Recent reviews by Anathema

Making it SFW is pure cowardice. Grow some balls KFC and show us the Colonel's balls.

0/10 rugpulled OS support, can't play more even if I wanted to get back to it. If that's how Respawn/EA wants to treat their players then good riddance I guess.

This game is probably worth it on a sale, I'd really like to give a neutral review but steam does not and likely will never allow that.

Let's talk about the elephant in the room. Technical issues. This game runs *really badly*, the recommended specs are a joke relative to how the game looks. On top of that it does not allow inverted camera, or rather it only allows it on the Y (up/down) axis, want inverted X? No you don't, not according to the devs at least.

The devs clearly lack confidence in their level design abilities since they decided to spam invisible walls around quite literally every corner, the game feels extremely constrained and railroaded because of this.

The combat is nothing to write home about either, the weapons are pretty haphazardly balanced with some being orders of magnitude better than others, not that it matters overmuch. The general design philosophy seems to be relatively sparsely populated (read: empty) levels with the occasional mook ambush, these are not a threat. Then there's the inevitable "mini-boss" room which is one or more (usually more) very strong enemies that hit like a firetruck and have enough poise to just ignore your attacks. If you randomly get shot by an enemy far off in the distance you've likely stumbled upon such a room, oh and the ranged type enemies have absurd aggro range (realistic, perhaps, but it's not very engaging to just get slammed with a shot from an enemy you didn't even get a chance to see).


The stamina management feels, for lack of a better word, 'bad'. There's nothing obviously wrong with it at a technical level but it feels weirdly punishing, this might just be because your bars are in the bottom left corner so it's harder to see them when playing, but it's harder to get a feel for your stamina use than in... let's say dark souls 3. Additionally the stamina recharge delay is extremely punishing, likely to incentivise using the self-harm effect to recharge faster.

Speaking of stamina, the dodge does not feel very good to use due to a combination of having practically no i-frames combined with some rather intense tracking on some attacks (that probably shouldn't have anywhere near as much) as well as some pretty suspect attack timings from certain enemies. That, and some rather strange hitbox choices frequently leads to getting hit by attacks you should have cleared. The best strategy for dodging seems to be dodging away, which is counter to wanting to actually hit the enemy with your attacks, this further reduces your practical attack window. You could, of course, also just use the block feature if your weapon has it but this trivialises combat if you play slow and methodical.

Now we've already discussed weapon balancing, but armour balancing stands to mention as well. Armour balancing is practically nonexistent. Every new armour set you get is, more or less, a strict upgrade from what you had before. Do you like what your current armour looks like? Sucks to be you, it doesn't help that the game tends to dump armour with resistances suitable to the level you're in as well. If you're in a level with a lot of fire damage it's going to give you fire resist armour and fire resist consumables.

For what its worth I do like the modules system, it's a compromise between power and progress gating in a way that traditional ring slots cannot realistically achieve.


I don't... hate this game. I also can't recommend it outside of a very steep sale either. It has too many problems and doesn't run well on current hardware, let alone hardware from when the game was released. Future hardware may alleviate this but that's beside the point (and my machine is more than overkill sporting an Rx 7900 XTX and a Ryzen 7 5800X3D).

Frictional Games needs better or more QA testers methinks, I softlocked in the tutorial :)

Not that I'd want them to fix the bug, I'm having a blast with my current playthrough as *the janitor*, if they fixed it I wouldn't be able to clean up all the props after all. I'm having a great time.

I really would like to like this game.

The concept's neat, but it's riddled with flaws ranging from minor stuff like the occasional unwinnable scenarios (drawing a bad hand relative to the encounter, a full mulligan can help but it's not guaranteed) to really annoying things like the he burning wisp enemy causing CTDs about 80% of the time (a CTD fails your run, of course. Because ♥♥♥♥ you, I guess).

The CTD is simple enough to trigger:

attack the enemy to pop it's evade, have it attack you, you retaliate, it attacks again, and et voila you have an overwhelmingly high likelihood of CTD (Tested on both nvidia and AMD hardware).

The counter is similarly annoyingl hope you draw an om-nom so you can drain its damage, preventing it form attacking or hope you draw a source of paralysis so you can prevent it from attacking. Oh, except I'm sorry. Evade makes it immune to paralysis, so really you need to pray you draw enough stat-stealers or pray to RNGsus.

