Fates of Ort

Old school look and good gameplay

+ pretty good quest design that only optionally holds your hand (hint button, which spoils the quest). There were no stupid fetch quests, almost all of them were very long-term and I have barely finished any + time stops when you don't move (well, almost always). And it's even part of the in-game lore! Haven't seen any deep worldbuilding based on this, but it was at least brought up +/- spells are powerful, too powerful even - there is a charm that makes enemies fight for you with a decent area of effect that's cheaper than the simplest magic missile. I haven't seen anything that can resist it (well, maybe bosses). It makes combat with multiple enemies easier than with a single one +/- I was about as strong after getting two first levels (1 hour of playtime?) as I was at the end. The only thing you get on levels are new spells and the first two seem to be the most important. Equipment seemed basically useless +/- there is no mana and instead spells cost small amount of life +/- the world is big and feels well handcrafted. The problem is that it's too big for little reason. There aren't any interesting spots you can come back to later and it feels very... linear. Don't get me wrong, there are many possible paths for you to take and this is an open world game, but said world is rarely designed for you to come back to revisit (e.g. because there was a cave in the early game with a powerful dragon, that you couldn't beat yet or something like that). And I say rarely, since there are cases when you cannot progress without an item so you come back to open a new path metroidvania style. It doesn't feel organic, it's not your decision and instead the game has to hard-stop you to then push you to come back later - enemy encounters are very easy so instead there is a ton of them to slow you down - coming back to spells costing life - it strongly disincentivizes exploration. The only way to get back your life is to get to the savepoint-crystal, so the game forces you to visit them often. In practice I learned to go directly to the next crystal (all are showed on the map from the get-go), just to be able to reach it on first try. There was barely anything worth seeing in the side areas that I explored before, so it was more pragmatic, but also not very adventurous - travel felt slow and that's despite very generous free teleportation to every discovered crystal - again about the spells - since each cast is costly and your resource is finite it's like the game...