| 5 star: | | (64) | | 4 star: | | (76) | | 3 star: | | (24) | | 2 star: | | (8) | | 1 star: | | (0) |
| Average Rating: 
Number of Ratings: 172
Write a review |
Previous | << 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 >> | Next | Show All - gattociao, August 23, 2023
- Drew Cook (Acadiana, USA), July 26, 2023
- Cory Roush (Ohio), May 30, 2023
- Lucifalle, March 28, 2023
- feamir, February 8, 2023
- jaymesjw, February 6, 2023
- Cerfeuil (*Teleports Behind You* Nothing Personnel, Kid), February 1, 2023
- OverThinking, August 10, 2022
- cat, August 1, 2022
- Kinetic Mouse Car, August 1, 2022
- VanishingSky (Nanjing, China), June 14, 2022
- rowan.du, April 30, 2022
- Edo, December 16, 2021
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Fast-paced religious horror, October 25, 2021I quite enjoyed playing Vespers, but it is not for everyone. It was written in a way that elicited a kind of visceral disgust (unsurprising giving the setting is a medieval monastery in the last stages of being wiped out by the plague). The decay of scenery and the protagonist's mental state keeps you wondering what is real and what is hallucination, and the regular (and often gruesome) deaths of the few other cast members keeps a sense of suspense.
Positives:
I enjoyed a specific aspect of the game that I've seen complained about in other reviews. The prayers to the saints were the most interesting kind of puzzle to me (Spoiler - click to show) as the stained glass windows gave enough hints about what sort of scenario each saint can help you with. I found the writing properly atmospheric and terse, and the short timespan of gameplay fits the small-ish setting.
Negatives:
I was probably most disappointed by the lack of descriptions. Most rooms were fairly barren, and many of them served no real purpose during the game. Also, some aspects of gameplay can be finicky and require a bit of trial and error (for example, timing some actions perfectly) which is a quirk of some games that I'm personally not a huge fan of.
So overall, I would recommend this game with the caveat that players understand what they're getting into. I think most prospective players will be able to tell based on the reviews whether or not the game is one they'll enjoy.
- Zape, May 10, 2021
- sw3dish, April 22, 2021
- unWinnable State (unWinnableState.com), April 2, 2021
- beecadee, November 14, 2020
6 of
7 people found the following review helpful:
You're breaking my heart. You're shaking my confidence. , October 1, 2020I was really looking forward to playing Vespers after reading reviews that it had similarities to Anchorhead, though I was left underwhelmed. I'm bummed, too, since Vespers has so many good things going for it.
The setting is damn near perfect. Playing a monk during the plague, watching everyone decompensate and die around him, is ripe for vivid imagery and tension. At times the game reaches that pinnacle. There are many subtle changes to the environment that occur as everything collapses, and in general, reexamining things on a regular basis is horrifying and rewarding. I also appreciate that while time moves forward with plot triggers, they are not always obvious at the time, which helped keep me in the moment. In this way Vespers succeeds as a successor to Anchorhead.
For me, though, just about everything else here is a misstep. The most egregious is that the game frequently does not remember things you have already done. I counted at least four instances on my first playthrough where the descriptions given do not match what is actually happening. For example, (Spoiler - click to show)if you ask Lucca about the flagstone while he's locked in the calefactory, he responds as if he's still in Matteo's room. Also, if you examine the bell after Matteo dies, the game responds as if he's still alive. While it's not expected that an author catch every single random thing a player can try, this happens more often in Vespers than just about any well-received game I've played, and it took me out of the moment every time.
The horror also didn't hit the right beats for me. Part of that is everything goes sour perhaps a little too quickly, so while I'm still digesting one horror, the next one is thrown at me before I have time to relax. By the end I was a bit numb to it all. I think part of that is also I didn't have time to really get to know any of the other monks, and with the exception of Drogo, they all kind of seemed the same to me. I wasn't invested in any of their fates, so when terrible things happened, I just shrugged it off.
I'm lukewarm on the multiple endings based on the moral choices you make. Vespers avoids the pitfalls of Tapestry, in that you aren't force fed choices and nothings feels overly moralistic. On the other hand, it's hard to tell (unless you do something truly horrific) that you're even making moral choices most of the time. Adventurers tend to just take the easiest path, and to not find out until the end that there was a harder but more rewarding path feels like the game played me a bit. Wishbringer and Counterfeit Monkey offer a more satisfying alternative by telling you at the outset that most every puzzle has both an easy and a hard solution, and neither of them are right or wrong. Just different.
I'm a broken record at this point, but in a serious dramatic piece, I much prefer there be one story with one ending. Replaying Vespers by making more despicable choices feels very icky, as it's no longer a character I'm playing at this point but rather me deciding to do despicable things.
I did enjoy my first run-through and it was the right amount of difficult. But with all the problems I have no desire to see it through again.
- William Chet (Michigan), July 20, 2020
- winterfury (Russia), July 2, 2020
- Panawe, May 29, 2020
- bryn_gc, May 28, 2020
- Sammel, April 2, 2020
- Elizabeth DeCoste (Canada), March 31, 2020
Previous | << 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 >> | Next | Show All | Return to game's main page