The story is strange and very touching in places. The writing was excellent. What I particularly liked about it was that it treated the player as an intelligent person: the underlying fiction was something that you put together yourself as the game proceeded, not something that was laid out in full and explained patiently. A good deal of the game's power came from this. I felt that some aspects were being held back needlessly from a character's point of view, but I can see why they did it for the good of the overall plot. At one point, I thought that the game was setting itself up for a sequel but it immediately continued into what I thought would be in the sequel. There's still an obvious possibility of a sequel, and I'll definitely play it if it comes out. There are two endings, but as a creator of worlds it was no contest as to which one I would pick.
The mechanics for the different characters (of whom there are six in total) are interesting and individual. Creating builds by giving characters appropriate weapons and pictos/luminas was quite fun. The synergies were almost as good as those in The Secret World. In the end, I'd set up Maelle as a death machine and Sciel was only killable when caught in a stun lock.
Combat is turn-based but Souls-like: defensively, you have to learn the enemy attack patterns and try to time your parries against them. I have a problem with this kind of system, because I've got very fast reactions and have to train myself not to parry the moment I see the animation incoming. I don't like at all; it feels as if I'm having to slow down my thinking. Some of the later mobs had simple attacks, but did five of them in a row: if you missed one, you had to waste a character's move to heal everyone up; if you missed two, you had to waste a turn resurrecting everyone; if you missed three (or sometimes, even two) it was a wipe. I was not good against these mobs.
The game's music is refreshingly different and completely matches the overall vibe; indeed, to some extent it defines it. I bought five tracks from the album, but after listening to snatches of the other 155 it was fairly clear to me that most were variations on the same theme.
The acting in the cut scenes was pretty damned good. The eye saccades were especially nice. Sometimes, though, the clothing changed from what the character was wearing before and after the cut scene. That was weird, it was as if the cut scene were a movie rather than an animation.
When I started up the game for the first time, it told me I should be using a controller. That would have been useful to know before I bought it, although to be fair I wouldn't then have bought it and so would have missed out on an enjoyable experience. Some of the keys had to be pressed twice to work initially, although later on this seemed to correct itself.
Now for some gripes.
Non-boss mobs respawn when you rest in camp. This means you can kill them over and over and over to get XP. This felt a bit like cheating to me.
The writing for the interactions with regular NPCs and for side quests wasn't anywhere near as strong as for the main story. Some of the comic relief characters were not funny.
As soon as I heard Maelle speak, I thought she sounded like Shadowheart out of Baldur's Gate 3. This transpired to be understandable as they have the same voice actress, Jennifer English, and while some voice actors have a wide range, either English doesn't or she does but was instructed not to use it.
It was awhile before I realised that speaking to party members in camp was not the same as using the campfire to speak to them. As a consequence, relationships between party members were on zero for much longer than they should have been (although catching up was quick once I got to it).
Early in the game, you come across objects that you can't use except in camp, but you can't set up camp. Rather than watching us try all manner of ways to set up a camp, simply telling us that we'll be able to do so later would have been helpful.
The game has multiple locations that you traverse between at continent-level. The camera at continent-level is third-person from a high viewpoint, but with the individual locations it's second-person over the right shoulder of the leading character. However, a handful of locations have a weird combination with a fixed camera and you move the party using absolute directions rather than relative to where they're pointing. I don't know if these are unfinished zones or bugs; I suppose I could look them up to find out, but either way it was somewhat jarring.
There are no mini-maps for the locations, which means it's easy to get lost or to miss parts of them. There is a map for the continent, but staggeringly it can't be panned. You can zoom in and out, but not move it around. This makes it unnecessarily hard to find locations you've previously visited, because if you zoom out far enough that the area shows up, it's too far for its name to appear so you don't know which one is which. Making this map moveable would be the single best improvement for this game in my opinion. It's no use having good mechanics if the interface stops you from getting to them in an easy manner.
The side quests aren't tracked. I don't mind going old-school and writing them down, along with where I should return them and to whom, but I do mind not being warned in advance that I'd have to do this. Sometimes, it wasn't even clear if something was actually a side quest or not (in one case, involving Monoco, it wasn't). It was also possible that you could hand in a quest too late but not be told that this was the case, so you thought it was still on when it was off.
Jumps and climbs are arbitrary. Sometimes, you can climb up a ledge; other times, you can't climb up a much lower ledge. Sometimes you can jump on top of objects; other times, you can't. For jumps that require a run-up, it's hard to line up where the character is going before you set them off, which in combination with the roll-on-landing that often happens means you can land where you want but will then roll off it. This is exceptionally annoying when the jump puzzle has more than 50 jumps and one mistake puts you back to the start.
Overall, though, this is a very atmospheric and interesting game that actually has something to say. Maybe it's because it was developed by an indie French company (it is very French); it's certainly an improvement on cookie-cutter AAA titles made by developers who won't experiment because they don't want to lose money.
PS: The last French game I played that was localised into English also seemed to have this problem:
