I played a little bit last night. It's OK.
Music is very good. Visuals can be very good, but also oddly ordinary, often compounded by late loading textures or some that never bother upping LODs. Pacing slow, but that's not an inherently bad thing, I approve. The world feels too clinical, boring, dead. Solving problems to make progress is trivial, to the point where it registers as purposeful mini road bumps to elongate story progression (this might improve further in). Animation is very stiff. Acting is similarly wooden at times, yet at others it seems perfectly fine during scenes that look to have been fully acted and captured. Speaking characters present best when they're masked as the lipsync tech is lacking, giving the game another layer of old-fashionedness.Holding the bumper to use magic vision doesn't feel great, especially when the game has to remind you to do it. Had a Broken Sword flashback when she said "the door was locked", not sure if that was intentional. I only got as far as the Bandicooting badguy and died 3 times at the same point with deadly moth swarms, the game reminding me during the reload (which takes far too long for a next gen game running from a next gen SSD) that I can press a button to use charged magic burst things, so maybe I have to do that, but trial and error is never a fun thing for me personally and I just couldn't be arsed and left it there. Similarly, running away from the big bad guy, towards the screen, has rarely been fun or enjoyable, so putting the two together was a big put off.
So far the twin worlds rendered simultaneously mechanic hasn't been revelationary, more a novelty, and nothing that simply switching planes on the fly as games have done for decades could have handled just as well, without the downgrade of visuals, lack of direction and IQ compromises it demands. I don't know which came first, the game concept or the patented dual viewports idea, but I've seen little justification for it beyond gimmic.
This seems oddly critical reading it back when I've been looking forward to a first new gen game for the xbox, it was actually OK playing through leisurely but I suppose a few things began to add up. To be fair, the only real problem I've had with the game is something I didn't mention above and I've not seen mentioned elsewhere so I think it's just on me lol. I think I've kinda been trypophobia triggered. It's not exactly that but I think similar somehow. It's a combination of the fungus-like stuff on her spirit world version's arm (although I feel fine when it's glowing for some reason), and then especially the girl with the same stuff on her upper body and missing limbs with stuff creeping out but particularly the red-cage-fungus-like missing bits in her remaining limbs... I just feel physically sick, uncomfortably hot and sweaty, and fixated on that rather than whatever stuff is going on in the game. It's not at all gory or horrific, it just makes me feel uncomfortably uncomfortable. Weird af!
