Horizon To Crinoa: Have Faith in Radiance -Prototype-

Having played and studied many professionally made ASG's lately I wanted to take a look at what indies are doing in the same segment. Found a demo of Horizon to Crinoa and decided to give it a go. Since this is a prototype and since its clearly made by a studio very early in their career this game shouldnt be judged to the same standards like the ASG I usually play. Decided to write this 'review' anyways to give the devs some feedback as that might come in handy for them as they work on the game. It is clearly is a prototype but not without its charm and potential. The music and the voice acting stood out to me. Any indie studio that is trying their hand on making 3D games with anime-styled characters (and that does not use AI) I'm automatically going to cheer for. Anime-styled 3D characters and NPR-based graphics is such a specialized field that I applaude anyone trying it out. The 2D character portraits and talking heads imagaes of Yellette, the main character, are really nice! But Yellette's 3D model could use a few hours back in the design lab because aestehically she is not as appealing as she could be. Costume and color-wise she works but her proprotions an…

"Horizon To Crinoa: Have Faith in Radiance -Prototype-" is one of those "What's the point" projects annoying Steam gamers who look for real, fully made, complete games. Instead the developers decided Steam Direct is for unfinished and abandoned attempts to make games (and I stress the word "attempt" here). They dumped what they admit is a prototype action RPG... considerably worse than most AAA ARPGs already on Steam, onto the platform, for no apparent reason apart from to pollute Steam with things that aren't full games, to the benefit of nobody. It's another case of developers putting their own desires above what's good for gamers, and when developers don't give a flying F$@# about what's good for gamers, it makes gaming worse for everyone. As is the case here. What do you do in the game? Lightweight ARPG combat with 1.5 characters and nothing else. Despite not being in Early Access, it's obvious this is an incomplete product. Developers have an obligation to deliver complete, not partially done products to gamers, that shouldn't be controversial. Whatever the excuses may be, it does no service to gamers for incomplete products polluting Steam like this. It makes it h…

For a game that recommends using a controller, the control scheme kind of sucks for it. Maybe it just kept bugging out on me, but after finally figuring out how skills work, they became very difficult to purposefully use because of all the forward-forward-backward nonsense and apparently-misread inputs. Would've loved to have an alternative method of activating them. As it is, I really tried, but I couldn't sit through the excessive monologuing just to deal with stressful controls. Hopefully all this gets ironed out in future projects and/or any proper release of this title.

in spite of it being a prototype, the game is a solid short & sweet ARPG with a good amount of fleshed out depth in it. i really like how expansive the playables' kits are, and enemies aren't exactly a joke if you aren't careful. i found it weird that knockdown recovery tech (aka "Regain Will" in this game) is not a default passive and instead has to be unlocked in the skill tree given how easy it is to get beat to death with several enemies hitting you otg without said passive. otherwise this is genuinely one of the most fun ARPGs i've ever played !

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Would of loved to play this game, however it is so bad for PC play, controls are poor, cannot be changed, camera stutter is big, it's a shame really I was looking forward to this.