Game EXP: Ashen Arrows (MQ2)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Ashen Arrows through Keymailer, a third-party platform that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

Ashen Arrows
Systems: Meta Quest 2, 
Release Date: February 20, 2025
Publisher: VRKiwi
Developer: Rusty Pipes Games
Time Spent: 3 Hours 56 Minutes
Playthrough Videos on YouTube

I've been having a lot of fun playing Ashen Arrows.  I've also been getting a little motion sick playing through the campaign levels, but that's kind of my own fault.  Ashen Arrows is a first-person action/adventure VR game in which archery is the primary mechanic.  The game has multiple modes, from story-based campaign mode, HUD-based mini-games, and a semi-robust tower defense roguelite, which is an absolute blast to play.  One thing that I've noticed while playing is that while I'm left-eye dominant, meaning that I aim with my left eye, I definitely prefer to pull back the virtual bowstring with my right hand, as if I were aiming with my right eye.  But this is how I've fired a bow and arrow in real life, with my right side on the draw, which feels more natural; although in the video below, I do try to draw with my left side first before deciding that I'm not doing very well and thankfully the game lets you switch hands on the fly, rather than having to go into a menu screen to switch hands; that would've been bad.

Seriously, if you want to get a feeling for the combat in this game, then you'll want to watch our third video, "Bastion: Midgard" which showcases the tower defense game where you fight off waves of enemies while also choosing from a random selection of skills and feats and continue to stack as you progress.

The campaign mode (the saga) is also pretty great, steeped in Norse mythology, but also full of modern and pop-culture references that might break your immersion if you're only looking for a historically accurate archery game.  This isn't it, though.  But it is fun, and it can be hilarious.  It also isn't finished, which surprised me when I looked up information on the dev's Discord channel.  "Currently we only have Act 1 in the game with 3 maps..." and that "...we have plans for more content."  This was honestly a bit disappointing to find out, considering the events at the end of Act I-II: Enchanted Forest and what you would call, "a pretty big fucking cliffhanger."  Before looking up this question on Discord, I had briefly considered that maybe I did something wrong in the collection process in Act I-II or maybe there was some kind of hidden exit like in a ghost house in Super Mario World, but no, that's the legit end until additional levels are released.  I then rewatched the release trailer, and there didn't seem to be any extra content in the trailer that wasn't in the game.  So I guess that's it for now as far as the campaign goes.  But at least I can still play through additional maps in the Bastion stages since I'm not likely to be playing any of the multiplayer.

My only other complaint is that the game will frequently make me nauseous after about 20 minutes.  In the campaign mode, any extended sequence where you need to move around through an area runs a high risk that I'm going to get motion sick.  I think part of it is that the ground is rarely flat, as there are hills, steps, and elevations that you walk up and down.  I've tried my usual walking-in-place method while moving, which worked well enough in Layers of Fear VR, but that was a house, and this is walking through forests, countrysides, and cave systems.  In Part 6, I had to switch to the teleportation method of movement because I knew that I wasn't going to be able to move in the same way for much longer without throwing up on our kitchen floor; I know that I probably should've stopped playing at that moment, but I wanted to give this other movement another try and I was thankfully able to finish the stage.

The downside to feeling nauseous after playing (and still having that slight feeling even three hours after playing) is that I can only play for 20-30 minutes, and when I want to play more, like right now as I'm writing this article, part of my brain might becoming conditioned towards having negative feelings about playing because the game has made me nauseous.  Thankfully, I found a happy medium and decreased the movement speed to just slightly faster than the absolute slowest you can move and that seems to have helped that queezy feeling from becoming too overpowering.

Sadly, this is where I have ended with Ashen Arrows.  The saga (campaign mode) feels like it's in limbo (and honestly, I feel a little jilted on behalf of the people who paid for this game because there is no mention anywhere in the game or on the game's Meta page about the game being incomplete), so all there is left to do is try to rack up a higher and higher score in the Bastion Mode, and while there is some draw to see how long I can last against every increasingly difficult hordes of enemies and what combination of skills I can rack up, that feels more like an end game goal and unfortunately, there is no end game.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Welcome the Inhuman Race

First Impressions: Goldenheart (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Goldenheart through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

