Foreign Sun

This is of course a must play if, like me, Biomass was one of your favourite videogame experiences in recent years. If not, it means you haven't played it in which case, feel free to jump straight into Foreign Sun as it is in many ways an augmented version of Biomass. It's hard to pin why exactly this game resonates with me so much. The metroidvania gameplay, the atmosphere, the music, the writing, the locations, the cryptic lore, are all excellent points, but why is it that it feels like you can 'smell' these environments? Why do the characters feel like real people who have laid out their life's worth of thoughts for you to pick up? Why do I regret my choices so, and am so happy when I get the opportunity to make new, hopefully better ones? Surely there is something more than nostalgia at play. Some kind of videogame singularity where someone, somewhere, worked really hard to make their vision come true and ended up making something beautiful beyond the videogame experience it was expected to provide. There is material for novels here (in fact I will literally pay the dev to write professionally, you're sitting on a goldmine that is your brain man), plus a few animated serie…

Tricky, beautiful, difficult, clever. I could go on and on. Foreign Sun was so very clearly made with love by, as far as I can tell, a single person. It's phenomenal, and if you love a good Metroidvania, you'll love this. Fair warning, it's not going to hold your hand, so be prepared to explore and learn through trial by fire.

Foreign Sun is an underrated gem that people should play. The combat feels so good to master. Learning the boss patterns so I know what to clash with or dodge was just awesome. The funny thing is, you don’t have to engage with clashing if you don’t want to. Those players will end up dodging a lot more, but as far as I know Foreign Sun doesn’t force you to clash if you don’t want to. I love the pixel art style and music are sick af. Though at the moment some of the areas are too dark. And how the story progression is laid out is great, but it could be a barrier for new players. You will experience terrible scenarios, but that’s ok. All you have to do is notice what is happening with the story and how the plot is playing out. Again, Foreign Sun is great please play this gem. I talk more about it in my review: https://youtu.be/Z5yb76Tj5KY

The game is beautiful, the sound design is excellent, the story is intriguing, it's all-around very well put together and it seems strange to me that this game is not more well-known than it is. It strikes me as a difficult game. Some games are "git gud" games and this is one of them. I'm afraid I might actually get skill-locked and not be able to beat it, that happened to me with Lies of P which was also an excellent game so I wouldn't consider the difficulty a downside necessarily, but it does stand out. EDIT: I spent some time hanging out by a checkpoint and practicing against nearby enemies for a few minutes and that helped a lot. The rhythm of combat in Foreign Sun is a bit different than other games of the genre but it clicked for me eventually.

I've only played for a couple hours but I can already see that this game is HUGE. the combat is awesome, the bad guys are buttkickers, and I really like the put-on-the-baddie's-clothes mechanic. definitely not so I can talk to them and stab them in the back immediately afterward

I'm a little hesitant to leave a review since I've only played about half an hour of this game so far. I ended up quitting the game to check how close I was to Steam's automatic two hour return window. Reason being that I feel it is very difficult to gauge what the gameplay is going to be like and therefore whether I want to keep it. I would probably put "not recommended" if this wasn't a brand new game with 25 reviews. It seems like an interesting game with a very dedicated fan following, so I hope that the people that it appeals to are able to find it and not turned away by a couple of reviews from people like me who didn't really get it. My experience of the game so far has been, I go through tutorial where I learn some basic mechanics. There are purple guys that look like the creature from the black lagoon, and there are dudes with sombreros and capes that look exactly like me, but we aren't friends. Note, during one of the combat stages in the tutorial, the game softlocked for about 5 minutes mid combat, with my avatar stuck in a very tight animation loop. Some button smashing eventually got it to work itself out. I finish the tutorial, and hop on a boat (charon vibes). Du…