Currently, the game is mostly good, but not perfect. I think* I'm up to date, as I just got to the top of hightown and everything just kinda fizzles out.
I'm going to gloss over most of what I loved, and say everything out of order, because I'm lame like that.
Vibes - immaculate. It controls how it should, the art, sound, world building, lighting, colors, voicing (gianni: the game is always a good thing), enemies, locations, everything. It's all wonderfully thought out. Extra little details like the flashbang being a light bulb are delightful and show they really put thought into it. The mirror travel is a delightful idea.
Maps - mostly good. The maps are smart in that you will constantly be opening up ways to backtrack. Like one giant chutes and ladders game. The downside is that if you're in any way a completionist hoarder like me, you'll be backtracking a LOT. The maps are so content-dense.....the first time you go through them. There's loads of branching paths, and always multiple ways to get through something. Easy to get lost.
Optimization - seems good, but check the specs: I wouldn't know if it wasn't.
A big pain point is just the stealth and general gameplay. I couldn't get a read on it. It plays like classic thief, but the enemy count, behavior, weapon availability, etc point to it wanting to play more like splinter cell conviction. There's no billy club, tranq dart, moss arrows, or other non-lethal. So it's either complete bare-handed ghost, or kill everyone. youve got a sword and a gun. And when the only tool a player is given is a shotgun, all the problems start to look like clay pidgeons. You do have smoke and flash bombs, and maybe those are useful, but other games have trained me to treat flashbangs as useless, as they tend to be temporary, inconsistent, and draw every enemy to them. Bottles and distractions take up precious inventory and are inconsistent (enemies seemingly only react to certain items thrown. glass bottles are good, but buckets, rocks, metal, etc may as well not exist).
Backtracking is tedious. If your inventory is full before you've even explored one building in an area, you'll have to backtrack through it all anyways, and the game doesn't extrinsically reward for leaving enemies alive, so if you did, you'd have to ghost it all thrice, forward, backward and forward again, just to clear out one section of the map. I already have 30 hours in this game, and half of it is backtracking through empty maps to sell things or do research. I don't need to pad that out any more than it already is.
The hive is a massive difficulty spike: You can't leave (which was a shock from a game which was so consistent about opening avenues to backtrack), enemies become sponges with double the health of before, are no longer separated into ranged and melee; they can do it all now. The sequence ends with a massive rush of enemies, right when I was at my weakest, and I had to resort to completely cheesing it. "just stealthing it lol" is much harder, as they can seemingly smell you in the dark (which is basically behavior brought over from the higher difficulties), which there's not really counterplay for, especially with how cramped the map is. You can play to reduce sound and light, but not smell. "skill issue" I'm sure.
Other thoughts:
- Researching enemies is incredibly tedious, even with the mirror travel (which is still a cool and creative idea). Body parts are huge, there's no quick way to see what you have and haven't researched (a mark in the inventory would be nice), you both need a lot of parts, and enemies drop a lot of them at once. Bioshock's camera at least made it so you couldn't max out research with just one guy. But here you chop one guy up and get 20 inventory spaces worth of limbs. Then you need to hike across the game world twice. I had to find out the hard way that huntsmen and woodsmen were treated the same, despite only being labeled as 'huntsmen' in the journal. I'd almost do away with the station and replace or augment it with a magnifying glass that fits in your inventory. Maybe something that can be bought from the shop. After all, since the game seemingly wants you to kill everything, there's no point in having the player backtrack through empty maps. Just bring the tool with you. one of the update logs claims "the world of Gloomwood will now change as the story progresses!" but if that's active already, I haven't seen any evidence. I guess this is just an in-between state of the game?
-If I didn't power through this, or skipped a day, I would completely lose track of what I was doing. I never saw a quest log, the shopkeeper doesn't remind you where to go, and the changes in the world can be easy to miss. you don't really have to make it AAA-playtested-put-a-marker-on-the-hud-focus-M obvious what to do, just move a candle or thumbtack onto the next area in the map room/cross out the seals you already have. Even OG thief gave you a checklist for each mission.
-opening the map defaults you to the most recent one you picked up. should probably just change that to opening whichever map you're currently on, only using most recent as a fallback if the player hasn't picked up the current map.
-leaning is pretty useless. The behavior I'd love to see is dishonored's "reduced visibility" leaning, but it seems in this game, it only considers the light on your camera position. My naive approach would be to calculate the visibility values of the regular and leaned camera positions and just average them. Either way, it feels unfair to lean out of a pitch black corner into a brighter light and be treated as if you're FULLY in the light.
-Item hoarding/stashing feels like an afterthought. Especially in relation to the alchemy system. The game encourages you to leave every single alchemy ingredient in the lighthouse (which are one-off and nonrenewable afaik), but forces you to just scatter them around the room as loose physics objects. Seems to be waiting on the implementation of containers.
-The mirror is introduced as something evil by the dialogue, but in practice it isn't. I thought it was some kind of choice system where you'd get punished or rewarded later on, but it seems not. Same as how it feels like there should be some punishment for killing everything. Maybe have the crows turn against you if you kill enough of them. Or like MGSV where enemies will start wearing armor. Or like dishonored with increased hostile rat spawns (among other things).
-Health displaying as "fine" tricked me into thinking I was at full health. Weird wording. precise health readings are only available in the journal, which I think is a wasted opportunity to add it to the ring/hands. Color changing mood ring?
-Powder horn hints at the existence of a black powder rifle/blunderbuss, but if there is one, I haven't seen it. Horn feels useless after the cannon, which is optional anyways.
If I had to round it up, the only through line I can point to is that the games mechanics don't always seem to play into each others strengths. Many aspects seem good in isolation, but interfere when put altogether. RE4 style inventory: neat, except in a game with so much loot to haul. Massive sprawling maze-like maps with loads of secrets: wonderful, until you get lost, or need to backtrack to grab a lever out of storage, or want to offload your loot (see inventory). HL2/amnesia style physics interactions: delightful until you try to sort your stash and items start clipping and flying around, seemingly no protections against losing track of key items like levers and wheels, and physics barely have purpose in stealth sections. Now they're wanting to add an attachment system, which would be cool...if this were COD. I'd rather just have the scoped revolver be replaced by a different weapon entirely, even if it uses the same ammo. Maybe a trapdoor rifle or something.
Good game overall, despite my rambling.