Goldenheart
Systems: Windows, Steam OS
Release Date: November 19, 2024
Publisher: MAVC
Developer: Millenniapede
Time Spent: 5.9 Hours
Playthrough Videos on YouTube

Before I started Goldenheart, I had read people describing the game as either a return to The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind or even a first-person Legend of Zelda akin to The Ocarina of Time, and honestly, I don't see either of those comparisons.  The in-game description of the combat difficulty can be switched between Story (easy), Normal (normal), and Souls (hard), presumably because the combat is more punishing, like a Souls-like game, but I don't think that's a valid comparison either.  Goldenheart is a first-person adventure and exploration game with combat that takes a stamina bar into account.  There are no standard RPG elements, such as leveling up, although you can find hidden gems that increase your HP by 1 scattered throughout the world.  Weapons are only acquired at context-sensitive moments, and the only incentive to kill enemies is to chance either a health or an arrow drop since there isn't any kind of EXP.  One of the biggest differences between Goldenheart and most other action/adventure RPGs from the early 2000s, and the reason why I had to stop playing, was that I realized that Goldenheart came across to me as an NES-era adventure game built in an early 2000s retro-style-engine but ignoring one of the most important advancements adventure games had made in the last 30 years, a manual save feature.

Now, I don't hate Goldenheart, and I wouldn't even say that I dislike the game.  There's a lot that I like here, despite having to change the aspect ratio every time I turn the game on.  I like that the story is intentionally vague at the start, when your troupe/band/group is waylaid by an increasing amount of monsters on the road between villages.  It's never made clear what your character brings to the group that you're in, although possibly because you're chosen to try and find a way through, maybe you're one of the few who are somewhat experienced with weapons, although you do require training from another member of your group prior to heading out into the world to look for Marren, another member of your group, and to ultimately find out what's going on in the world during which you uncover more expansive world-building lore involving an ageless warrior named Cazanseco who hermited himself away in a tower to further study life-extending magics and who is likely somehow connected to the evils that the world/area/region is now experiencing.

As I rewatched all of the videos I had recorded of my time playing Goldenheart, it made me a little sad that I felt as frustrated as I had, and all of that frustration was centered around the saving mechanic.  Saving in Goldenheart can only be done by reaching checkpoints.  This is a problem for several reasons, the biggest of which is that to me, it discourages exploration and experimentation.  When you have save points relegated to unknown checkpoints, it feels like the game is purposefully being hard for the sake of being hard, but not in the good way that Souls games or even Super Mario Bros. can be hard.  It's being hard in the cheap way that NES-hard games will use gotcha-moments or purposefully obscure enemies in the background with foreground elements.  The best way I can describe how saving in Goldenheart works is that feeling you get playing Neverwinter Nights, Morrowind, or Resident Evil (the original or the GameCube remake), or any adventure game that doesn't have autosave, and you die after not having saved for the last 20 minutes.  By limiting saves to only at checkpoints, Goldenheart has artificially recreated that feeling of realizing that you haven't saved and that you're going to need to repeat the last 20 minutes.  That feeling of self-loathing for forgetting to pull open the menu and clicking a button, taking all of a couple of seconds because you got caught up in the story and action, is a horrible feeling.

I do have a solution, and a rather simple one at that, too, because I'm not about to criticize (this time) a core game mechanic without offering some kind of a solution.  Scattered throughout various areas of the game are wells that exude a purply-pink mist that heals the player to full HP when they come in contact with one; coincidentally, this is the same substance that has kept Cazanseco alive when everyone else around him died.  Had these wells also functioned as a place to save the game along with the checkpoint saving feature, this would make exploring the game so much more tolerable.  Giving some agency back to the player is what I feel this game would need to make it just that much more accessible and playable.  This way, there is still some level of player choice when it comes to saving and you prevent the player from save-scumming through some of the more difficult areas.

I decided to stop playing after dying in a challenging area that contained constantly respawning enemies (both melee and ranged), and multiple color-coded locked doors.  Maybe the lack of desire to continue also had to do with dying while in a conversation that I couldn't stop, which put me back 12 minutes, which I know isn't a lot when I write it out loud.  And while I did make it back to the same area 3 1/2 minutes later (because I avoided all of the enemies I knew I didn't have to kill, it was a hard death to take.  But that death left me feeling deflated, so when I died in the maze, I dreaded the thought of having to go back through this area, not being able to avoid the respawning enemies and finding the key(s) all over again.  I just didn't have it in me.  And so I exited back to the main menu.

