#MAPS and minors should not interact because its too risky

[butterflyinthewell]

Important online safety message to minors.

I’m almost 40. I’ve seen some scary stuff online.

It’s a sad world that someone has to tell you to be more situationally aware of creeps, but I hope this advice helps you be safer online.

🗣

You don’t have to specify your age, but make sure it’s clearly known that you are a minor if an adult engages you online.

If it makes you more comfortable, you can put something on your profile like “I am a minor, 18+ please do not interact.” Add it to your posts too if you have room (it depends on the site). One unfortunate part of Web 2.0 social media is not everyone checks a profile before they retweet / reblog / share someone’s stuff.

If an adult keeps engaging with your stuff and you don’t want them to, it’s okay to block them.

Stay away from spaces adults have marked as nsfw, off-limits to minors or unsafe for minors. Chances are there is material in those spaces that you may not be ready for, or it will shock, offend, frighten, disgust and/or trigger you.

Some adults will pretend to be minors, and unfortunately I don’t know what kind of “tells” give away that they’re lying about their age, but I’m sure someone who knows more about that can reblog this and add that info.

Now, here’s what to do if a creepy adult starts creeping.

If their profile states they’re a MAP or NOMAP, block instantly. MAP / NOMAP means Minor Attracted Person / Non-Offending Minor Attracted Person. These people are pedophiles. Some of them identify themselves with the acronym PEAR or the pear emoji. 🍐 Be wary if you see this in someone’s profile info.

PEAR stands for Pro-Expression Anti-Repression. That’s something you apply to fiction, NOT reality. Fiction can be turned off, flicked off a screen, a book closed or otherwise disengaged from the moment someone doesn’t like it. Real life doesn’t work that way, and don’t trust anyone who claims it does.

It doesn’t matter if a MAP / NOMAP claims they’re getting “help” for their pedophilia or not, they should not be engaging you in any capacity.

If you engage them and discover they’re a MAP, disengage and block.

If an adult sends you anything that is sexually explicit, no matter the form, be it art, fanwork, videos, audio, roleplays, etc, screenshot it for evidence, block that person and tell someone you can trust.

Even nudity that is not sexual (this includes furry art with exposed genitals) should be treated as suspicious if an adult knows you’re a minor and still sends it to you despite being told you’re uncomfortable with it. They might be trying to desensitize you to the sight of nudity so they can show you more and more explicit stuff. Do as above; screenshot, block and report to someone you trust.

+ Part of the grooming process is the adult tries to reach you somewhere private, like DM’s or a messenger app and desensitize you to stimuli you would normally reject by exposing you little by little to it. Think of it as a twisted form of exposure therapy for phobias, but you don’t want this exposure. They want you to get curious and will up the ”intensity” of the explicit material.

The media itself existing is not the problem (unless the adult using it on you made it), the real problem is adult using it specifically to desensitize you into thinking that kind of stuff is okay in the real world. If an adult engages you, shows you media with questionable material in it and tries to tell you “see, it’s okay because it’s being done here” screenshot it, tell them fiction is not the real world and break off contact.

Most creeps stay hidden, so their blog may not contain a trace of anything weird, but when they engage you they send you all kinds of creepy adult stuff. An adult who is engaging you to groom you will use pretty much anything to try to make you think it’s normal and okay for them to do that to you. Remember always that it’s not. Remember the line between fiction and reality.

No adult should be sending a minor any pictures of naked people (or naked furry art with visible genitals) of any age no matter how innocent it seems!!!

If an adult sends you pictures or videos of themselves in their underwear, naked, showing their genitals or showing themselves doing sexually explicit stuff, screenshot the evidence, block them and report it to someone you trust.

If an adult asks you about sex toys or sends you info about them, that is really suspicious. Screencap, block and report to someone you trust.

If an adult asks you questions about your body, like what your hair ‘down there’ looks like, or how you’re developing, or if they ask if you touch your private parts, screenshot the evidence, block the adult and tell someone you trust.

If an adult asks you questions like “do you know what a (something sexual here) is?” or any questions that are sexually explicit or makes you uncomfortable, screenshot that crap, block them and tell someone you trust.

