Thank you for putting into words the problems I had with this game too. I saw it getting so much praise, and several people I know told me it would be right up my alley and I\'d 100% love it.... and then I didn\'t? The whole experience just seemed shallow and I really felt like I was missing something.
The gameplay loop is, like you say, very quick to get dull. It\'s not a good horror experience, and honestly it\'s not even a good fishing game either. The boat upgrades are hilariously unbalanced, the monsters have neat concepts but aren\'t actually threatening enough, the material gathering is simultaneously overly generous and tedious to do.... It\'s just a mess. Literally none of the gameplay elements are a highlight, unless you count the occasional novelty of seeing a particularly weird mutant fish.
And the writing. Man I tried so hard to like it, because the atmosphere you\'re thrown into is fantastic. But there\'s no meat to it at all. I even consider myself a fan of Story Breadcrumbs type games (I had a huge Dark Souls lore phase) and this was too barebones for me. Nothing that\'s set up feels like it pays off satisfyingly - and lots of stuff just flat out has no pay off at all. Like the quest chain with the Mayor and the Dockworker trading in suspicious packages that probably contain eldritch fish. There\'s a wonderfully eerie moment when you discover the Dockworker starting to turn into a zombie and.... that\'s it, end subplot literally then and there! No dialogue or references to this, no consequences in town beyond the fact you can\'t talk to him anymore, nothing. The subplot doesn\'t end, it just stops. And the whole game is like that all the way up to the endings.
There remains a foothold out of this mire — now climb.
Could be a simple as depending on what you like I guess. I have an extremely positive review on what I consider my favorite XCOM game I’ve ever played on this site, and someone underneath angrily calls it the worst in the series
^^ That\'s the biggest problem with the game\'s story; it doesn\'t grasp that the most important aspect of Weird Fiction is gradually building up and unraveling the mysteries through smaller but still equally freaky moments. I feel like I know exactly the same amount about the game\'s main mystery as I did at the start, which makes the Last-Second Ending Choice feel extremely unearned. None of the side content really has much mystery or suspense around it, either; a lot of it is just \"this region has an inexplicable giant monster, it\'s so spooky, how\'d it get there, we don\'t know! Have fun with this deliberately oblique obelisk vision that reveals nothing!\" I would even be fine with the Blackstone Obelisks if they allowed me to piece together parts of the story, but they still don\'t.
It's not about the gold; it's about the glory.Leave a Comment:
Shallow Depth, No Biting
This game started out so strong. As an unfathomably huge fan of H. P. Lovecraft's body of work and The Shadow Over Innsmouth especially, I was really excited to play this one, especially with its rave reviews. If there's one thing I can truly commend, it's that it nails that insular, vaguely xenophobic small-town New England feel that makes Innsmouth so iconic. The atmosphere in this game is great all the way through.
That being said, this game is...not scary. In fact, it's outright boring at times. After you start accumulating the tools to catch super expensive fish and deal with the Panic meter, any of the malingering fear the game is trying to generate goes out the window. It doesn't matter if LE SPOOKY GHOOOOST SHARK jumpscares me for the eightieth time when I can tank five hits with my upgraded hull anyway and the worst that's going to happen to me is either losing some items or my engine conking out. I should be pissing-my-pants scared every time I get caught out on the open ocean at night with a full panic meter, but I'm not. What they should have done was only allow you to make cargo and equipment upgrades but have you die in one hit to monsters (maybe not to bumping into stuff, that would be annoying), so that there's an actual mechanical danger to compliment the unnerving atmosphere the game is trying to present.
Despite being billed as an "open-world exploration game", the world is pretty barren and there's very little to actually explore or do. Each region has one, MAYBE two side quests in it and a handful of POIs that stop giving out worthwhile loot by the mid-game. This game so magnanimously overcompensates with the amount of resources you can collect that you can have every single research and upgrade unlocked by the halfway point, and suddenly every single dredge point becomes less than worthless. I don't know what games like these' aversion to giving me a gigantic Money Sink to work for is.
This game's story also sucks. It's trying so hard to be vague and mysterious like a true Weird Fiction story, but it's literally just one giant Fetch Quest with none of the mystique or engaging characters or dialogue that make games like Darkest Dungeon and its sequel so gripping. There are a handful of colorful personalities (I like the Travelling Merchant and Lighthouse Keeper, they'd feel right at home in Innsmouth alongside Zadok Allen), but the vast majority of them are pretty bland. Plus, the ending (SPOILERS) literally pulls an "it was all in le head because YOU were le bad guy all along" twist on you in the year 2024 and both choices you get are three-second cutscenes which reveal nothing about the story or world. There's nothing hopelessness or existential terror-inducing about these endings because we haven't gotten meaningfully attached to anything in this world and the mysteries it holds weren't adequately developed.