It's not a great feeling when you feel that you've been enjoying a game only to realize that one of the core mechanics is something that has tainted an otherwise well-constructed game.  I feel sad that I'll likely not find out what happened to Jaconian's troupe, whom he left back in Histahnia Village, or how Cazanseco and his search for eternal youth has affected the world and the monsters or if it's just as simple as bad guy with bad mutant monsters; I get the feeling it's not that simple though.  Maybe I'll just watch someone else's playthrough from where mine left off.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
The Stars are Shining with Consense

MIDI Week Singles: "Marshes" - Aztec Adventure: The Golden Road to Paradise (SMD)

 

"Marshes" from Aztec Adventure: The Golden Road to Paradise on the SEGA Master System (1987/88)
Composer: Unknown*
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: SEGA of America, SEGA Enterprises, Ltd.
Developer: SEGA Enterprises, Ltd.

You know, I don't really hear anything in the first half of this song that makes me think of marshes.  The music is too peppy and upbeat for your typical romp through a seasonally low-lying and waterlogged wetland dominated by herbaceous plants and populated by horned turtles, biggs, chabuns, fukoro-togages, and watermen. Then, around 13 seconds, the song takes on a descending tone that fits in better with the marsh setting, but I don't think this would work entirely on its own for the six minutes Niño is trudging through Central Mexico (or northern South America if you're playing the original Nazca '88 released in Japan six month prior).  And even though the song doesn't loop perfectly, when that beginning melody comes in again around 0:27, the preceding 14 seconds make this opening so much better than it was the first time.

I have no nostalgia for this song or the game, and watching a longplay doesn't really make me any more interested in finding and playing a port/emulated version of it, but I just like how the second half of the song sounds and how it manages to improve the first half.  At least to me.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Maybe After All These Years

*P.S.  I was only able to find one source that listed Mikio Saito and "Strong" Shima as possible composers, but since I couldn't find any additional information that would put either Mikio Saito or "Strong" Shima as working with SEGA around 1987 I decided to leave this information blank, but at least mention it down here.

Demo Time: Ayasa: Shadows of Silence Demo (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Ayasa: Shadows of Silence Demo through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.] 

Ayasa: Shadows of Silence Demo
Systems: Windows, Steam OS
Release Date: December 21, 2024
Publisher: Aya Games
Developer: Aya Games
Time Spent: 58 Minutes
Playthrough Video on YouTube

The shortest way to describe Ayasa: Shadows of Silence is a mix between LIMBO and Little Nightmares but with significantly looser controls and at times all with a very confusing depth perspective.

The game starts out in an oddly visceral pan through a serene forest, follows a butterfly through acrid pink smoke past the rotting corpse of an elephant to reveal a clear-cut forest on the outskirts of a large upwardly constructed city right as an air raid siren blares and a nuclear bomb is detonated in the heart of the city while an army of naked, eyeless and grinning humanoid marches on the said city.  A lot is going on in this opening, all happening in fewer than 30 seconds.  I don't know what it all means.  The game then opens as the camera pulls back from a young girl, who we'll call Ayasa because it seems like a name and I can't find anywhere on the Steam store page that says it isn't the name of the character, as she wakes up, presumably immediately after the bomb went off in the opening.  It certainly is an impactful opening, to say the least.

Once the game started, I moved the graphical settings down from High to Medium since the game was maxing out at around 22 fps on High, and around 45-55 on Medium.  I kept these settings throughout the rest of the game as it seemed to run fine and needed no further alteration.

Then at about 4:08, the chase began as the left side of the screen filled with purple and black smoke as withered grasping hands emerged from the encroaching storm.  And then I ran off the cliff and died.  I respawned back at the beginning of the stage, forced to watch as Ayasa once again woke up next to the wooden crate.  What was a little frustrating was having to sit through this 21-second sequence (I timed it) before you could start running towards the right side of the screen hoping to get maybe a split-second headstart on the cloud of hands.  And then I ran off the narrow plank bridge.  And then I waited another 21 seconds before I could take control of Ayasa again.  In total, I died four times trying to get across the bridge, which isn't too bad, but at the same time, it does feel a little excessive considering this is the first seconds of the game.

