Originally Posted by
Formalhaut
What's the general story about, and what's game-play like?
As someone who's played for five hours...
In a nutshell, you play as a young woman in a distant future where technology has destroy civilization, nature has taken back the earth, machines in the form of animals wander the landscape beside actual animals, humanity has reverted back to tribal societies, and an entire religion has formed based on these things. The woman you play is an outcast, shunned by her tribe to a life of exile that she longs to remedy and find answers to, because she, like you, has no idea why things are this way, and no one is telling. Honestly there's a lot more details but it'd take several paragraphs for me to fully explain because it really is that deep, and the game does an incredibly good job of showing and telling the story so that it's not at all hard to grasp or understand. Modern Square Enix could really take a lesson or two from this game.
As far as gameplay goes, it's an open-world action RPG. It's kind of like grown up
Zelda with a lot more depth and options in a wide open world. You have melee attacks and an array of weaponry at your disposal, including various traps and a bow with various kinds of arrows available. Combat is extremely satisfying too. Sometimes you get into really fast paced battles and you have to do your best to hit weak spots, and doing everything just right and taking down a big metal beast feels more rewarding than 99% of the battles in video games I've played. It's very well balanced and adequately difficult. It's challenging enough to make you feel accomplished from a win, but it's not masochistically hard like the
Souls games or anything. You also level up and there's a whole progression system, as you would expect in an RPG.
To be fair, I've actively avoided reading things about the game, so there's a ton of stuff I don't know yet. But I will also point out that it may very well be the most visually gorgeous game I've ever played as well, and I'm playing on a standard PS4. Youtube videos don't at all do it justice.