After completing the main story I confirm everything I said last month.

The combat system and the characters’ growth are really off balance for various reasons.

The only redeeming point of the game is the story, which becomes quite intense toward the end with all its twists (even if a pair of them were a bit forced). It may be enough to like the game if you get invested into it, but, personally, I wasn’t.

We completed the game and the DLCs.

The very boss fights remain the best part of the game for me. I liked almost all of them, apart maybe from the last boss of the base game, that felt… wrong? That second phase was a step back compared to even some mid-game bosses (i.e.: illitis). For this reason, I couldn’t believe it was the final boss and I was left a bit unsatisfied when titles started to roll after the last cutscene. Maybe it’s because we played it co-op. Soloing it would have been a different experience, I suppose.

Story-wise we lost a bit of track of what we were doing and for what reason. As said last month they decided to concentrate all the notes you can read in a few spots rather than scattering them around. That translates to 20-30 minutes of reading every time. It slows down the game flow a bit too much, so it can be a problem if you have limited time to play and you wanna just shoot things up. When we started the DLC - that’s supposed to give closure to the story - we tried to get back on track, but we faced the same problem again. To make things worse, after some exploration and a few bosses, the story went suddenly forward with little to no explanation about the characters involved and their reasons, and the game was done like that. No closure at all. A bit of a disappointment.

As a whole, the experience was positive, though, so, maybe not right away, but we’ll play the sequel too at some point in the future.

The monochrome filter of the visuals was an appreciated add-on, as it gave the feeling of being in some old samurai movie.

The story is quite full of nonsense from the premise to the possible endings. Still, it’s not invasive enough to ruin the game experience and poses as a passable contour to the gameplay.

Gameplay-wise there’s a minimal component of exploration in order to get collectibles/new skills/upgrades and it luckily doesn’t ruin the game flow. I liked the level design in that sense. Most of the gameplay is focused around combat. It requires a certain degree of skills to time things right, but let’s say that once you unlock the first stunning skill it becomes quite easy and repetitive, even at the harder difficulties. Most enemies can be killed with the same skill, since there’s little to no variation to them. Even bosses, apart from maybe two (out of six), despite having different skills and move sets, are beaten in the same way: stay still, wait for them to attack, parry, counter, and repeat. That’s the combat system in a nutshell.

Anyhow, the fights are indeed frequent but short, so the game as a whole is fast-paced and doesn’t make the mistake of dragging itself too much.

Basically it’s been a short, enjoyable, but eventually forgettable experience.

I found the game way too simple, to the point that it felt kind of devoid of content. Too short, too little to do, uninteresting fight system (just mashing the attack button at close range), unpuzzling puzzles. It got a bit interesting only after getting the third character, but then again, it was at the end, with less than one hour of gameplay left.

The only redeeming point was the story, even if you can consider it a fairytale for kids. Probably that’s the whole point of the game: it could be a decent entry level game for a kid who’s never played anything of the sort. For anyone else I’d consider it skippable.

One last thing: the inventory management system was a really badly thought-out addition. Not only is there limited space that forces you to basically ignore almost all of the lootable objects, but there’s not even a way to fast exchange items between characters. To make things worse, once you learn how to handle fights, those objects aren’t needed because they’re mostly for healing. I think the developers should have just found a different way to manage healing and skip the inventory feature altogether.

It’s quite hard to give a review of this game because I liked it, but at the same time I found a few things to be really poorly designed.

The dive into Indian mythology was refreshing. It’s not often explored in Western media, so I found it very interesting, even if it probably represents just the tip of the iceberg, or even less. The hindi voice-over enhances the experience even more in that sense, even if it’s been hard to follow it sometimes (= reading and fighting at the same time). I was really impressed by the amplitude of the levels, from the 2nd to the 4th in particular. The top down view combined with the fact that you see your character so small compared to the rest of the world that surrounds her really sets the impression of being a small thing before the eyes of spectating Gods.

Gameplay-wise the game mostly focuses on combat; there’s some puzzle and platforming, but I wouldn’t weigh them in, since they’re really simple. I found the combat system to be quite weak: it mostly revolves around constantly dodging and then striking back, hoping not to be swarmed. Not particularly fun for me.

What I really didn’t like though was the management system for the skills and the weapons. It’s overcomplicated for no reason at all. 3 weapons, 3 possible elements to equip them with, 3 upgradable skills for each element. But at least in my experience you end up using just one weapon (bow) and just one element, because even if you wanna always use a maxed out element, you have to reassign the skill points every time and that becomes annoying fast.

What I liked even less was the story building and the ending in particular. You have 5-6 hours of constant narrative that builds up a story that makes you think you’re the chosen one or something. Gods give you blessings and weapons; they clearly state that they trust your abilities; you face and beat various divine beings up to the final battle. Well, in the last two-minute long cutscene, after the last boss fight, everything changes. There’s a plot twist (plus probably another implied one) and everything ends. It’s been kind of abrupt and unexpected to the point of being weird. Did they have to cut the game short for budget reasons? Did they think it was a good cliffhanger before a possible sequel? Whatever the reason, I didn't like it.

So yeah, play the game but be prepared for a possible letdown at the end.

The game is heavily based on trial and error which honestly I don't know if it’s a good or bad thing. Probably neither. It's just different from the usual puzzle game where you can plan your moves beforehand. Here you have to see how enemies move, then rewind time and plan what to do and see if it works. It's a bit of a time waster in that sense, but I still enjoyed it.

I particularly enjoyed the challenge of getting all the achievements, meaning solving some of the puzzles in a different, less intuitive way.

I also liked how some of the levels are interlaced with each other, in the sense that what you do on a level may have repercussions on a later one. I especially liked that they managed to integrate the fact of having to go back and change things with the story itself. I mean, in practice what you do is open the menu and select a previous chapter/level in order to replay it and do something differently, but what you’re actually doing (story-wise) is using your powers to go back in time in order to change the future. I found it clever, more so since the last puzzles are heavily based on this feature.

I liked the untold story too. The ending managed to get really emotional also thanks to the surging music.

I didn’t meddle with the “hard core” DLC (which is free btw).