Mato Anomalies Review (Vi)
Yes, the 40 € price required a leap of faith, but so far it's everything I had hoped for: The insane text density and chill noir jazz music of Arrowiz' previous game, Hermitage: Strange Case Files, but with less static gameplay. I was a bit sceptical if the step up from a visual novel (the aforementioned Hermitage) to "all game modes under the sun" (Adventure game! Dungeon crawling! Card battling!) could really work... and I think it does! Of course the battles are no Atlus spectacle, but they are comparable to Soul Hackers 2 (and just as chatty), which this reminds me more of than Persona 3-5, both in ambition and scope: It's no AAA production, but everything works, transitions in and out of battle mode are swift, and the game world is so WEIRD and interesting in the best way with everyone you meet acting shady as hell... I will expand this review over time, I just love Arrowiz' approach to games - so many informations and obscure cultural references in the text, you either swim or sink, read or die - and I don't want this game to get buried in negative reviews by impatient people.
About the various translations
One word of caution though: Mato Anomalies features several translations. I would recommend non-Chinese players that maybe want to play in Japanese, Spanish, German, Italian or French to switch between the English script and their language a couple of times to see what they like better. The German translation for instance isn't bad, but a bit stiff, has some typos and and some lines simply made more sense in English. (Which seems to happen more often with the NPC lines than with the "main" dialogue, maybe they were translated by different people?)
Dungeons
The "Metasphere" sections are clearly made from various building blocks you walk on, like Hot Wheels tracks hovering in a virtual void. Layouts are fixed, but not very exciting. Some very light puzzles involving switches. No random encounters at least! There are some attempts at visual theming (say, a stock market arrow graph pointing up a set of stairs for a dungeon about greed, and piles of cash on the ground, yeah, not very subtle), but for some reason that theme is used for a whole chapter, including all of the side missions, which IS confusing - when doing a side mission I often wondered "Am I right in this place? Haven't I been here before?" What makes the dungeons okay, and somewhat distinguishable: There are many little story beats thoughout a mission to prevent the obstacle course padding effect, a bit like flavour text in an old crawler where the text had to compensate for the basic graphics
Card battling
Generally, I don't like card games, analog and digital. Just not my thing. So naturally, the "mind hacking" parts are my least favourite, as not much happens during these sections, storywise. What's good though for a card game loser like me: I'm not expected to build my own deck. There are a couple of decks for different purposes pre-built. I'm not going to explain the rules here. Let me just say that brute force does not work. Which is a good thing, I guess, makes me engage more, read the card descriptions with care. The watch thief hack took me a good while, but in the end I had a strategy and won and it felt... rewarding? Pretty cool. It's all about playing your cards in the right order, using all of the stacking effects. And like I said, actually reading what's on the screen, haha.