Betrayer (2014)

It's worth sticking with Betrayer to see through the devilish tales told by the NPCs and watch the conclusion come to a puzzling end, but most might find the trip a sour sweet hidden by a sugar coating.

This is not the case in Betrayer, as its mechanics and narrative grew routine. I appreciated those aesthetics only from a distance it wouldn't give me. It's hard to criticize a game for being good-looking, but it's hard not to when its ambitions so clearly lay beyond that.

Still, there are some decent features in Betrayer. It's gorgeous to look at and your experience may be different from mine, depending on your luck. If nothing else, it has made me very excited to see what Blackpowder have learned from creating Betrayer, and I hope they can improve on the problems I encountered in the future.

Although Betrayer brings many good ideas to the table, the mix fails to homogenize in a meaningful manner, and the game's shortcomings begin pestering you while you repeat the same patterns over and over.

Instead, there's a merchant shop in every major location so you can get a charm that confers 4% faster running and you can't dig certain items out of the ground until you find a shovel way late in the game. I'd much rather see my character, in first-person, manically clawing at rocks, fingernails tearing off, punctuating lines of blood like the dot on an exclamation point. It would at least fit with the tone the rest of Betrayer is trying to set.