Liberte

I know nothing of the development of this game but it plays like a first project. It took me a while to fully understand why its so ♥♥♥♥. The devs couldn't figure out collision. Enemies do not reliably lock their direction when an attack begins. When they have a longer windup they frequently 'recheck' the players location right before firing. So you see a big swing, dodge behind the enemy, and the enemy instantly turns around to land the attack on you. To compensate for this they tried to make red outlines on the ground, but said outlines frequently do not line up with the attacks and have no animation to indicate timing. For example musketmen project a red line on the ground when they aim, you have a solid 2 seconds or so till the damage actually lands. Pistoleers project the exact same solid red line, but fire almost instantaneously. Other games have solved this by filling the red area in time with the attack. This is made substantially worse by the slow deliberate combat with permanent health loss. Every time you get clipped by an attack from an enemy that projected a red arc forward then turned around and did the actual attack in the opposite direction to catch you that …

Librete is a wonderful concept of a game, but falls short. It attempt to conduct itself as a rougelite, but rather feels like an experience that wants the player to die instead of a improvement of skill and character abilities. The random ness a rougelite/like offers is highly controlled, losing the feeling on how each runs feels unique to each other, while, at the same time, never feeling like their is beginnging, middle, and end to a run due to the only objective being the story missions. While the game brings unique concepts and an inetresting setting, this feels like a game that need extensive tests and returning to drawing to board.

I really don't wanna drop a negative review here. The art direction is great, and the story seems interesting. But the basic gameplay loop is so. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. boring. like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, the other reviews didn't exaggerate.

[h1]A lot of promise, and yet so much unfulfilled[/h1] [h2]Score: 6/10[/h2] There is so much in [i]Liberte[/i] that makes you root for the developer. The setting is novel and creative, the music engaging and melancholic. You get whiffs of brilliance in the merging of deckbuilder and roguelike mechanics and for the first 5 hours you will be inspired. In those first 5 magical hours the game will show so much promise and trick you into believing there is more to come: more maps, more skills, better enemies and the need to change your strategy. This promise is not fulfilled. The game is prone to soft-locks, the decks can be optimized in around 10 hours and the environments are repeated so much they become bland. There is no need to tinker with your own broken deck, and no need to explore other characters or swap strategy. You will defeat the same bosses using the same strategies over and over again. Good runs will be kneecapped by random soft-locks, as opposed to bad rolls or skill issues. I am giving this game a bare recommendation, just to encourage the devs to keep doing their work with the hope that their future projects are better nurtured. As for [i]Liberte[/i], only buy it …

This games (?) does not deserve any cents/pence worth of your time. Nowadays, this should be free given the level of the game it deserves. So if you buy this for a sale, you should feel pretty stupid for this negligent act. At the time I bought this, I naively thought the trailers and Steams catcha were worth the effort. Nope, none of it is worth.... So far, I just stopped playing it, because there is no point pushing further, no advances in the story, just a slow 1% progress every 10-20min depending on the repeating story arcs, so it would take more than 300h to complete it. Buy anything else would be worth !

This game definitely brings some great and, most importantly, fresh ideas to the Hades genre. It's beautiful, rich, and mature in its own way. Liberte has its own core. It runs great on Steam. I highly recommend it.