Recent reviews by Variable Why

Real good movement. Though it is hard on the hands at times. It's a pretty short game, but I really hope a sequel is made with a more expansive and populated world.

Also, that goat has made so many people mad for such stupid reasons that I love this game even more for it.

For the early access demo, this game is actually really well done. The RPG mechanics show a lot of promise, with hints that later patches will provide a lot more variety and depth to the combat. While your options are limited a bit by being a single character RPG, it shows a lot of promise! Characters are good so far, being likable, and the art is lovely! I recommend it, if the NSFW stuff doesn't bother you too much!

I spent two hours creating and stacking coffins to avoid using the stairs. I only stopped because my computer could not handle over 10000 physics objects in one area. I did this because I did not want to use the elevator and stairs. It was worth it.

Also, this game is heavily inspired by King's Field and Shadow Tower, leaning into the aesthetic of the latter. The music and GUI is reminiscent of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, wrapping up the PSX aesthetic very nicely. This is very much like a modernized version of Shadow Tower (PSX), so it won't look as clean as King's Field IV or Shadow Tower Abyss, but speeds up the basic gameplay loop a fair bit.

The game is a first person dungeon crawler, so the fundamentals of combat don't get much deeper than Skyrim, but the challenge comes from managing your resources and enemy encounters. Learning what tools are best suited to fighting enemies is more important than your raw stats, and understanding how to avoid hits does more for surviving than packing a lot of healing. In one of the modern mercies this game provides, you can heal up at a save point, but as long as you don't enter a loading screen, enemies and objects will not respawn. This means less skilled players can still pick off every enemy in an area and move forward slowly in one session, whereas a skilled player can push forward in fewer trips back to the save point. In addition, the variety of weapons and magic at your disposal allow you to experiment with different ways of engaging enemies, and at this point, all weapons have a good level of balance, so there are no wrong weapons to use.

The overall aesthetic is reminiscent of PSX games, as mentioned earlier. This game appears to strive to replicate the environments of Shadow Tower (PSX), with a lot of very dark areas and shorter render distances. Along with this, a lot of the tunnels and halls recreate the claustrophobic confines of the Shadow Tower very well. Textures in the environment are intentionally pixelated, and only need the texture warping to capture the PSX experience perfectly. The only part of the aesthetic that does not line up are two of the female humanoid characters, who appear to be made in an art style different from the rest of the game. Fortunately, these characters are not in your face, so it's a minor issue.

Exploration and stats are tied into each other. Both your ground speed and jump height are tied to your core stats, which you can level up similarly to Dark Souls. Each level grants you varying number of stat points to assign. While you don't need to reach any particular stats to use weapons at this time, they do influence how effective you are using these tools. This ties into your ability to explore like it does in Dark Souls, where more stats mean more enemies can be dealt with faster (for most players). Since most of the areas are like mazes, with no maps to help, levels are critical for unaided players. Unfortunately, since the aesthetic aims to capture PSX graphics, the lack of landmarks becomes an issue, since most textures are too low resolution to help with navigation. This can be mitigated with movement speed, but this does feel a bit like a band-aid solution.

In general, I'd say the game is not for everyone, but definitely worth playing if you're curious. Hopefully future updates can address current problems that exist in early access, and I have high hopes for it!

But I already got to drop 10000 coffins in a library, so I think I got my money's worth.

While not at all like the previous Yakuza games in terms of gameplay, it works as an amazing RPG.

Very accurate to the original, with some great quality of life changes! Some of it could be improved further, but this is still an incredibly good farming sim if you want to change things up from Stardew Valley!

I adore this game. It's charming and silly, and at its core, it's entirely about luck. So it's the only game where I don't feel bad about losing either!

Though the game isn't for everyone. I've brought over a dozen copies for my friends, but I have more playtime alone than all of them combined.

This game may be addictive.