Garenburg Woods

Revolutionary game. Peak. Bought company stocks. Top 4 games I've played of all times.

Ive played the true ending at the time of this review and have not seen neutral or good endings. Garenburg Woods is Interesting, and worth a play. If you can handle the music being occasionally grating on the soul, I wholeheartedly recommend the experience. The childlike spray and crayon tool ms paint style is charming and even nostalgic in a way. I admit to having quite a few issues with the feeling of the game though. Mild spoilery implications and a spoiler later on so here is the long and short of it: It's neat! Now I get nitpicky because this game interests me conceptually. Ramble time. The game feels smaller than it seems to want to feel and it will take you out of it; when you gain the ability to move rocks, if you run to the first rocks that the game notes you can move you are made the butt of a small pretty funny joke where you aren't allowed to move the rocks. notably making it so you are punished for remembering the game. The biggest charm of the style also hurts the tone and impact of certain serious moments; the delivery on the underlying story is weak on average, neither feeling gut wrenching to me as a player or impactful in game outside of one event near the end of the game. Notably, this one part has enough thoughtful dialogue to emphasize an actual relationship between these characters in a heart to heart. I will concede perhaps the true ending is not meant to be the first play-through and the lack of inter-character interaction to make me care(or rather remind me of my friends) is supposed to be a punishing push towards the truth. And the truths are both grounded in a cruel reality and a fantastical scale, hurting the impact of both. Spoilers for this game and the game End Roll. [spoiler] Egly of Garenburg and Russell of End roll are the main comparison to make here. The Player characters of both games are similar in a very notable way, they are the true "villain" of their story. They kill and run, on accident or on purpose, they left a trail of bodies in "reality". This comparison can point out the differences in impact and where they may come from. In each segment of Endroll, the events reflect the truth as the lead up gives the player context and details that make the truth more clear before certain boss fights. Garenburg woods has striking visuals and interesting implications, but nothing to emphasize the tragedy or cruelty of Egly's own actions. Where Russell feels jealous during a birthday party where he must share a birthday with a much more liked character, Egly kills his friend that trusted him by duct taping him down, did he feel anything? why did this betrayal not cause any notable reaction from either characters in the "dream" nor tell much of a story about reality[/spoiler] Of course the purpose of these games are somewhat different, as there is a greater story to the world of Garenburg Woods. But that story is beyond our reach, and hard to ground ourselves with as well. BUT This Game is still interesting, a game that is uniquely the creators own style, music, story and I Want to see Whats next from this creator. Do play this game.

Before I say anything else, I have to say that this game didn't work in the steam launcher. I could load the game, but none of the inputs worked. For some reason, the only thing I could do was select with the ALT button (rather than Z). I had to put this game into EasyRPG to play it, hence why steam says I only have 11 minutes. Now that that is out of the way... This game Is one I really enjoyed. Whenever I quit playing, I always wanted to return and see what happened next, something that very few games have managed to do. The child-like graphics combined with the music always made me feel unease, like something could go horribly wrong at any moment. The game constantly telling me that this was a happy adventure only strengthened that unease. I think my only complaint with the game itself is the amount of enemies in each area. In my first playthough, in the first area I killed every single bat. It quickly got boring to me so instead I started avoiding them. In one of the later areas there are just too many enemies. Even in my 2nd playthough I still ran from them, despite being overpowered and easily able to kill them. I just didn't feel like it was worth my time. Overall, I would say that this was a really interesting experience. I got both the good ending and the bad ending in about 4-5 hours but that's because I just didn't want to stop playing. A really solid experience considering I bought it with money I got from just selling those steam trading cards. It also has a lot of replay value, being able to get every ending in both normal and hard mode. I did quite enjoy.

Ok, so basically, it's peak. Kino too, whatever that is supposed to mean.

R07 Toby Fox and Yoko Taro were famously inspired by Garenburg Woods and it is considered to be the modern form of The New Testament. No but seriously Garenburg Woods is an interesting narrative and while the RPGmaker gameplay can at times be repetitive, boss battles are meaningful to the overall story and also have creative gimmicks made it worth playing through, it's a story that only really works as a video game with gameplay. I was honestly really interested in unwrapping the narrative and the ending left me excited to see what else Creatalsoftware has done and will do in the future... Also I love Airfish

dev is very nice and helpful