Stop me if you've heard this one before: you -- selected from races including "proud northern warrior," "magical half-breed," "imperial merchant-class," "water-breathing lizardman," and cat -- show up on the docks after an otherworldly being psychically reaches out with a prophetic vision. A small tribunal of new Gods aims to insert themselves prominently into a world that previously featured a more numerous and now-distant pantheon, while eliminating a more different panthon of demigod beings that more directly intervened in people's lives. You set out on a quest to find the instruments of pain needed to delve underground and defeat a long-forgotten adversary attached to a mysterious and primordial source of power.
It'd be reductive to say that Lantern's got a little Skyrim and a little Fallout in it, but I think they did more exercising (usually) excellent judgment and throwing out the things Morrowind did wrong -- that everyone agrees the game did wrong -- and replacing those parts with things that work. So it's more close to Skyrim's leveling system with Fallout's perks and points to dump into skills. At certain points while playing, it was "save points for later when I'll need them to do <x>" where x was unlocking some door or accessing some perk I wanted. As the game began to open up, I started saving points to pump skills I wanted to have more of. You could theoretically save points to shore up things you want but don't participate often. It's nice that parkouring through the world giving you levels through Acrobatics and Sprinting doesn't count against you with combat abilities, having a pool of points every level adds a lot of flexibility.
I say "usually excellent judgment" because the number one pain point of the game is quest navigation. The drop-down box to enable quest markers not only doesn't enable quest markers, but also finger-wags you with a permanent Dunce Hat. Haha, funny, you got me guys, nice one. Except the game really cries out for SOMETHING. The game doesn't give you quest markers, but then also doesn't give you good navigation instructions to where you're going. One early quest I never got around to finishing was getting not-Patches's ring back from his cave full of Eyeless. It's on the west coast of the island, he specifies in the dialogue to start the quest if you need to veer north or south once you get to the west coast. It's not specified in the quest information in the menu. You can't select that dialogue option again to repeat his instructions. The only way to figure it out is either restart the game and listen to that dialogue again, or watch someone else play through the game. The post-Visions main quest bits that the oracle lady gives you are equally cryptic and not listed or written down anywhere I could find: if you want a reminder, talk to her again. If you're going to patronize me for asking for quest markers, fine, but give me SOMETHING: verbatim copies of quest dialogue, detailed directions, names of important landmarks so I can stumble upon it and say "was this the place that quest wanted?" and then go verify it precisely.
Give me something and stick it in the quest log, and do it early, and do it often. I can't tell you how many times I'd find a new place, poke around for a minute, and second- and third-guess whether this was an actually important to a quest I either had or would get eventually, or if it was just flavor, only to teleport out and realize my mistake hours later when it was already too late.
Also, early on I made it a habit to mark all the safe beds I came across. The game is so dark at night that you really want to be operating between 4AM-9PM, even with a lantern. You kinda start the game by venturing as far as you can go while still being able to double-back to town, then you get a spell to fast travel back to town and just go until nightfall, then you find more beds and go from bed to bed, crack of dawn to night. It wasn't until later on in my playthrough I just started bulldozing through night cycles to get where I was going. That said: you can only have five custom waypoints on the map, and they're just "this is a thing I marked." I really would've appreciated something like in Hollow Knight, where some NPC sells you "bed marker" and now you can put a little bed mark on the map that ONLY shows up on the map. That way I can save my ever-persistent game world visible custom waypoints for important things and just mark "here's a quest guy," "here's a bed," "here's big enemies to avoid." At least then a lack of quest markers could be solved by being diligent and letting the player mark up their own map with points of interest. They started doing a better job of marking locations you've been to, but only after an update a few days after I started playing, and I'd eventually stumble into a lot of NEW LOCATION: [INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK] location markers where stuff is there but doesn't have a name yet.
One thing I did expect was for the game to have a little Breath of the Wild in it: you could wait to do the tower at the end of your playthrough, when you're most equipped and you've taken care of parts of the final encounter by way of doing quests in the world; OR you could bumrush the final boss and deal with a harder fight at lower levels. Not only does that not seem to be how the game works, the day one speedrun route that would've enabled just that was aggressively patched out in a way that tells me the devs absolutely want you touching a minimum of this many parts. As it stands, you venture into the tower early, do an encounter that's not worth spoiling, and then THAT opens up not only a shortcut but access to more parts of the tower. I didn't realize until about 10 hours in that the first trip into the tower isn't the last trip, and I didn't realize until 20 that the upper part of the tower can be gotten to without abusing Fortify Jump. I was expecting goodies for being a good explorer, not a whole expansion to the tower I'd failed to stumble upon prior.
Since the game is in Early Access, it was kinda hard to divine whether things not working the way I expected were my fault, the game's fault, or some fantastical save-load error where an NPC fell out of the world by accident, or killed themselves on a campfire. Some things became more obvious when playing around with collision off, I think a future repeat playthrough will be a lot smoother now that I know a little more of what makes the game tick and where more the secrets are. There's still whole areas of the game I haven't figured out how you're supposed to get to "normally." There's still quests I've finished by accidentally stumbling upon the answer ten hours after picking the quest up and failing to put together how someone was supposed to solve that intentionally.
A lot of people have been complaining about game crashes and poor performance. I've had a couple crashes, but they're rare. I've had some stuttering, but it seems like I'm hitting some kind of load barrier or area threshold, because a lot of the single stutters I've had happen in the same place every time. My performance has been north of 60fps almost the whole time on a 6700 XT. and I even left Hardware RT on for the first day of playing because (at least in the early game areas) the performance penalty wasn't enough to make the game unplayable. I did get about 20+fps out of turning it off, and later areas, especially on top of the tower where you have long sightlines of complex scenes, start performing worse than the earlier ones.
Overall: the game rocks. I hope they don't kind rid of ALL of the jank as they move out of Early Access. Being able to clip into the floor and levitate to the final boss to speedrun the game was exactly what I'd expect out of a game aspiring to be Morrowind. Still, when the performance issues are ironed out, and the NPCs stop immolating themselves on bonfires, the game's going to kick ass.
I'll look forward to The Holy Fool too.