Because this is only a demo, I felt like nothing I did made any kind of sense.  There were areas with large sentient plants that looked like something out of Alice in Wonderland, there were giant ROUSs, there were the naked smiling creatures, and again, there was the purple and black pulsating cloud of flailing arms.  Everything seemed to be after Ayasa and everything was a one-hit kill.  Thankfully though, unlike the very beginning of the game, there was never again a requisite 20-second unskippable cutscene upon respawning, because the section in the burning village would have been more of an absolute nightmare than it already was; because who enjoys dying 15 times in just as many minutes if they're not playing Celeste?

Once the Ayasa makes it inside a few of the buildings in this burning village, the game truly feels influenced by Little Nightmares, although there isn't a lot here before the demo ends.  There are some building interiors and just as much crawling through tunnels and ducts before you reach the penultimate room, but that is about as close as a comparison as I can make.  The camera angles are similar, but the structure of the rooms feels more normal and less fantastical than the oversized proportions of the rooms in the Maw.  The penultimate building was interestingly designed in that you start in a foyer and have the choice of an anteroom that one of the naked creatures inhabits, but that is a dead-end room, which is only revealed after you reach the door and discover that you can't open it.  Or a flight of stairs that leads to a large open room where a massive floating eye scans the room with a red light that incinerates any organic flesh it touches.  The exit is a well-hidden hole in the wall on the second floor, but because both of these rooms contain easily triggered one-hit-kill enemies, it can be very easy to become frustrated and lost.  But once you find the hole in the wall and fall through to the room below, the demo abruptly ends.

I don't know how to feel about the Ayasa: Shadows of Silence Demo.  On one hand, I like the art style and I like the homages that the game is pulling from without feeling like it's trying to be either LIMBO or Little Nightmares, at least from what is present here in the demo.  I don't like how floaty the controls feel, especially when you're trying to run over a narrow bridge followed by a non-skippable 21-second intro scene.  I also really hated that sequence in the burning village where I died 15 times, but maybe that's just on me?  I feel like I'm partially curious about who and what the naked smiling creatures are as well as the giant eye and how they're all related to the nuclear explosion at the beginning of the game, but I'm not so curious that I would buy the game on day 1.  I'd probably wait until it's been out for a few years and maybe pick it up during a future Steam sale or if it's included in a Humble Bundle.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

Game EXP: DeathOmen (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for DeathOmen through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.] 

DeathOmen

Systems: Windows, Steam OS

Release Date: February 5, 2025

Publisher: CreativeForge Games

Developer: Jeff Winner

Time Spent: 2.8 Hours
Playthrough Video Playlist on YouTube

DeathOmen is an atmospheric-horror walking sim that builds tension through interspersed jump-scares with some questionable mechanics.

The game starts with your character waking in a darkened room with a laptop.  The laptop seems to be a central hub for cameras placed throughout the house, twelve in all, and one particular room where a woman lays awake on her bed unmoving.  There is also a strangely designed storefront where you can buy a hot dog, medication, or a flashlight.  This storefront is one of the more clunky aspects of the game and what looks like AI-generated artwork for the icons doesn't really fit thematically with the rest of the game.  These same icons pop up again once you enter the code to leave your room and step out into the hallway when the game tells you that you're hungry and should eat sometime, presumably a hot dog purchased from an online marketplace.

I then spent the next 32 minutes trying to figure out what the game wanted me to do.  I explored the explorable house with a handful of doors being locked without a "This door requires a key" notification, which was actually nice because that told me that I didn't need to worry about trying to open that door.  There was another keypad on a door downstairs that I figured out after reading an apparent letter to myself.  The first half, being the last 16 minutes of our first video was actually quite tense as I was fully expecting something to jump out at me or to find something happening on the cameras via the laptop upstairs.  By the end of the first video, the first 22 minutes, I felt mostly engaged, but when I quit, it was because I didn't know what else I was supposed to do.  In the second video, all 16 minutes, there was close to no feeling of dread or wondering what was going to happen because it was essentially just a repeat of the last half of the first video.  Wandering around the house trying to figure out what to do.  It was only after reading the Steam Forums and watching a walkthrough video from Zhain Gaming, did I discover that what I was missing was an annoyingly placed USB drive hidden behind a book on the bookcase in the downstairs office.

