The mechanics are pretty straightforward and enjoyable as you enhance your deck, but the main part of the gameplay involves working around the ways a boss can cheat (steal your cards, destroy everything, etc).
What is unfortunate and made me stop playing is that you are not working on a main deck/card/anything -- if you die, you try again. That's tolerable when you are 5 minutes into a game, but as you progress - the end boss you have to figure out how to cheese is 30-45 minutes deep.
The puzzles are very quick and oftentimes simple, like clearing the scales off a fish and assembling the remaining bits into the correct locations, nothing that involved deeper thought like a sliding pane puzzle, they are more about finding missing components by noticing things like loose threads you can pull on.
I would say it is as fun and plays similar to the recent Boxes game, but with 2D animations.
The gameplay is fairly well done for an aerial combat, aim assist is a huge help -- but it does suffer from the same problems every game like this does, losing track of things that go past you. It doubles down on this problem by having no reverse ability - so when navigating a corridor with obstacles it can be a pain to nose bump your craft back onto the correct path.
The game introduces a symbiotic ship, that you're able to use some meta abilities with - like a short range teleport and a way to drift in space (which one would think would be automatic with no friction ..). I have no interest in playing more nor watching the remaining as a Let's Play for cutscenes to make it make more sense.
Each of the guests is an animal and every night has you visit one of the rooms and work through a series of puzzles where the hotel guest ends up getting served up as part of the next days meal. It matters that you do certain things in order though because you need all of the ingredients on a certain day for a "perfect" meal. Like the Pheasant Lady has to die earlier so that you can collect her red wine and use it on a different day, or there will be an optional puzzle for something like a sprig of Rosemary.
It was about an hour and a half total to finish. Well done puzzles, nothing too crazy to figure out, and some creative ideas.
Instead you and your shopping cart companion are castoff experiments from an Evilcorp, you are a homeless man who has half a brain and the power to control pigeons, and your companion is a wisecracking shopping cart with googly eyes. Graphics are basic and repetitive, like an early PS3 - but not to the point of being too distracting.
The world is silly in that way, but follows a lot of the similar premises as GTA and the like -- the main story mission is to help your buddy get his body back and you to get your other half a brain I assume, but the map has an Ubi number of side missions that are "race to this area", "put 5 bodies into this bin", "be rude and avoid police", "shoot targets".
I would have toughed it to the end for the amusement, but some missions are locked behind upgrades that you are forced to do to your base -- which means you have to collect resources to create smelteries, and collect wood and metal to smelt ingots, and craft metal plates from ingots to upgrade pigeon coops, etc. It's not a paywall, it's a timewall/grindwall - meanwhile rival gangs come to destroy your stuff so you have to run back and defend your upgrades whenever you are raided.
As a proof of concept it's great, fund these guys and lets have them make a game. As a game/story, it was a bit of the same "get the [artfully named creature] in the [location]" with no purpose beyond that. The additional hunt was given by an odd professor guy looking to fill out his bestiary compendium and looks like a Nickelodeon cartoon caricature of a hunter.
There was a tribute to reddit face in one of the boss rooms with a bit of a slapstick intro creating a mutant. 😁
Nothing was too difficult to solve, there were numerous puzzles where there was probably an optimal solution but you were able to eventually easily work through like sliding tile puzzles. On the few occasions I found myself at a loss for what to do, I usually smacked my forehead for not looking closer at one of the legs or something that seemed so obvious in hindsight.
Great simple low stress game, will play their others.
The game tells the story of Miquella and his attempt to ascend to godhood. It's hard to judge true motivations when you're speaking of the will of demi-gods, especially one whose magical abilities are to subvert the will of others.
Previously one of the more "hated" in Elden Ring was Mohg, who kidnapped the eternally youthful Miquella and imprisoned his seemingly dead body in a cocoon to attempt to revive with blood magic, but apparently Miquella was manipulating Mohg to give up his own soul and use it as a vessel for Miquella to install his brother Radahn as the god consort.
What's great about it, is that "maybe" that's the story -- environmental storytelling has got to be the cooler ways to reveal a story. You serve as a video game archaelogist as you guess what transpired to create a battleground scene from the tattered remnants, the fact that one tent has a rival soldiers armor set, or a bunch of unexploded gunpowder helps you come up with a guess and support it by descriptions of the tattered remains you uncover.
10/10 and I can't wait to replay this again.