If you’re a creator and an adult tries to commission materials with nudity or sexually explicit stuff, refuse and tell them you’re a minor. If they persist, take screenshots, block them and tell someone you trust.

If an adult sends you violent or gory stuff and you don’t like it, demand that they stop and block them if they don’t. Screenshot anything they say if they keep doing it, and tell someone you trust.

If an adult demands you get on camera for them, do not do it. Screenshot the evidence, block them and tell someone you trust.

If an adult is threatening to reveal secrets you told them unless you do what they say(ie “send me a closeup of your private parts, or I’ll email all our chatlogs and your old naked photos to your whole school”). DON’T DO IT!! Screenshot the evidence, block them and tell someone you trust.

If an adult threatens to hurt themselves if you stop talking to them, stop talking to them anyway. This is especially true if they actually harm themselves and show you pictures or videos of it. That is a classic abuse tactic and it’s not your fault if they hurt themselves. Block them.

If an adult you blocked makes more accounts to keep contacting you, or starts showing up on other sites you visit trying to contact you, screenshot all the evidence and tell someone you trust.

If an adult (or anyone)tries to smear your name because you wouldn’t obey them, use any evidence you have against them in your defense and tell someone you trust about the situation.

If you run a blog talking about your abuse or experiences and an adult engages you to ask uncomfortable probing questions about the details of your trauma / abuse, be very suspicious and block them.

If an adult talks to you like you’re their special friend, or if they say you’re their very special friend, be very suspicious.

Acting like a sole source of kindness is one way an adult can groom a minor. They want you to feel like they are the only source of good that you can trust because they want you to gravitate more and more to them.

If you tell an adult you don’t like it when they swear while talking to you privately and they stop, but gradually start to do it again, be wary! An occasional oopsie slip or typo is one thing, but slipping in swear words when they know it makes you uncomfortable is suspicious. They may be testing your boundaries.

If an adult tries to set up an in person meeting, refuse it and talk to someone you trust about it.

If an adult (or anyone) tries to tell you that you should only trust them and nobody else, expects you to behave a certain way to be accepted, or if they act as if you’ve wronged them for trusting people other than them, that is a huge abuse warning sign. They are not safe to be around and you should break contact immediately.

If an adult compliments you in ways that makes you uncomfortable, break contact. A grown adult should not be telling a minor “you’re sexy” or “you’re hot.”

If an adult makes frequent comments about how mature and grown up they think you are, be suspicious.

If an adult learns you’re trans / non-binary and asks questions about your private parts or whether you plan to get surgery, be suspicious.

If an adult asks if you’re alone at home, say no even if you are.

If an adult asks if they can come visit you, say no.

If an adult asks for your phone number, don’t give it to them, no matter how nice or tempting they may be.

If an adult is making you uncomfortable in any way, it’s okay to block them and disengage.

Do not approach an adult with nsfw stuff you made. If they run across it in public on your blog that’s one thing. Sharing it with them in private can get both of you into trouble. Don’t do it.

🗣

Note: if you, a minor, did any of the above because you didn’t know better at the time, know that you are not a bad person. No adult should take advantage of your youth or innocence to hurt you.

🗣

To adults out there:

Do not approach minors with anything sexually explicit!!! This should not need to be said.

If you send something and find out they’re a minor after the fact, apologize and don’t do it again. If you think it’s proper to avoid any more private contact, do that. If you think breaking all contact period is proper, do that.

Make sure minors know you are over 18, whether it’s somewhere on your profile or tacked onto your posts. Something like “over 18, minors DNI” is helpful. I personally have my year of birth (1980) on my profile because that’s easier than changing a number every year.

You can’t prevent minors who fake their age to see naughty stuff from engaging with your stuff, but you can make it clear that you will not engage them back. And do not engage them. In fact, if you’re worried about that, block them when you discover them.

Private conversations with minors is okay, but make sure you tell them you’re not comfortable talking about something if they mention something sexually explicit. Even if it’s fandom related stuff, keep the conversation away from anything more than talking about characters dating or kissing or whatever.

