I've been meaning to play this game for ages, but was finally prompted by the realisation that I could play the copy we got super cheap ages ago on my Mac laptop.
It's as beautiful and bittersweet as I was told it would be. Very understated, almost all of the game is getting the protagonist from point A to point B past various enemies in the remains of a floating city, all shown in a simple isometric view. The wry, melancholy narrator and gorgeous soundtrack combine with the simple but beautiful art to evoke a US-frontier-inspired fantasy city turned to ash. The story itself is fairly simple, doled out by the narrator in tiny pieces as you go from place to place, but I found it really affecting and beautifully told.
The combat is very flexible, I found some sections incredibly difficult but a lot of them were optional and they'd probably be easier if I wasn't such a mindless button masher. Anyway, the difficulty didn't ruin the game for me because there's a "no sweat" mode where you come back from death with full health, the only downside being you miss out on certain achievements and some XP. There's one enemy where my only "strategy" was giving myself all the "damage enemies when they hurt you" passive abilities and watching as they slowly cut themselves to pieces on my corpse.
Here's the trailer. If you want to check it out
it's only $4 for the next four hours.
nb: while I think it does some really interesting things with it's historical parallels, it's possible indigenous players might find the POV frustrating.
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