Recent reviews by bSixdouze

Will of the Wisps is an ambitious sequel to Blind Forest, where Moon Studios tries to expand on the metroidvania gameplay with obvious inspiration from Hollow Knight. For that it does well, but there are numerous invisible problems with that. This is a spoilery review. Shield your eyes. Also I am prone to rambling. So this is going to be ranty.







My primary opinion is that the game is too short. Having the best of Blind Forest and Hollow Knight makes for a great experience, but there is not enough time. The content may not be rushed, but it is bare-bones; Additionally, the pace of the game I would describe is "accelerating" as you play. For a metroidvania it seems like a good thing, but I mean accelerating even for that; accelerating acceleration? Anyways: The early game feels like a slog as they feed you the mechanics one by one, and thus layered upon that the (lack of) combat feels un-intuitive. But once you get some charms and an attack you like, the game goes by too fast.

I remember before the segment where you have to reactivate the water-wheel, I had spent about 3 hours getting there? My total playtime is 11 hours purely to beat the game, and that is including the rough total of 2 hours I spent on side-quests! 3 hours to beat chapter one, 2 hours of side content, and 6 hours for another 4 "chapters" ["chapter" in this case referring to a segment between each 'climax' of running for your life & bossfight] of the game?!

Once I had completed the game, I looked at the map. Then, I looked up the full map of Hollow Knight (because I have yet to finish that game) and saw the issue: Quite literally, the game was too small. Ori could cross rooms in seconds; perhaps for their own good, our favourite white spirit was too good at acrobatics. Sometimes, I wondered if the fast travel was somehow slower than Ori's movement, which got me to realize another thing:
In a metroidvania, why would you give the player access to fast travel right off the bat?! It's not a crime to force players to manually backtrack -- especially if your game is quite literally about fast and enjoyable movement! Now you might be thinking: Why not just not use it? To which I will raise: Then why would it be in?
To use our tried and ever true Dark Souls comparison, that game only gives you fast travel after you've been forced to backtrack the same areas multiple times. it's a diegetic way to make players stumble into new occurences at Firelink. And speaking of Firelink, that brings me to another ramble!

Will of the Wisp's equivalent of a central hub is Wellspring Grove, a towny area where you get to interact with the Mokis and some NPCs. Why is that so majorly unimportant to the game?! I understand the importance of keeping your side content to the side, but come on Moon please at least force the player to enter that area once in like pre-chapter 1's completion to tell them that there is a towny zone to begin with!

There was quite a bit of content that would suffer the classic problem of metroidvanias: Redundancy. Areas being so small and there needing to be a new thing per zone lead to thing becoming almost absolutely useless later on, and they were all neatly placed in the bottom-left of the ability wheel so you would never have to think of them again.
Bow is on thin ice simply because its replacement is quite late into the game (viva la grenade), the Feather is tragically underused outside of puzzles, and Flash is... Flash.

TL;DR, good game that's a little too ambitious but I love it anyways play it, it's good

I like this game, but it's not my thing.
I love sandbox games like No Man's Sky, but its current lacking in content and bug-ridden code drives me not to play.

It's good; give it a try. Put it aside to come back to when a major update drops if you don't like it. Gets better every time.

Too little content, and indecent roguelike design choices.

There isn't variety in the runs as much as there really needs to be to make the game playable. The same levels in the order, the same weapon without modifiers clutter the floor.

Goodbye, Dirty Bomb.

I wish you came out sooner. I stopped because my computer could no longer run the game, but damn was it fun. So much better than its direct competitor Team Fortress 2. And no, it's not an OW/Pala clone, those two are ability-based.
That's besides the point. I'll miss you, db.

Changed is... a weird game.
Sure it has fetishes, but they're extremely overlookable as deaths. I don't even enjoy the fetish, but there I was enjoying what was supposed to be a kinky mess of a game. But it is one mess of a game.
It is, however, a commendable effort as the maker's first game. And a brave debut too!

[?] The English translation is highly flawed, which is both good and bad. It's bad because there are broken text elements and writings are obfuscated behind typing errors, But, it gives the tritagonist/arguably-the-main character Puro a unique voice, I won't spoil it, but it manages to add to his character. If the English translation is ever finalized I do hope his speech remains untouched.

[-] 'Puzzles' are lackluster, really. They're either simple, overly precision-intensive or rng-based, none of which are good.

[?] Story is nice. I expected terrible writing, but it was actually good for what it's worth. However, the ending is a heavy expository dump that I wish came in drips to the player instead of long chunks of dialogue.