If something you ship has an underage character, do not talk about it in private with a minor, not even if the character is aged up to adulthood.

Got nsfw stuff on your blog? Tag it that way.

I use “n s f w post” for stuff I want to show up in other related tags, “nsfw post” for reblogs, and “nudity” for nonsexual nudity like mermaids with bare chests or artistic nudes. Those tags are specifically for minors to blacklist or mute. (I don’t usually reblog nsfw artwork, but sometimes I post nsfw fanfics, create nsfw text posts or reblog nsfw text posts / fanfic. If I feel it’s nsfw, I tag it such even if most people don’t think it’s nsfw.)

If it’s fanfiction, I make sure the rating is listed and that it’s nsfw, and I try to warn for triggers as best I can.

If your blog or website features a lot of adult or violent content, mark it 18+ and tell minors to not interact.

If a minor approaches you and tells you a harmless secret, fine, keep it secret. You, the adult, should never approach a minor and tell them you will keep their secrets.

If a minor is expressing a desire to harm themselves or someone else, don’t keep that secret. Tell them to talk to someone they trust irl or put them in contact with a hotline or website where they can get help. Be supportive in talking them down from immediate harm, but do not become their therapist. (It’s tempting, you see a kid in trouble and want to help, but always be careful!)

If a minor tells you they’re being abused by an adult in their life, put them in contact a website or phone number where they can seek help. Be supportive and listen, but don’t become their therapist.

If you run a role play blog, state explicitly that you will not engage in nsfw rps with minors.

If you’re roleplaying with a minor and the story takes a nsfw turn, tell the minor you will not role play a sex scene with them no matter how much they want to. Either fade it to black with a time skip or bail out of the rp.

I say this because I forgot the age of someone I was rping with on AIM a long long loooong time ago and it got explicit, and they got in trouble with their parents for it. Their parents contacted me on AIM without their teen’s knowledge and reamed me out so hard I was scared for weeks. They were right to do so! I told them they were right, apologized profusely and swore to never rp with or speak to their teen on AIM ever again, and they agreed to those terms. I kept that promise. Any contact with that former rp partner was done in public, such as via deviantart comments or LiveJournal comments. It was a major learning experience for me and it stuck because this happened almost 20 years ago.

As an autistic adult I feel more like a kid with all kinds of adult knowledge and privileges (ie can gamble, drink, visit adult places) that most kids don’t have. I relate more to people who are younger than me, but that doesn’t give me the right to assume their level of knowledge or lived experience is equal to mine.

What I’m trying to say is always be aware of the age of the person you’re rping or speaking with!

Do not commission sexually explicit or violent stuff from creators who are minors.

Do not engage with a minor who sends you sexually explicit stuff. Tell them that’s inappropriate or you’re not comfortable with getting that from them.

It’s okay to agree with a minor that an adult celebrity or character they have a crush on is attractive or whatever, but if the celebrity / character is a minor or the minor talks about wanting to have sex with that character / celebrity, tell them that’s not an appropriate topic of conversation because of your ages.

This also applies to them sharing fanworks with you depicting explicit nsfw stuff. Deflect them and tell them it’s not appropriate due to your ages.

Do not ask minor for personal info like their school, phone number or address.

Don’t do any video chats with a minor unless they’re family or it’s a group thing like a Zoom event.

‼️ TAG YOUR STUFF APPOPRIATELY!! YES, EVEN STUFF YOU RESHARE!!

‼️ USE APPROPRIATE WARNINGS!! YES, EVEN STUFF YOU RESHARE!!

#online safety #grooming #abuse #safety #predatory behavior #antis #anti antis #pro shipping #purity culture #fanpol #online grooming #online predators #internet safety #internet grooming #web 2.0 #psa #signal boost #important #MAPS and minors should not interact because its too risky

[ramajmedia]

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey Review: A Link Not Worth Missing

For anyone even slightly intrigued about taking on the role of a formative hominid, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is a totally unique and sophisticated experience, but impatient gamers may feel shorted by the ruthless difficulty or emphasis on self-directed goals.

