Personal blog

The world is vast and the character agile, but the menus are awkward and the size of the world is used as an excuse to recycle assets, so much so that you seem to explore the same place over and over. The main problem is the plot and the dialogue, weak and unclear, with flashbacks that could be better and only a few music tracks. Extraordinarily promising, it remains a nice experiment that, especially in its dialogue, could have been improved enormously.

The Andalusian Baroque pixel art, the sacred music and a finely balanced difficulty with only one real spike, at Eviterno, are all still there, while the RPG mechanics, with the rosary and the altar system, and the platforming grow. It reuses the same stylistic elements a bit too much and is less innovative, but it remains a beautiful game, perhaps slightly less beautiful than the first, which is best played before coming here.

It is a personal, post-apocalyptic reinterpretation of Noah's Ark, with fossilised animals, fishermen chasing the shadows of fish and a disaster caused by humanity's own weapons. With no explicit dialogue, the film relies on glances, ambient sound and experimental direction, but some rituals, such as the collecting of water flasks, remain incomprehensible. Difficult, at times too cryptic and heavy, it is reserved for lovers of arthouse cinema.

The pilgrimage-like atmosphere, with death as excommunication and Guilt to atone for at the altars, is accompanied by Spanish and sacred music and exquisite pixel art. It looks harder than Dark Souls, but damage and exploration are well balanced and only the final bosses raise the bar. It is perhaps too cryptic and has to be pieced together bit by bit, but I strongly recommend it to genre veterans with quick reflexes.

The sound design is unforgettable, with a hidden, cryptic rhythm in every scene, and the Wishing Willow becomes a deep and disturbing riddle. Some scenes towards the end break the tension, though, and in my view the Willow should have worked only for the protagonist, to feed the paranoia of an artificial love. Apart from a few rough edges, it is a horror film that manages to scare and that I enjoyed.