[??????send help??????] Made my friend a latex fetishist

[+] Despite its premise being the fetish, it isn't really forced onto the player to see such things as the option to f12 is there. There isn't much anyways, it ends quick and well.

[-] Don't let the popularity fool you: I have to go against my likings of him and say that both Puro and Mr. K were... disappointing characters. Very little was done to flesh them out and what effort was done poorly. A good effort, however!



Uh... I sorta wish there was an ending where Puro willingly assimilates the player and they stay in the building. 3rd bad ending/false ending maybe?
but that's fine, that's what fanfiction is for amirite?

That doesn't make it bad by any means. The game is tagged as psychological horror, but really it's only because of the dark subject matter (which I wish Steam had an actual tag for).
I suggest that you don't read the reviews, including this one, if you seek to go into this game blind. But know that this does get a positive from me.

What I like about the game is its set-up for the "psychological horror" aspect. It can be predictable (and is quite telegraphed) if you know what to look for, but going in fully blind may just lead to some pleasant expectation-subversion.

And maybe I'm biased because I absolutely love studying literature.

So, DDLC. A game made to subvert its own medium. The story of the game is simple: Of 4 characters in a dating sim, 3 have a romantic path while the 4th is mostly ousted. That 4th is Monika. She realizes that the world she is in is fake, and seeks to destroy it so that she, the only sentient* one in it can talk with the only other sentient being: You.
I find this game interesting as it walks the line of the moral grey--Was she evil? Because, at least for me, she isn't. Monika, however, was selfish. Being able to manipulate the game, while still unable to write herself a path (which she laments the lack of in the song Your Reality); to quote: "If this world won't write me an ending, what will it take just for me to have it all?" Her intentions get muddy when killing the other characters instead of simply deleting them--which mind you, she did consider with Sayori! Monika felt like she was suffocating under the forced negligence of the player, but can you blame her?
There's something else about it, too. Each of the characters correspond to a -dere, which I found added to their charm, and specifically to Monika which I will mention again later.

• Yuri--Dandere
  
• Sayori-- Deredere
  
• Natsuki--Tsundere
  
• Monika--Yandere

Overall, I feel as if this game was (superficially) going for the harem-writen style of visual novel, where all the girls inexplicably fall for the player. I'm not a fan of these kinds, in all honesty, but the "psychological horror" tag caught my intrigue. So I got curious. At first, I was extremely disappointed because of its facade. That was, until Monika showed up. From the way she spoke to how the game doesn't let you interact with her by forcing the others upfront, to how you could not even write a poem in her quote-en-quote style. My suspicions were raised then. The protagonist being so distant from myself honestly feels like a deliberate choice so that Monika would stick out among the others more. After all, she talks to you as a player, not you as the protagonist.
* Also something to note: Monika's development is interesting. She is meant to be "The One", but starts off as one of the generic -deres as well. Only towards the end of Act 3 does she break character, her binding to being a videogame character.
I also love the fact that the first verse of the song Your Reality plays around the idea of the player's arbitrary, who has the ability to simply save-scum.

Overall, solid 8.5/10.
Merits

• Well-used misuse use of tropes
  
• Designed-to-be-flawed characters are still a loveable bunch, and aren't stupidly cringy in their act because "flaws!!! xd"
  
• Soundtrack works. Not a masterpiece, but extremely well-tuned with the game. And not annoyingly extravagant like other "psyche-horror" games these days. In a way it's similar to how To the Moon's soundtrack was exceedingly brilliant, as the creators were also the composers. But Dan is a newbie, so it seems, and it works too!
  
• Clever use of the medium, did what I wish UnderTale could have done with file editing.
  
• The music is mentioned again. The songs themselves were good, but the way they were used was also well-executed.

Demerits

• There's little to no subtlety in the foreshadowing. Makes sense story-wise, it's just something that irked me.

Neutrals
[/list]

• Makes me sad that you don't get a lot of agency in the story. But that's part of the experience of a harem-novel, really...being an oblivious man-♥♥♥♥♥ T H O T. And the theme of futility is this game's motif, after all.
  
• Memetic material all around
  
• I had to get my sister to scroll through Sayori's depression segment for me. Having harbored those feelings myself in the past, I just couldn't. Call me weak-hearted.

Good night, sweet prince

It's very fun, yes yes.
Nothing I can really say

If I had to summarize the game in one sentence, it'd be this:

Anyway, I got more out of this game than any of the TellTale one I've played, so you get the idea of its polish.

The thing about having a remake allows me to vote for this game in two different categories, and it deserves it.
This game, the original, fell short with somewhat poor optimization and lack of backstory of the world. The remade version improved on all that and you should definitely buy the remake why the hell are you in the now unavailable Original store page?