Innovation is built on past failure. Any written coverage of the new game from Assassin’s Creed mastermind Patrice Désilets and his team seeks no less than to upend that most pernicious standard of icon-hunting gameplay which his blockbuster series originated, popularized, and drove deep down into the dirt. Every year since, gamers have been greeted by a constant swath of open-world sandbox collectathons, with methodical upgrades doing their best to camouflage repetitive gameplay. Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is far and away from that style of gameplay, with the overall sense of stunned discovery and emphasis on exploration and evolution is presented here in wholly unique manner. This is not another re-skinned Assassin’s Creed, but a tiger of an entirely different stripe.

The elevator pitch for Ancestors would probably mention a combination of survival sim with the evolution of the human species. While that description is sufficient at a baseline level, the game requires a very particular approach to that idea, one requiring contemplative distance and patient engagement with its various inner workings. Rather than commanding a specific standalone character in charge of a group, Ancestors sees players guiding a collective of primitive hominids at a point starting 10 million years in the past, awake and vulnerable in a jungle with no directed guidance as to how to progress quickly to the next stage of growth.

Related: Telling Lies Review: A Thoroughly Immersive, Interactive Story

Assassin’s Creed is probably a poor reference point, although your hominids can pursue environmental landmarks in order to trigger a spinning-camera cinematic familiar who's activated a “focus point.” Aside from these scripted instances, Ancestors does not offer any other kind of hand-holding at all. You manage a group of primitive hominids and learn what’s required to survive in the wild, which may include anything from combining various detritus to create tools or experimenting with foodstuffs found high up in the forest canopy and hoping for ideal digestion.

Some key differences separate this journey, though. Most importantly, Ancestors features minimal narrative audio and text, and the only time you ever even see words on the screen regards vague achievements (like hitting an animal with a particular rock or using a tool correctly). No, the primary narrative involves the geographical advancement of your clan as you navigate from one biome to another, and any dictated summary only happens inside your own head as you play, as the game avoids any indiscreet storytelling, content to subsist on a few wordless cinematics as you make your way further and further into the landscape.

The game experience can actually feel downright hostile at times. If predators appear and take apart your clan one by one, you may very well lose the game entirely, which may constitute a complete reset. Before you think this makes Ancestors some kind of roguelike, it’s relatively difficult for this to occur, and would probably require a particularly ignorant and unfeeling approach, but it is possible. So long as you keep a considerate eye on your fellow primates and learn how to deal with any adjacent predators preying on your clan settlement, you’ll make slow progress to each upgrade and scrap of geographic progress. Should you avoid an early end, choosing to evolve to the next generation ages each of your hominids up; elders die, adults become elders, and children turn to adults. At any time you can even select an evolution point, which upgrades your clan in accordance with specific bonuses, pushing you up a million years or more but punishing you for failing to advance in step with actual ancestral expectations.

Eventually, you’ll find yourself joyously distracted by each scrap of painstaking progress. That could mean exploring out ahead for a new settlement with a small crew of hominids, contending with threats and looking out for landmarks and clean water sources in the distance. Even after figuring out how to craft weaponry and tools, no single member of a clan feels overpowered, and increasingly hostile predators and prey animals emerge out of the unknown territories to test your skills. Hunting and attacking these creatures takes some time to get used to, but a kind of randomization mechanic ensures that slaughtering a rhino is not a simple matter of pressing a button quick enough — sometimes an individual hominid must be lost for the clan at large to persevere.

The number of progression mechanics available in Ancestors is well beyond the scope of this review, and the game seems to take delight in hiding its most essential leveling-up secrets. Progression-wise, carrying an infant primate on your back or having one close by grants you “neural energy,” and accumulating enough of it while unlocking upgrades lets you boost certain abilities or learn new ones throughout your journey. Similar to the Elder Scrolls series, performing specific actions is usually what’s needed to evolve and make higher tier basic actions available; if you’d like to stand straight and walk on two feet for a longer period, simply make a point to walk on two feet more frequently.

