It's told in a somewhat comic book fashion narrated at a bar, and they play around with that -- like sending you through a bad route, then having the narrator say "but it would have been foolish for me to go that way ..." and then rewinding the action back.
It gets a little wacky towards the end, which I kind of attribute to the narrator getting drunk - which upon contemplation is a really smart idea that I love.
What it is, I find somewhat less ...
You play as the wind, that plucks a petal from a flower -- and with that petal you fly around clumsily picking up other flowers, which make your flower mass bigger and once you gobble up most of the flowers in the level "discover" another flower, which effectively will be the next level for you to fly around. The world doesn't actually fill with flowers as you might imagine, you are collecting them in order for the grass to grow.
Visually stunning? no. Pretty? ehhhhhhhh. Fun to control the wind? hmmmmm. Recommended? Well ... can you get it for $2?
Return of the Obra Dinn was a refreshing new stylized (1-bit monochromatic) game unlike any I have played before.
You are an investigator looking over a ship and using the clues from moment-in-time scenes to deduce the names and fates of the 60 passengers on a ship in the early 1900's. The sequence of events jumps around in chapters and each section gives you their staged scenes in reverse, so it takes at least a couple watches to get the gist of the story.
It was a big wonderfully fantastic logic puzzle with murderous sea creatures and mutinous crewmen. My only complaint was the difficulty I had in navigating to replay certain scenes to try and gleen further clues, which actually had me give up on figuring out everything - but the story was interesting enough that I read along with the solutions to try and understand it all.
The engine of this game is such a great vehicle for storytelling, and the bar has been set so high recently with some A+ titles out there that I was really looking forward to this.
There are elements of it that are fantastic. The feeling when you are crouch running with some pounding drums and chanting as background while raiding a monastery with your war party are incredible. The story is fairly well done and you have a sense of uniting the kingdoms that you have aided as allies to come to your aid in the final mission (ala Mass Effect).
Where it falls short is in two areas in my opinion. First - like all AC games, there is a point of "over-powered" you can reach that really replaces excitement with a bunch of button mashing. I could have soloed the final fort, and would have preferred it to risking any of my companions.
Second, it lacks that bit of spit and polish that we've come to expect on A+ titles: shopkeeper inventory that makes sense, a ton of minor frustrating bugs like treasure items showing on the map that have already been retrieved, or NPCs with bizarre behaviors.
The one other point of interesting note was that you can choose to play either as Male or Female, and they left all of the potential "romantic interests" in for either gender you choose. There were two options presented to me in the form of a quest that ended up being some sort of ride out to check on the livestock or something, and I remember being a little disappointed - like I was tricked into a mission. I never pursued any of the romantic choices with either partner so I'm wondering if the game assessed my sexuality - as 5(!?) males came onto me on subsequent missions in not-so-subtle ways. Typically the response options were very blunt too -- "Aww yeah" vs. "I just think of you as a friend", so when I was finally presented with a third option that was effectively ignoring the awkward situation - I chose it. When I finished that mission, he pulled me aside and kissed me.
Uhhh ... awkward. Okay.
I'm not sure why every RPG game feels like they need to put in a little bow-chicka-bow-bow ... and the way they did it was just weird and uncomfortable. Stuff like this if included at all should be hidden deep in dialogue trees with at least some specific navigation, sought after instead rather than trying to be avoided.
