Transistor

Picked this up because it's from the team that did Bastion.

The art is gorgeous, and frames the story/combat/background perfectly.

The controls and gameplay are fluid. The combat seamlessly blends into your normal exploration, while still having small hints of RPG throwbacks. For instance, an area seals off around you, your action bar become available, etc.

The main character walks a bit slow, but it's the right pace for the fights. It's still slow for exploration, but the game is quite linear overall.

The voice over carries the story in a well paced manner -- giving you a bit of exposition as you need it, but never overwhelming you. Very well done. The OVC terminals are also a neat way to show her thoughts and emotions without having her speak. It's clever, also well-paced, and immersive.

The function system is solid. It almost requires a bit of time to make sure you know how they work, and how to optimize them. They give you a testing room to test out combinations, which is nice. There's also a testing ground in the same area that challenges you in a puzzle to kill enemies under a certain time, kill enemies in one turn, or survive. I loved this, but it was tough at times.

Functions can be equipped to sockets in the Transistor (A, B, X, Y slots). Functions can be equipped directly to a slot, as an active command, or they can be equipped into an upgrade slot of an active command. They can also be equipped to a passive slot, so with just a few functions, you already have a lot of combinations to choose from! Each function costs between 1 and 4 memory to equip, so you'll have to make a choice on what to keep pretty early on.

When you level up, you get to pick a new function from a choice of 2. Then you choose more memory, an additional upgrade slot, or an additional passive slot. Finally you choose a new limiter, which you can activate to make the game more challenging, but also give you more experience per fight. I played the majority of the game with most limiters on, but I avoided getting any limiters that reduced my total memory.

Dying doesn't end the game, it breaks one of your functions. You get to continue the fight after that, but you're going to be in much worse shape. On top of that, if you manage to beat the fight, you have to get to 2 more checkpoints before the function is restored. I think it was their intention to force you to try out new abilities. The challenge rooms were a good way to help me try out new abilities and see new combinations -- this was just frustrating.

On a minor positive note, I've learned from experience it never removes your last damaging function. If you happen to have an off-hitting function though, it will almost always destroy the main one... with the 2 upgrades... that was doing 99% of the damage for you...

Things I loved:
* When you boot the game, it immediately continues your game. No title menu, no choice selectoin, just GO.
* The art, controls, dialogue are awesome
*  The functions are well thought out, and fun to toy around with combinations
* There is new game plus

Things I "did not love"
* The above notes about the consequences of dying. I basically just restarted from checkpoint when something broke
* Walking around was a bit slow
* Could use a few more boss fights


If you haven't played it yet, it's well worth it.