It sounds straightforward, but the aforementioned lack of hand-holding means that certain sections of the game can sometimes feel too vague and diversionary. Soon enough, though, players will start to put together what’s expected of them, or figure out the most ideal areas in the map for a new settlement. Patches of the environment may appear so hostile that committing to a new home is an intense strategic decision, a risky venture that can end up resulting in a few losses. Is there a Machairodus stalking a nearby watering hole? You might have to deal with it directly before breathing easy in a new home, and ignoring it to explore further on will mean contending with periodic attacks on your brethren.

If there was one word to use in order to classify how Ancestors plays, it’s slowly. Learning how different elements of the environment combine, conflict with, and compliment each other takes time. Cold rain can inhibit progress, until you find a particular plant which counteracts that status. The savanna’s direct sunlight compromises your stamina, but combining certain tools with certain resources can help protect from that effect as well. At no particular moment will any of these answers be provided for you outright — they emerge while attempting to hit rocks against plants, plants against rocks, plants against plants, and so on and so forth.

As a survival sim, Ancestors is complex and competent, but also falls prey to many of the predictable foibles and frustrations of the genre. Highlighting the specific item you wish to pick up can either be simple or close to impossible, and misdirected inputs can cause a tragic fall from a tree when swinging through the jungle or a woefully misdirected counterattack on a rhino. These instances don’t utterly subvert the intended flow of the game or its inclination to accidental mishaps, but they can be quite discouraging, especially when they tilt a carefully balanced sense of comfort to a desperate grasp for survival in a matter of seconds.

On a pause screen, players will see dozens of tips and tricks that might help them on their epic journey from point A to point B, but there are plenty of hints delivered in a more subtle and clever fashion. Catching up on sleep lets you watch your clan dream, with fluttering images revealing minor but meaningful hints as to how to get ahead, and audible cues let you know when a strike with a weapon may successfully alter another or potentially land a hit an target. The sense of learning never feels superficially coy, but it’s not unreasonable to expect that particularly vital techniques may evade an otherwise successful journey through the game, simply because you didn’t combine the correct items or use them in highly specific ways.

A wonderful soundtrack accompanies the desperate grasps and stumbles, subtly shifting with each new biome. It’s not exactly procedural, but seems like it is, drifting in and out of the action with ocarinas, flutes, tribal drums and choirs. Your hominids seem just emotive enough to be readable, visibly delighting in the sweet smell of a new edible resource or grasping at their throats when thirsty. Weather is as unpredictable as can be, and a day spent in a jungle cave settlement crafting weapons feels appropriately cozy with the heavens cracking outside, and each separate biome in the game feels carefully designed and rich with visual flourishes.

The most pressing issue with the game is its assortment of bugs, which are admittedly expected. Fellow hominids can be difficult to wrangle en route to a new settlement, and often deny eating an item or using it to protect themselves against the elements. It’s unpredictable enough to be irritating, and you may find yourself simply taking brief control of a different hominid character to self-apply a resource, but it’s sensible to expect a few patches in the coming months to periodically improve companion AI. For what it’s worth, though, they function as expected more times than not in this launch build.

This review has been careful to avoid anything in the realm of spoilers. In other games, that might constitute dramatic story beats or hidden power-ups, but Ancestors seemingly has no care for either of these. The narrative feels both personal and epic in equal measure, where fighting off tenacious predators at a new settlement can constitute a full hour of game time, and you could spend just as long trying to figure out how to extract honey from a bee hive.

There is very, very little to compare with Ancestors, and its capacity for non-verbal storytelling never seems to falter, with the path through its various territories as engrossing as it is dangerous. With numerous survival sim and open-world games available, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey truly does feel like a one-of-a-kind game, a meditation on evolution that draws equally from scientific research and the types of games most of us play these days. For anyone even slightly intrigued about taking on the role of a formative hominid, this is a totally unique and sophisticated experience, but impatient gamers may feel shorted by the ruthless difficulty or emphasis on self-directed goals.

