An Automaton's Journey

I started my playthrough on Windows, beat the first 2 dungeons. I took a break for a few hours and went to play my save on the Steam Deck. Trying to load my save kept crashing the game, and the text is stuck in Japanese, even after changing the settings and starting a new game. The Steam Cloud unfortunately changed my save to the new one, so all my progress is lost, and even re-installing the game keeps the text in Japanese. I'm going to refund this until the bug has been fixed. I don't mind losing progress, but I do mind being lied to about Steam Deck verification. If it works for you, great. It doesn't work for me.

At first glance, it looked like some cheap RPG Maker game with a lot of game mechanics similar to the old classic Zelda games, but it was much more than that, and I enjoyed the journey of this game quite a bit. This game offers a lot of content for its cheap price tag. You have to play the main story to advance further, but there are also quite a bunch of optional quests and stuff to explore. It took me like 10 hours to complete my first run. There is also a map system which displays a lot of helpful information and maps out the dungeon explorations as well. Most of the weapons/skills you acquire will be upgradeable and are still useful for certain puzzles or obstacles. Speaking of puzzles, there are a bunch of puzzles, especially in dungeons, but nothing too hardcore. You don't really need to know Hololive to understand the story, but the characters are pretty lore accurate and there are some Easter eggs and inside jokes here and there as well, so it's a plus for fans I guess. Now, let's talk about my favorite part, which is the end boss fights! Each fight is very creative in its own way and reflects the character very well. It gets a little more intense as you advance further ingame, but there are a lot of options out there to make you stronger, which keeps the power creep balance in check. For anyone who is interested in 100% the game. There are no broken achievements here and most of them have a description of how to obtain them, which is always a plus. Alright, let's talk about some stuff that I didn't like: - You can display the map while moving around, but it does cover up quite a bit in the bottom left corner, so you will see less there and might miss a chest or something. - Changing your weapons/skills while moving takes too long since you might need to press multiple times to reach out for the right one which causes confusion as well. Using the menu stops the time and choosing your weapons/skills this way is much more safer. To sum up, it's a pretty underrated indie that offers a lot of content for it's very cheap price tag. If you like classic Zelda games and endboss fights, give it a try.

The game was a fun zelda like game. The writing and references were fantastic, I really enjoyed the dialogue and the character's interactions. (Justice for a certain somebody!) Now I don't play this type of game often, so I died a lot. This is fine and part of the learning process, however i found the contact damage to be very unforgiving and proper spacing is not that easy without a lot of practice. Other than that I didn't really have much issue with the gameplay. My biggest issue with the game is that on Steam the game sits in my library non-capitalized as 'An automaton's journey' and not 'An Automaton's Journey'. This is obviously a non-issue, but still... It was very fun even for someone not too familiar with the genre and I would definitely recommend you give it a try.