Sublustr BLACKTAIL Review

I try to be lenient towards aspiring indie devs, but this game is just BAD, I'm sorry. Everything in this game - dull story, poor dialogues, tedious and repetitive combat, clunky movement, boring fetch-quests, horrid "survival elements " aka endless resource gathering and crafting, an empty map with nothing to do (save for that endless, painful, mind-numbing arrow crafting that I mentioned earlier) - is simply not my definition of fun. The only merit that Blacktail holds for me is its world design: the map is quite pretty with its strange, weird places, phantasmal ruins and mysterious underground tombs/temples, but their novelty quickly wears off as soon as you realise that there is nothing to do there; they're empty. There is no lore, no story to them - nothing. But even that would have passable if not for pervasive, tedious enemy encounters that are identical throughout the game, for enemy variance is nonexistent here. Every battle feels like a war of attrition, enemies sponge up your arrows no matter what you do. And the bosses, ugh... even worse. Put down the distracting decoy, shoot spongey enemies, run around and gather resources to craft more arrows, put down the decoy, wash, rinse, repeat. All that for a reward of MORE crafting ingredients, yay! Who would have thought. Overall I DO NOT recommend this game. I've played for about ~17 hours and it felt like a painful, tedious chore every time I picked up the controller. Pretty graphics and "slavic folklore" are sadly not enough to justify immersing yourself in a world of painful boredom.