Don't read below if you haven't played the game as I went on a bit too spoilerish here!

I opened this game expecting nothing and got a walking simulator lasting mere ~3 hours. A walking simulator lasting ~3 hours that got me crying my eyes out multiple times, traumatizing me and made me google story explanations minutes after finishing it. After I read Calvin's story and experienced the room he and his brother were living in, I started feeling disgusted about "The House", and this feeling only got stronger when I kept progressing the story. When I delved into The House's structure, it's "decor" and design, I started asking myself "How come no one in this family had any objections to this?" How come no one saw how f**ked up this all was, that it wasn't normal, and decided to stop this, to change? "The House" didn't feel like a house for a family to live in, it felt like a fricking museum where the exhibits are human lives and tragedies - and maybe it wouldn't be that bad if it'd concerned some war heroes or other groups like that but not when the topic of the "museum" was a single family line where each of the sealed rooms belonged to a relative, whose death wasn't mourned by the other family members, but rather commemorated and maybe even "revered" - and it was all orchestrated by the other members of the same family. I started and finished the game during the same night and I couldn't help but think about everything I experienced in it when falling asleep that night and again for some time the next day. I didn't expect this game to make me feel so many things in such a short amount of time, probably the best story-to-length experience I've had in a game 'till now. I somehow managed to miss two stories - Sam's and Milton's - when I was playing and I got angry at myself for that after I caught up with then on YT... Great (but traumatizing) game.

Yeeaaaah, it felt like I went back to 15 years ago lol

The game felt very different to the previous Sherlock games from Frogwares, mainly cause of the open world aspect I think, but nonetheless I enjoyed playing. I haven't played an open world game in a while and when I was just free roaming on the streets in Chapter One I felt like I missed this "do what you want and go where you want" feeling. There isn't much content in this game if you just want to do the main story cases but, it being an open world, there was luckily much more to do than that. I really liked the side quest of treasure hunting, it reminded me of a similar thing in Gravity Rush 2 (which I sadly couldn't access cause I started playing the game after it closed its online servers) and I had fun searching for the places shown on photos - I only wish some of these views had something more in them that could give you a better idea as to where to look for them cause some of these were really looking like they could just be whenever and you wouldn't know where to look unless you'd just run aimlessly around the whole map or already stumbled upon these places before. The game made me feel a bit lost sometimes when I was following a case cause it wasn't always obvious to me as to what I should be doing next to progress the quest and I wish it could be signalized a bit better. After I finished the game I learned that it isn't, like I though, a prequel to the older Frogwares Sherlock games which is a pity but oh well. I didn't really like any of the 4 available endings to Chapter One and I wish there was one that'd be more of a merge of the existing 2 but oh well. Overall, could definitely be improved but it was kind of fun to play (didn't play any DLCs though as I read that they all felt like a money grab).

Went for the True Demon King ending but got defeated after battling the final boss for an hour in what felt like the most tedious fight I've fought in a game in 5 years (lv 86) after which I watched the 2 minutes long ending on YT and called it a day lmao. Cool for dungeon crawling standards but there is little more to do than crawl around dungeons in this game and the protagonist, besides just looking cool, is an empty sheet of paper with no personality (felt even emptier than old Persona protagonists). Almost everything shouts "old" in this game but I can see why it may be good for people who like this kind of gameplay. I've heard a lot of "SMT is hard compared to Persona!" comments before I started playing Nocturne, which was my first mainline SMT and now I can say that difficulty (on normal) in SMT III relies on player's ability to prepare for the fight. Of course the battle will be more difficult if one of my party members is weak to ice instead of being resistant to it when the enemy we're fighting uses ice attacks (and so one blocked ice attack nulls all of my press turns), but Persona games work the same in that regard and in the end the two aren't very different in difficulty (again, on normal, haven't tried Nocturne on hard). My favorite part of the game might have been the Fourth Kalpa (played the Chronicles version), running away from >the potentially spoiler Chronicles character< was stressing me out like nothing else in this game but at the same time felt super engaging.

I think this game managed to do everything it wanted and was meant to do. It was short and mostly simple but some of the fights were surprisingly challenging. I liked the diversity of battle moves and I think both music and art style were cool and they completed each other well. The dialogues didn't feel filler-y for such an action-based game and for how little there was of them even though the game's plot wasn't very complex, and the occasional humor didn't feel forced or cringe. I had fun, would recommend.