God help you if you encounter more than one in a single fight, you will likely fail the run by default due to CTD. Back up your save before each fight, if you can be arsed.

Add in that the majority of cards are pretty much useless when tier 3 and onwards has too many straight up hardcounters to the majority of strategies and it really just becomes a case of who has the biggest beatstick. It's a very simplistic CCG and that's pretty much the entire game, there is nothing else.

You run through the same three procedural tilesets repeatedly, for the entire game, four if we count highmoore castle.

Too simplistic, feels like an unfinished demo. At $14.99 it's half-baked, I'd give it a tentatively positive review if it was $3.99 but as it stands it does not have $15 worth of content.

Honestly, I miss this game. It was a lot of fun, in spite of not being what was originally promised. The emperor protects.

See, normally 'labyrinthine' is a negative descriptor, and that's precisely what this DLC turned out to be.

It can best be described as... extremely tedious. It's also busted and buggy (I got the killing undead enemies achievement at less than 40, and I got the one for all 8 audiologs after picking up 3).

This DLC is a circular "maze", what this actually means is it's a lever simulator.

The gimmick is that you have to pull levers to rotate each segment of the "maze" to line them up and find the path through, this is already tedious enough on its own since the animation stops being cute and novel after the first couple goes, in actuality the mechanic exists only to pad out the otherwise tiny "maze" in both backtracking requirements and in time-to-clear. And I say padding, because even with that accounted for the maze can easily be cleared in less than an hour, boss included.

This is further exacerbated by the absurdly tanky enemies the "maze" is filled with, there are the normal ghosts from endgame areas, they're not so bad. But there are ridiculously tanky skeletons, and even tankier armoured ghosts wielding greathammers. None of these enemies are hard to kill, they're just absurdly time-consuming.

The DLC isn't so bad if you just beeline straight to the boss, but you're going to have a bad time if you want to collect all the items and secrets. I'd strongly recommend finding a guide, if there is one, for what route you should take because navigating the "maze" blind is an exercise in tedium and sheer force of will.

Not that any of the unique loot is particularly useful, the armours are equal to or outclassed by base-game armours, the weapons aren't particularly interesting either.

The boss fight is also probably the worst one in the game, it's a pure gimmick fight, once you solve the gimmick the fight is free. The keeper takes the dubious honour of dethroning the champion as the worst boss in the game, which is something, I suppose.

All in all it's relatively poor value for money. Maybe get it on a discount if you really want to 100% this game (since the DLC is required for some steam achievements), but I'd recommend getting yourself a nice ice cream cone or something instead, it'll last about as long, and I promise you it'll be at least twice as enjoyable.

If you got this as part of the GOTY edition you didn't lose anything of value, but you didn't gain anything of value either.

Another complete scam/troll DLC by Deck13. Once again: 1.99€ is far too much money for what amounts to one EXP level and 3 semi-common enemy drops (from every enemy class, more or less).

If they were big runes it'd be a bit more tempting, but that would only be a small band-aid patch over a much larger issue with the runes (the runes are gacha/RNG. Want a specific rune? Hope RNGesus is with you, big runes are only obtained from bosses so you have a finite amount of rolls with no guarantee of getting what you want or need).

If you got this as part of the GOTY edition you didn't lose anything of value, but you didn't gain anything of value either.

Another complete scam/troll DLC by Deck13. 1.99€ is unreasonable for a small scavenger hunt side-quest (find some graffiti, they're decently hidden but this is more irritating than anything) for a borderline useless trinket (you can only have one trinket equipped at a time, and there are much better options)

Use a guide if you can't find the secrets yourself and save the money.

Oh and as with the weapon and armour micro-DLC, the 'reward' will just clutter your inventory for the rest of the game (including the trinket you get to reveal the invisible graffiti), so it'll make your trinket menu just slightly more annoying to use (though unlike the weapon menu, you don't swap trinkets all that often so it's negligible).

If you got this as part of the GOTY edition you didn't lose anything of value, but you didn't gain anything of value either.

Yet another complete scam/troll DLC by Deck13. 1.99€ is too much money for some very earlygame weapons, they're very marginally stronger than your starting equipment but fall off very quickly.

I'd advise against wasting your money on this. They may potentially have been useful if you could upgrade them so they last with you through the game, but alas they're just garbage low-tier equipment.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say they're actively detrimental since there's no way to sell or stash equipment you don't want to use, they bloat your already slow-to-use mobile/browser/console quite a bit.