is unintuitive and unsatisfying, searching for loot is *the* jankiest thing I've ever seen... It's frustrating because I see a lot of good potential, but that'll have to be realized in a modern game. I can't recommend this game unless you have the patience of a saint and tolerance for janky games.

For a game with such a charming exterior, I really didn't expect it to have this many intimidatingly difficult puzzles. 10/10, would bnnuy again

the ending(s) just made me sad

genuinely felt like a punch in the gut :(

Is it weird that I went into this with false expectations?

I picked this up almost immediately after finishing Frog Fractions 3. The humor was hit-or-miss, but I unironically adored the puzzles of TXT World. The various minigames were a nice bonus, but they were always secondary to whatever challenge it took to reach them. This game is... mostly just the minigames. There are shades of the challenge, particularly with the point-and-click section and the mining section, but most of the game is being supported by the humor alone, and it just doesn't do much for me.

Yes, this is from someone with too many hours in a game telling you not to buy the game. Those 54 hours are all from one playthrough: I was aiming for the "School Sleuth" achievement, which requires you essentially to befriend a lot of the students around the school. As I was searching for another student to drag along, crossreferencing with the fan-made list of students, trying to figure out exactly which one would be the least annoying to knock out at the moment, I had an epiphany: this wasn't fun.

In theory, any of the 500+ students can become a member of your party, and you can train them just as you would any of the main characters, but in practice, nothing about the process is worthwhile. They all reuse animations from the main characters, there are maybe 12 voices in total across all of them, they all have such generic appearances that I'm convinced some of their models are reused, and even purely from a gameplay perspective, all of their abilities are identical to the main characters (while always having less than them) and all of them will always be weaker than the main characters.

So just ignore that entire mechanic, right? Except then you're stuck with the main characters, and so many of them are annoying and unsympathetic until you unlock the tragic backstory that excuses all their previous behaviour. Honestly, I ended up sympathizing with the villains more than a lot of the heroes, I swear some of them are genuinely nicer, but it's all for nothing when you can do nothing but beat each other up. So just mute the characters and fastforward through cutscenes, right? Except then all that's left is the battles, and either they're so easy you can button-mash through them, or they're an absolute slog because the enemy's level compared to yours almost always dictates your accuracy. No matter how much you try to prepare, it's all for nothing if you haven't put in the time to grind.

I want to like the combat system, but trying to make combos is annoying when any one of the attacks in the chain can just miss, or the radius of the attack doesn't line up with what the preview showed, or when a single disruption from any source means everything else is wasted? I want to be able to engage with the combat mechanics, but what's the point when it's easier, more reliable, and faster to just run through the battles on autopilot? Characters are supposed to play different roles, but why bother paying attention to anything besides how quickly they can defeat an enemy?

This game frustrated me on every end, from start to finish.

This game is just fun. It's fun to fight enemies, it's fun to platform around every area, it's fun to solve puzzles, it's fun to run around these gorgeous environments and just soak in the music and scenery and everything in between. It provides a steady stream of challenges that push players forward, but it never becomes so brutally difficult that it's alienating. With that said, the puzzles can sometimes stray into obtuse territory (knowing that I could freeze waterfalls is one thing, doing so to juggle all those boulders around is... something else), but these moments are few and far between: a couple of rough patches really, really isn't enough to stop me from thoroughly enjoying my time with this game.