More: Winds of Change Review: High Fantasy Undermined By Melodrama

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey releases on August 27 on the Epic Games Store, with PS4 and Xbox One versions expected to release in December 2019. A digital PC copy was provided to Screen Rant, for purposes of review.

source https://screenrant.com/ancestors-humankind-odyssey-review/

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[ramajmedia]

Remnant: From the Ashes Review - Soulslike Gunslinging Takes Root

Remnant: From the Ashes brings guns and friends to the Soulslike table, and playthroughs remain engaging despite its several flaws and bad tendencies.

Darksiders 3 developer Gunfire Games' Remnant: From the Ashes is the newest Soulslike, introducing high-intensity gunplay and online co-op to the well-trodden genre while still aping a sufficient amount of Dark Souls series elements to fit the trendy criteria. This surefire formula means that combat and exploration are decently rewarding, but the game inherits its antecedents' worst annoyances in the process. Its post-apocalyptic story settles itself somewhere between the dark fantasy of the Souls games and the gritty sci-fi setting of The Surge without borrowing much from either, but its efforts to craft the caliber of universe, lore, and characters that defines the genre cumulatively miss the mark. Luckily, Remnant: From the Ashes's core gameplay loop is engaging and difficult enough to carry both solo and co-op players through to the end of a semi-randomized campaign, but it's a far cry from the infinitely replayable adventure that Gunfire touts.

Setting the stage on an alternate history Earth ravaged by an alien force known as the Root, a hive mind of tree-like lifeforms hellbent on the complete entropic destruction of life across all worlds. Minus the tree thing - which, at the very least, makes for some interesting enemy and world design on Root-infested Earth - Remnant: From the Ashes's story isn't exactly groundbreaking, retreading a tired premise that's been explored to far greater effect by the likes of the original Halo and Mass Effect trilogies. Of course, the Soulslikes' main quests are rarely particularly imaginative or well fleshed-out, so the unoriginal concept deserves a pass here. What moves players from one area to the next is the search for the Founder of Ward 13, the only one who knows how to stop the Root at its source on Earth.

Related: Vicious Circle Review - Messy Multiplayer With Potential

There are many attempts by Gunfire to contrive the mandatory lore that Soulslike fans crave and a few heavy-handed text logs that spell stuff out, but its the search for the Founder - the only one who knows how to stop the Root at its source - that sends players on a circuitous journey across multiple worlds to kill almost everything they meet. Most of the game is a blur of near-constant monster slaughter, and interspersed among protracted combat sections are a few moments where Remnant: From the Ashes's creativity is allowed to shine through. However, none of these moments really pertain to or enhance the main storyline. It's expected that the drama should take a backseat to gameplay, but even the most seasoned and cynical players will likely be surprised at how anticlimactically and abruptly the central plot thread slams the door shut on playthroughs after hyping up the ending over a lengthy course of playtime.

The barebones story's lackluster payoff does sour the final hours of a Remnant: From the Ashes playthrough, but the focal point of the game is obviously combat, which does a more than serviceable job of delivering players from start to finish without descending into monotony. Its emphasized gunplay is punchy and satisfying, and it feels consistently great to stagger rushing enemies with shotgun blasts and devastate harassers at range with precise headshots. Though weapon variety is fairly limited during a significant portion of most initial playthroughs, the six starting guns can be outfitted with a diverse assortment of mods that temporarily alter weapon behavior or grant player abilities after filling a damage meter. Melee combat is also an option, but it's far more situational than in other Soulslikes due to its lack of power and zero stamina usage, relegating it to crowd control and a risky method of ammo conservation.

Although it misses the chance to flip the script on Bloodborne's brilliant fusion of ranged and melee combat, Remnant: From the Ashes isn't shy at all about lifting most of its mechanics and ideas straight out of FromSoftware's other titles. Though most lack the nuance of their inspirations, there are tough-as-nails boss battles (blocked off by fog gates, even), an obligatory stand-in for Estus Flasks, a stamina meter, and a Bonfire-like system of World Crystals and checkpoints that enable fast travel at the cost of global enemy respawns. The prescribed approach is slightly subverted by exchanging risk-reward Souls for permanent experience and Traits, though it's hardly an imaginative change. Its biggest additions are gunplay and online co-op, the latter of which makes the game innately more fun despite seriously killing atmospheric tension and tipping gameplay balance severely in the favor of bosses.

