ATONE: Heart of the Elder Tree

Glad I stumbled upon this unique indie game and underrated gem. The hand drawn art style, emotional story, and relaxing exploration mixed with rhythm-based combat create a really unique experience. The soundtrack is great and the rhythm battle music is amazing. The arena battle achievements are extremely difficult and I had to get my wife's help to complete them :D

I just can't associate vikings with mellow electric music. Visuals are nice, but the story with the whole setup is just boring. And once again the girl boss thrope where you need to cut your hair to be a fighter...

I really wanted to recommend this because I love the art style and the music, and the rhythm game battle system was very appealing to me (I'm terrible at action/fighting games). But I only got maybe a quarter through it and got so frustrated I lost the motivation to continue. - In the rhythm game portion, the rhythm doesn't actually match up with the music making it really difficult to hit the beats when you're supposed to - its like half a beat behind. That's kind of a critical flaw if that's gonna be your primary game mechanic. - the puzzles give you very little in the way of guidance (though you can get one hint for each) and eventually I hit one that I had absolutely no clue how to solve and no patience to go through all possible permutations of solutions. I couldn't progress without solving it so I gave up. - You pick up random stuff as your move through the game maps in treasure chests and things, but its never explained that they exist only to give you money to buy things? They never show up in your inventory so I was completely confused until I first encountered the travelling merchant. - The books/lore drops you find don't really seem to matter in any way to the game play …

I am not really a fan of the artstyle and the battle mechanics just doesn't feel right for the world. I mean there is nothing wrong with it i just can't get in the mood for it. References feels very out of place and the speech choice system just feels frustrating because it is so hard to predict what reactions choices makes. If this were a score system the game would get a high score but since it is if you recommend it or not then no i don't recommend this game.

https://youtu.be/sk9QRvcD6l0 Attempting to do too much too fast much of the basics appear to have been overlooked weakening the overall cohesion.

A beautiful and interesting game, but a bit lacking in terms of gameplay. Especially during the first hours, it's just long dialogues and cutscenes, then 2 minutes of gameplay with puzzles so easy they can barely be called puzzles, then more dialogues and cutscenes. Thankfully it gets better later on, and the story is engaging, but the puzzles remain way too easy all the way through. The only exceptions are optional puzzles, which on the contrary are way too difficult. In fact they're more like riddles, or challenges you would find in an IQ test or something. They're purposefully vague, and I'm sometimes certain I have the correct solution yet fail. The best parts of the game are the rhythm sections which serve as fights, although they're a bit short and there aren't many of them. It's a shame we can't watch the beautiful animations in the background while playing, but that's a flaw inherent the the genre so I can't hold it against the game. If you don't bother too much with the nonsensical optional puzzles, it's actually pleasant to follow the story through that little mythological universe. Graphics, writing, animation, everything is well crafted.