Prabhav Agrawal

Played it for 10 hours straight on my brand new PS5 which I finally secured last week. Started playing it at 9:30am this morning (IST). The game is nothing short of what you'd expect out of a typical PlayStation exclusive title, although it's out on PC as well. The graphics have been highly leveraged by the absolutely outstanding art design, which even, in my perspective, surpasses PS4s last swan song, Ghost Of Tsushima. The music changes rhythm depending upon your current location and syncs beautifully with cute, little rot beings that accompany you all along the way, and present a wonderfully crafted companion mechanic that I haven't seen any game implement until this point. The traversal, combat and environment are genre defined, but add a soothing touch of Pixar vibe and enemy AI is aggresive, even on the normal difficulty, you can die, and die a lot, if you aren't always on the edge of your seat when engaging with bosses / minibosses. The story so far is decent, highly levered by small cutscenes that transition seamlessly into gameplay (on PS5). The artists are sure to have exceptional talent when it comes to move you with character expressions, and optimal use of simple words. Exploration is great, and you are rewarded for every tiny bit of puzzle solved / area explored, which in turn either contribute to you learning new skills, or purchase different types of cosmetics for your little rot companions. The main steal of the show here is the dualsense controller. People must play this game using Dualsense's haptic feedback and adaptive triggers for the PlayStation 5 system. They really show what it is capable of, and what more it can achieve in the coming years. When you first unlock the spirit bow, the trigger resistance and feel the dualsense offers is simply unexplainable and must be felt to believe what the guys at Sony have achieved with their new console. This game is easily a Game Of The Year contender for me. In a year of mostly deserted game releases and huge number of game delays, this game brings quite the light into the industry stepping forward into the new generation. Emberlab's first game, is surely a masterpiece in my perspective and they can only make this new IP grow into an epic in the coming years.