I really enjoyed Vampyr and reading about this game I was hoping I would enjoy it as well. Vampyr is the tighter and more enjoyable of the two games. This game drags and many cheap tricks are used to waste your time and keep you playing it well beyond the game's ability to captivate your interest.

Pros:
- The idea behind the game is great. A ghost of your lover stays at your side to help you and enhance combat.
- The setting is cool. Exploring early America in the late 1600s.
- Red is a great character.
- Combat is pretty fun and leveling up has meaningful benefits.
- Exploring the side missions where you solve hauntings is interesting and sending off ghosts is pretty cool.

Cons:
- Where Red is great, Antea can be insufferable. Red is always kind to her, but she can be very condescending and critical to Red. She blames him for her death. You play as Red, yet she is front and center.
- The game is loading with "the message". Woman are strong, mean are weak, colonialism is bad, and a lesbian in every camp. There are two sisters. One is a lesbian and the other is so badass, she should be the main character. She is the most masculine character in the whole game. She even has a badass name. Thickskin.
- There are a ton of side tasks and puzzles that are way too frequent and cut and paste. One of the most annoying puzzles that they use way too often are these vine puzzles. At first they were fun, but they stopped being from 50 times later and they are later needed to proceed with the main mission.
- Although it was interesting to send off ghosts, the insane amount of ghosts gets to be a bit much. The game takes place at several small camps and pretty much every person is haunted. Half the camp dies and haunts the remaining half.
- In the end, you have so many useless items in your inventory, I have no idea what the purpose of them are. Linen, leather, etc. You use very little for crafting and they are worth practically nothing when you sell them. Yet you end up with hundreds of each item, because the game world is littered with useless crap everywhere. You will go through some trouble to get to an area only to find these useless items. How much of my time was spent chasing after linen and leather? A lot.
- The world is broken up into smaller areas with these cheap tricks like crevices, ledges, crawl spaces, and climbing walls. How the settlers got around is beyond me because there are no connected roads or paths. Every area is laid out like a maze to simply make moving around more tedious and time consuming. It really got annoying after about 20 hours of it, with 20 more hours to go. I see no reason why the game could not have been more open world and easier to get around. Fast travel locations were mostly frequent enough, but you should have been able to quick travel from anywhere to those points and not need to go to those points to only travel to other points.

Overall, the bad, cringe, and annoying outweighed the good. I was drawn to the game and did enjoy the ending, but it was also a chore half the time and there are just too many things that could have been better. I doubt I will buy any other games from the developer since they are obsessed with preaching the message and I just want to enjoy a game without being preached to.

After seven hours of playing, I can say that this game truly deserves more recognition. For me, the character design, setting, and voice acting are exceptionally well-crafted and polished. As for the gameplay, it's not too difficult and is quite accessible for newcomers. I'm really excited to finish the rest of the game! Hopefully, in the future, DON'T NOD will continue to create more games with fresh and unique themes like this one. 😚

6/10 (Flawed)
Decent concept, too many rough edges to recommend.