I genuinely don't understand this design decision.  There's no reason that I can understand to keep the USB drive so secretly hidden from the player since this is essentially what ends up propelling the game forward through to the end of the game; I think it was supposed to have been the player character who was the one that "hid" the USB drive in the first place.  The developer even acknowledges that the USB drive is often a difficulty wall that has come up with other players.  

Once you have the USB drive, it gives you access to the laptop on the desk in the office which has a similar interface to the laptop upstairs, but instead has access to a different series of cameras.  I can only assume that this is your character's regular job as an offsite video surveillance specialist as you acquire $1 every time you click to the next camera in sequential order; although I don't know how you're supposed to "report" anomalies like the paper on the fridge states.  Like the USB drive, acquiring money to make purchases from the online marketplace is a form of gating off the player from the next section of the game, requiring you to purchase an item upstairs and then travel down to the front door where the item is immediately delivered and dropped off on the table just inside the front door.  At one point I did try to buy the flashlight because I had the money, but the game told me that I didn't need the flashlight yet so I couldn't buy it; until a few minutes later when I needed to go into the basement and the game told me that I should buy a flashlight before going into the basement.

The remainder of the game is a series of tasks, requiring you to return to various rooms in the house to pick up items before the game tells you that your character is tired and should return to bed for the night.  While exploring the house and returning to rooms to collect items is when all of the jump scares happen and I do admit that most of them are very well timed, never giving you long enough to look at what it is that's scaring you for you to develop a clear image of who and what is doing the scaring.  When there is a static-induced jump scare, there is a slight chance that it will trigger a countdown timer with a classic "mental trauma" icon and the first time it happens the game prompts you to take your medication.  So then you must return to the office to click through cameras to earn at least $30, after which you return to your laptop upstairs to buy the meds which are then delivered back downstairs by the front door.  Thankfully, and oddly enough, you are given 10 doses of your medication and there were only three or four instances in the rest of the game that required you to take your medication; in a separate playthrough I watched what happened when the timer reached zero and it's just an instakill screen with "Fatal Panic Attack" blazoned across the screen in bright yellow text.

Throughout my entire playthrough on the Steam Deck, the only issue I ran into was that I couldn't invert the y-axis natively, but I was able to invert the touchpad in the Steam Deck controller settings, similar to what I had to do with Hell Dive.  This meant that the touchpad was always inverted, making navigating any menu with the cursor a little awkward, but manageable; significantly more so than had I had to play the game with standard y-axis controls.  I didn't change any of the graphical settings and the game ran anywhere between 30-52 fps.

Overall, I found DeathOmen to be a mixed bag in the best way possible.  The story was a little convoluted in both its telling and its final explanation for why all of the events were happening the way that they were.  The purpose of the two laptops with their multiple cameras felt more like a mechanic whose sole purpose was to require the player to perform an action to trigger an event to progress the game without it feeling well integrated with the rest of the story.  And the atrociousness of the online store and the USB drive.  But once you acquired the USB drive and the rest of the game progressed at a reasonable rate.  The jump scares were well timed and paced so that there was a feeling of dread as you walked through the house, constantly wondering if you did actually close that door or when that door opened and by whom.  DeathOmen also didn't overstay its welcome taking me a little over an hour once I located the USB drive (although I probably could've saved some time had I remembered that there was a spare fuse for the electrical panel in the nightstand).  Good tension and jumpscares hampered by a mediocre story and occasionally confounding mechanics.  Take that how you will.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
I Don't Want To Die Alone

MIDI Week Singles: "Conclusion" - Wizardry VII: Gadeia no Houshu (PSX)

 

"Conclusion" from Wizardry VII: Gadeia no Houshu on the PlayStation (1995)
Composer: Takeshi Yasuda
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Developer: Sir-Tech Software

This one's a little interesting for a couple of reasons.  First, I decided on the PlayStation port of Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant, originally released on DOS in 1992 and ported to the PSX in Japan only in 1995.  From what I could find, the music for the PlayStation port was completely rewritten by Takeshi Yasuda and didn't use any of the previous music that was written by Steve Miller.  Next, is that I am 98.47% certain that Takeshi Yasuda is specifically referencing Trevor Jones' score from The Last of the Mohicans, specifically at 1:56 where it sounds a lot like the Main Theme/Prologue at 0:40.  Lastly, I'm only guessing on the title of the song being "Conclusion."  Because there's no official soundtrack, my two frequented online sources only list this song as MUSU, and is always listed as the third of four tracks from the game; to note, there are song titles for the DOS and PC/Mac versions of the game, but again, this is a new score.  Conveniently, "むす" translates to "conclusion" although I could also be missing some significant context as to what musu actually translates to, but "conclusion" works well in this context and I actually find fitting for this song*

