Dread Delusion

I do not know why, I just found the game very irritating. Like for some reason it did not respect its player’s time. A world with unique aesthetic and living, but weirdly empty and devoid. Large spaces take a long time to walk through. Means of faster travel take later in the game to unlock or a magic build. The most frustrating aspect of this game is the dependency on eventually non regenerating stamina requiring a night’s rest. This means finding inns and spending gold or homes where your gold is stolen. Not until player homes are unlocked can you rest without loss to limited coin. Still reaching any of these places quickly requires more stamina and with the big map they are far between. This took the wind out of the sales of exploring the game that wants to put emphasis on exploration.. Many odd shortcuts that were uneeded that go back to the same place, that save no time as they never were in places you need them. Though several skills and stats present different builds ...

Avoid if you have any issues with motion sickness from games, worst reaction I've ever had even worse than VR.

This game has a known bug: (https://steamcommunity.com/app/1574240/discussions/0/6369856709163652934) that players only find out about 10~ hours into the game. This bug results in loss of all progress and renders the game unplayable. This bug has been repeatedly documented and reported and yet, somehow this game does not have a huge red flag all over it warning people that it is broken. Their blatant anti-consumer practice of marketing a product they know is defective is frankly disturbing.

The characters, lore, and art direction made this an instant classic for me. The combat and character building are pretty simplistic but in a way that makes sense. My only real gripe with the game is that there are tons of waterfalls and I never found anything behind them!

TL;DR: Strikes a lot of the same chords as playing Morrowind for the first time. Though, much more limited in scope and polish, this game is definitely worth a try.

I really tried to like this game, but it's not very fun. The world is massive, which is impressive for an indie game, but it's pretty much empty and the fast travel system is extremely limited. Character progression is super slow because it's tied to a crafting system gated by a non respawning resource (iron ore). The stuff you find on the map, mostly plants used for brewing potions and upgrading your house is useless because: 1) You will find hundreds of potions around; 2) Upgrading your house is gated by the scarcity of iron ores. In short, you spend a lot of time going from point A to point B, then backtracking, but barely accomplishing anything other than removing quests from your backlog.

PSA: If you do get the game and are planning to play it between multiple systems (for example, playing it on a PC then switching to Steam Deck, or even between two PCs) consider saving a copy of your save file somewhere safe outside of Steam Cloud. I had some issues with cloud saves not transferring properly during my playthrough and at one point lost hours of progress because the game did not correctly upload the save file to the Steam Cloud, causing my older file on my Steam Deck to overwrite the Cloud save, which caused my new file to get overwritten on my PC. I reccomend at the bare minimum to go to "C:\Users\[your user]\AppData\LocalLow\Lovely Hellplace\Dread Delusion" and back up your save file after every session to ensure Steam Cloud doesnt erase your data. This is genuinely one of the best RPGs I have played recently. The world is absolutely fantastic, the lore that is set up and never fully explained leaving questions and theories left and right. The fact that there is...

If I could give it a neutral review, I would. But I can't, so I opted for a negative one. The one word I can use to describe this whole game is [i]rudimentary[/i]. Nothing is truly fleshed out. The combat is incredibly basic, and, as soon as you level up your agility, it is all but impossible for you to ever die. Another reason you'd want to focus on agility is WALKING. The game is an absolute walking simulator, making you stumble all over the barren world for hours. The enemies are WORTHLESS. There is literally NO REASON to fight anyone in the game. And, as mentioned before, with decent agility they can't ever catch up to you. The quests? The NPCs are very rigid and are not programmed to react to quest stages, which makes little sense. What you can and cannot say or do is very limited. The overall game design? Lots and lots of visual glitches (distorted NPC faces, randomly floating objects, misplaced models, seams in the ground, etc.). The same puzzles, over and over. Reused as...

Checked this game out because it closely resembled the Elder Scrolls III Morrowind in its artstyle and overall vibes, ended up disappointed. Overall it's like a blander version of Morrowind with souls-like elements, it's missing many rpg elements you'd expect, the story is kind of bland, and the combat seemed daunting at first, but once you experience it, it quickly loses its danger appeal. The world building and art is decent though. The game is decent enough as a standalone thing, so at a discount it's probably worth about what it offers. Just dont get your hopes up like I did and compare it to something it's not.

Every so often I'll attempt to give this game another chance, but it keeps letting me down. Let's start with the biggest flaw and most obvious flaw: the stamina degradation system. This is perhaps the most infuriating thing in any single player game I have ever played, and makes me think less of the developers who thought it was a good idea to implement it. Your max stamina reduces as you play, and you don't start off with a lot of it, either. (Even if you spec into it with the right character generation questions.) You don't even have to do actions to lower it, it just lowers on its own over time. You have a very interesting setting & world, yet you limit the time I can spend in this place... WHY? Perhaps if you made the enemies smarter and more engaging you wouldn't have to cripple the player like this. The artists and sound designers knocked it out of the park, though. Best part of the game by far. Now let's talk of all the glitches and oversights that are still in the...