Baldo: The Guardian Owls

This game has come a long way since I first played it on Apple Arcade years ago, briefly. I realized there was a great game there but mobile was not the way to experience it, plus there was still a lotta jank and bad game design choices. But boy has it improved since then! First of all, I'm a huge LoZ fan, and this is very much a Zelda-inspired game. At times, it's downright shameless with the similarities lol. But on the whole, I think it does enough to establish it's own identity. It's basically a 3D-rendered, cell-shaded top-down Zelda, skewed 45 degrees to an isometric view, à la Tunic or Death's Door...with a Studio Ghibli aesthetic. It's quite massive tho, and I've only played the main quest, which took me 60+ hrs to finish at about 95% completion, since a couple of minor side quests just seemed redundant at that point. I've only just started 1 of 3 free DLC expansions, separate from the main quest, so the amount of content here is insane! This game was created by only 2 devs, I believe, over several years, and it launched in a pretty rough shape to some very mixed reviews. I can still remember some of the annoyances from back then. So many small indie games aren't able to re…

They fixed the game, I bought it on iOS back on release day and it was rough. The game is extremely enjoyable now. If you enjoy TUNIC and those types of games, you will like this one, especially if you enjoy that graphic style.

I gave the game about 100 minutes, and that was enough to see its major flaws. From the start, the font layout and menus feel messy and unfinished, with even basic options like adjusting the resolution being difficult. When starting the game, the first option presented is a DLC, and it is unclear which option actually starts the main story. While the game looks appealing on its Steam page with a Ghibli-like style, the in-game visuals are a major disappointment and feel cheap and artificial. The puzzles are confusing rather than clever, making progression frustrating instead of rewarding. Story transitions feel disjointed, with no sense of progression being carried over. Overall, the game feels like an unfinished attempt to copy Zelda, with no voice acting and a lifeless world. Despite its attractive presentation, I cannot recommend this game. 1/10

Closest thing to Zelda on PC. Great game, lots of fun. Devs have done a lot of work on it and it really stands on its own.

Plaied for the first time on playstation before the DLCs, now playing it on Steam. So far, a very big no for me is an obvious bad game design choice. There is the base game and 3 playable DLCs, but only 3 saving slots, so in order to play all of them, one of the game files must be deleted. Never liked that solution, and in this case with each DLC requiring a separate save my opinion of the game is negative, I don't want to have to delete one of my game files in order to have the full experience.

I truly want to love this game, graphics is cute, music catches ear (owl town!), exploration is great, puzzles here and there engaging, but last few dungeons... are absolutely awful, with constant backtracking and lacking clear goal... unable to finish game like that