Without knowing any additional context as to when the song is played (as I couldn't find a longplay specifically for the PlayStation port), I still feel that this would be a fitting song for the conclusion of a sci-fi fantasy adventure.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

But It's Not Gonna Change for Anybody

*P.S.  To note, none of the other file names, ANPA, DARK, TLAN are translatable in the same way, so it's likely  just a coincidence. DARK could just be music that plays during the dungeon crawling sections of the game (ie , when it's dark), and TLAN could be somehow related to the mission to defeat the T'Rang and just be mistranslated. I don't have any ideas about ANPA though.  Just theories of course. 

First Impressions: Grimm's Folly (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Grimm's Folly through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

Grimm's Folly

Systems: Windows, Steam OS

Release Date: March 14, 2025

Publisher: Gray Days Entertainment

Developer: Gray Days Entertainment

Time Spent: 86 Minutes

Grimm's Folly started out somewhat promising, with a series of environmental puzzles offered in both first and third person perspectives, along with an oddly placed time trial racing mode that I had yet to determine its significance on the larger whole of the story.  You play as the character of Alex, who has been mysteriously taken into a realm called the Mind Palace by an unknown entity in an apparent swapping of matter, along with a hyper-intelligent crow who seems to know more about this place than your character.  As you play, you primarily control Alex in a first-person perspective, but at will, you're able to switch over to play as the crow who waits for you at your next puzzle location.  As the crow, you're able to fly around the playable area and, for reasons yet undiscovered, engage in a timed race mode where you fly through golden rings as fast as possible.  As you uncover puzzles and different enclosed locations in this Mind Palace, which includes unoccupied but fully furnished buildings, you uncover more and more of the lore behind this place, your captivity, and, I presume, a way to escape.

Now, the game is longer than the 86 minutes I played, but I encountered on two separate occasions glitches with the camera controls.  Playing on the Steam Deck, I didn't need to do any controller/button remapping on the back end, and the game natively offers inverted y-axis toggling, so that was a nice change of pace.  The first time something strange happened was at about 14:00 when I was searching through the school/library building.  At that moment, the game took control of the camera to focus the player's attention on the crow that was sitting on the telescope as well as the journal on the table.  After this integrated cutscene, I was not able to look down, which you can tell as the camera shakes every time I pressed the joystick up.  I thought maybe if I changed perspectives to the crow, be it by taking control or playing the time trial, it might reset the camera, but apparently, only saving and quitting was able to fix the problem.

The second time occurred when I started our third video and discovered that the Look Sensitivity setting was all wonky.  I tried moving the sensitivity around to different settings, but even that had my turning at an excruciatingly slow pace.  The biggest change I was able to make was by reducing the Look Sensitivity to effectively zero, saving and quitting, then starting back up and increasing the setting to max, but again, that still made the game unplayable.  My only other option would be to start up a new game and hope that this problem is fixed, but the thought of starting over, even as early as I feel like I am in the game, is not something that I'm eager to do.  The two possible outcomes from this are either that this will fix the problem and I start from the beginning or that the sensitivity is still not working correctly and the game auto-saved over my only save file.  So again, I'm not enticed either way.

It's all rather a shame because I thought the dual mechanic of controlling a crow and a human could have been intriguing, even if the time trial came across as a bit silly and out of place.  I liked being able to swap over to the crow when I wasn't sure where I was supposed to go and could look around (as the crow) to get my bearings.  I was interested in knowing more about the crow as well as how and why the crow couldn't see the player character even when they were standing right in front of each other.  Was that a purposeful choice narratively, or was it due to developer limitations?  Maybe both?

So this is where our journey with Grimm's Folly ends.  Sadly glitched/bugged out of the energy and gusto to continue or, at the very least, to find out what happens if I restart the game, which isn't a particularly great feeling to have.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

P.S. Our incomplete playlist over YouTube.