In picking what Souls elements to incorporate, Remnant: From the Ashes chose to take after its forebears' worst habit: padding out boss fights with droves of cheap fodder. Confoundingly, this mistake was entirely avoidable. It was most present in Dark Souls 2 before being addressed in its sequel, meaning Gunfire had five years' worth of hindsight and still actively chose the worse alternative. It's a shame, too, because Remnant: From the Ashes has great boss designs and a few with some truly formidable move sets. Rather than give players a genuine sense of accomplishment after mastering more intimate battles against hulking opponents dangerous in their own right, the game instead over-relies on overwhelming players with frustrating quantities of common enemies. Remnant: From the Ashes's best bosses are those that deploy only a small number of additional elite minions at a time, but these gratifying encounters are too few and far between.

This approach of throwing large waves of enemies at players works a lot better in Remnant: From the Ashes's regular environments, and the difficulty here also scales much better based on player squad size. Mowing down scores of grisly adversaries is the name of the game here, and it's obvious that Gunfire went to great lengths to ensure that the core combat remains engaging dozens of hours in. The act of clearing areas of common enemies in normal ARPG fashion is regularly punctuated by the appearance of elite enemy types that require advanced tactics and greater firepower. These stronger combatants keep players on their toes and contribute to a consistently frenetic experience, and it never fails to spike one's pulse slightly when hearing the distinct warning sound and seeing the sudden Left 4 Dead-like rush of lesser foes that herald their arrival.

That said, this core gameplay loop quickly grows predictable, but that gripe can be attributed more to overly simplistic level layouts than to enemy patterns. Whereas most Soulslikes pride themselves on cleverly funneling players around complex, interconnected areas that build a sense of real place within their worlds, Remnant: From the Ashes instead settles almost exclusively for series of corridors of varying dimension. Coupled with the relative small size of disparate areas within each world, it becomes apparent that the game is so densely populated with hostiles in order to artificially lengthen the amount of time and resources needed to reach the next checkpoint. The feeling of being a monster exterminator is further reinforced by the inclusion of a mini-map that reveals paths as they're navigated. This concession was likely made to cater to the game's online nature, but it considerably dulls the thrill of exploring the unknown.

While its environments are shallow, enemy design in Remnant: From the Ashes is the full package. Non-boss enemies leave little to be desired in terms of their disconcerting visages and solid variety, and they're an effective vehicle for effective environmental storytelling. Each world sports unique collections of foes, and no faction outshines the Iskal on the primordial swamp planet Corsus. Brainwashed and enslaved by the manipulative Fairy Queen, the once peaceful Corsans have been made hosts to an incredibly aggressive species of parasite. When first exploring this world, shambling humanoids with amputatable legs at first seem like generic aliens. That is until later on while encountering eerily familiar Corsans that have yet to fully turn, culminating in the introduction of their more heavily affected peers that degenerate into their fully devolved form mid-battle. Gameplay-driven discoveries like are far stronger plot devices than anything found in the main story or flavor texts, and the game would be stronger overall if it had shifted its focus more toward this direction.

Even though it won't set the Soulslike genre alight with its well-implemented but ultimately minor additions and tweaks to the formula, Remnant: From the Ashes is an intensely compelling gameplay experience, doubly (or triply) so when played with friends. Even when it sabotages itself with its abortive narrative, cheap boss tactics, and undervalued enemy design, it still emerges from the ordeal as a solid shooter with a high amount of polish and decent replayability. Though it remains to be seen if Gunfire can fix the present issues and expand the game into the infinite time sink that the studio promised, Remnant: From the Ashes will no doubt inspire genre fans to hang up their swords and shields for some time in order to dive into a chaotic universe, guns blazing.

Next: Telling Lies Review - A Thoroughly Immersive, Interactive Story

Remnant: From the Ashes is now available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. Screen Rant was provided a PC code for this review.

source https://screenrant.com/remnant-from-the-ashes-review/

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