Recent reviews by Olivia!!

I was a little excited to revisit ELDEN RING now, and the recent patch unfortunately brought back all the frame pacing problems of the original release. It's still a pretty good game, but it will almost certainly not run smoothly. I've seen it tested running on medium settings @ 1080p on a rtx4060 and stuttering. If you get it, just know that it's not your PC that's bad; it genuinely just runs like that. They did fix it, somewhat, in 1.02.3, but its back again now with the DLC patch (even if you dont own the DLC!). It's not "unplayable", but it's certainly unenjoyable. If it gets fixed, I'll rectify this review, but until then I genuinely can't reccomend this game.

Short version: This game is so incredibly good. I cannot reccomend it enough to anyone interested, especially if you've got three friends willing to go in with you, but it's fun to solo as well.

Long version: This game is exactly what it says on the tin; It's a ffxiv-inspired raiding roguelike. Gather with three of your rabbit-shaped friends, pick your classes, and set off to fight increasingly tricky to overcome enemies. Each of the ten classes plays very different and all of them have fun playstyles, which you can customize a lot at each of the shops you pass through (by changing fundamentals about either of your four skills), which you wanna be on top of to survive the patterns of each boss. A donut-shaped safe area between two damage fields, with a rotating cross forcing you to dance in a circle as you also cant get close to another player? Check. Figuring out where you'll go after a teleport, which needs you to land on top of another player after their teleport but also make sure you dont land in a damage zone? Check. If you've played any higher level ffxiv content, you'll feel right at home. If you haven't, Rabbit & Steel is an excellent game in its own right.

There's a reason this game has been played and loved by so many for just about two decades now. I've played it on and off several times throughout the years, but the modernized UI and tileset really helps to convey what is going on at a glance, which really lets you bypass the major hurdle to getting into what is otherwise and excellent game. Don't be scared by all you've heard about how complicated Dwarf Fortress is; you can start making a living on very little knowledge, and have a good time with it. The ingame help is a good source for finding out how to set up managers, bookkeepers, etc, and then you can really just pick the game up as you go.

I don't know where to begin with describing my problems with this game. The big complaint with previous Yoko Taro titles are always about the gameplay, so they got Platinum to develop this one, but instead of being interesting to play you somehow have less interactivity with the combat than in something like Drakengard 3. Someone claimed the combat being boring is intentional, to make you feel like an emotionless murder machine who doesn't even think about what you're doing as you're killing enemies, but if that's true the game sure doesn't convey it well and it doesn't make it any more fun to play. There are a ton of systems that have no reason to be in, but they're there anyway without adding anything to the experience. (Dark Souls bloodstains, for example). The game straight up lies to you at several points; and not in the kind of clever, unreliable narrator, way. Worst of all, the story of this story-heavy, narratively driven single player RPG is nonsensical at worst and unfortunately... problematic at worst. The final segment in the true ending of this, once again, *story heavy single player RPG* has an always online requirement (and also breaks the established canon; There is a massive plot hole that opens in the true ending that completely invalidates a lot of the rest of the game). But worst of all for me is that, in a game ostensibly about androids developing egos and making choices of their own, the game gives you no options whatsoever in making your own.

All in all, I'm sure a lot of people can enjoy this game for what is there - a lot of my friends called it their game of the year. But for me, it was a confused mess, with an infuriating ending, and every good moment I had with the game was doing the exact opposite of what the game seemed to want me to. All in all, the one feeling it left me with was "disappointment". I had high hopes for this game and it let me down time and time again.

Oh, Keiichi Okabe delivers a stellar soundtrack again, though.