I’m not too proud to admit I *messed up* the Icy Fortress gauntlet more than once. And even within the actual ‘linear’ levels, there’s plenty of variation in puzzles, fights, and even general aesthetic to make the actual experience much more interesting than I made it sound just now. And then there are the boss fights, which all involve some form of running a deadly gauntlet before getting where you need to go. Exceptions include a mostly-open desert map where you have to return twenty pearls to the starting position, or the forest maze that sees you branch off in three different directions to open a magical portal in the center. Note that not all levels follow this formula. But the first time you’re playing, you won’t know what you’re doing and you won’t be laser-focused most levels I played clocked somewhere in the 30-60 minute range, making one or two of them in a row feel like a solid chunk of play time. It’s possible to burn through many of them in a handful of minutes, if you know what you’re doing and you’re only focused on getting to the end. Maps generally take the form of ‘straight line with branches’: There’s one ‘correct’ path to get to the exit, with dozens of smaller or larger side paths that lead to powerups, lore items, and optional fights. In order to get to the exit you have to clear obstacles, solve puzzles, and fight giant Golems as you traverse the map. Most levels are some variation of ‘get from point A to point B’, where point A is the spot your character enters the map, and point B is whatever narrative justification you have right now to keep moving. Masters of Anima works like this: You play your way through eleven varied levels. The five people in the audience who still remember Overlord nod approvingly at this deep, yet accurate cut. And I’ll probably never play it again after this. It’s a game I enjoyed playing for a week, that I don’t regret pushing through in order to see everything, and I would probably recommend to anyone interested in this particular sub-genre. It’s a competent piece of art-entertainment. It doesn’t necessarily push any boundaries, and it doesn’t contain any world-shattering writing or ideas, but it’s ‘fun’ to play and presents itself without any glaring faults or omissions. I sometimes feel like there’s only room for extremes: Games are either transcendental experiences or incredibly smart and innovative, or they’re not really worth our time and effort. There’s a word that gets too little play and a bad rap in games writing, and that word is fine. You didn’t miss much, honestly: The opening page would have included a whole bit about me not being able to tell Scottish and Irish accents apart, which - listen, I know, okay.) This review will be a little shorter than you’re used to for previously documented reasons of tomfoolery. I worry that stories like ‘I bought a game because I thought it was cool, but misclicked the Steam install link and as a result almost instantaneously forgot about it for several months’ are too far out. But then I did some digging (of both the memory and email varieties), and sure enough, it turns out that I thought this game looked really neat and I got it for review purposes. This was surprising mostly because I didn’t remember ever giving that game a first chance. Remember that Steam even that ran a month or so ago? The one with the checklists with games that you might enjoy? On a whim, I looked at the list of ‘games you should give a second chance’, and was surprised to find Passtech Games‘ and Focus Home Interactive‘s Masters of Anima. Like I’m just telling tales to entertain, instead of relaying the way my brain is fundamentally pointless. I make these on here every so often, mostly because my own absentmindedness is a never-ending source of hilarity for me, and I always worry whenever I do this that my stories seem to far-off. I’ve made bad memory jokes on here before, right? Right.
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