Amedama

• Genre: Action Adventure
• Spoiler Free Review: There are some mechanic spoilers that are inherently story spoilers.
• Time Played: 17 Hours
• Too Short/Long: It didn't feel too long, but it probably should have been a little shorter by reducing how much certain sections needed to be replayed.
• Soundtrack: It's pretty decent. Some tracks are a little repetitive but it fits the setting well enough.
• Pleased/Disappointed: I'm pretty pleased with this one.
• Why I played: Basically just because it looked cool. I tried the demo and liked it, put it on my wishlist, and it went on a decent sale almost immediately after.
• Did I cry: I think I did choke up a little here and there. Not as much toward the end as I would have expected, but as a game that has you interact with a lot of wayward souls in order to help them pass on.
• Jank: It has a little bit of jank, but nothing that really hurts the game besides the fact you can get stun-locked. Sometimes there is weirdness with dead bodies standing up, and the dialog has not accounted for every possibility.
• Difficulty: Normal, it's probably a little harder just getting started before you figure out everything, you can easily supplement any difficulty by eating to temporarily increase your stats. The hardest parts of the game being when you don't have the opportunity to do so.
• Recommend to others: I don't think it would go super high on a recommend list, and I'm not sure of the audience I would potentially recommend it to, but if you're interested in it, I'd say go for it.

I liked Amedama, it's unique but somehow doesn't do too much to stand out - maybe just because its good, but only good, never really exceeding expectations. In it, you are a soul that can possess bodies of people you have killed. If you have previously killed them, you can later possess them just by hitting them. This isn't like some games with similar mechanics where it is a combat mechanic, but rather something you can only do outside of combat, essentially choosing who you go into each battle as. As a bonus, there are times when the dialog of the game will adjust according to who you have possessed, and as you proceed, there will be times when advancing requires you to possess certain people. 

There is a Groundhog Day element to the story, requiring you to possess more people and go different locations to uncover why things are occurring and uncover the mystery of everything. While I do enjoy the story -Kind-of Spoilers Until Next Paragraph- Ultimately I feel like the payoff and result is rather unsatisfying, it did a great job of creating intrigue, only to have very simple explanations for occurrences, no reason behind certain actions, or simple coincidence resulting in certain outcomes. The ride is great, the destination is... fine. -End kind-of spoilers-

While the time loop is fun, the game generally tells you where to go and what to do as you go along. There aren't many opportunities for you to figure things out on your own. Sometimes you can jump ahead of the game, and that is satisfying, but for the most part, it's run to a destination, do a combat, interact, run, repeat. You're more along for the ride, even if it dresses it up in mystery.

The combat is generally fine and can even be pretty fun sometimes. It's a little janky with the positioning, and defending - which is a primary mechanic because it allows you to parry rather generously, but if you have been hit the recovery time is abysmal, and it's very easy for you to get stun-locked when facing multiple opponents. The difficulty of the game isn't so great that it's an issue that often, but before you learn how to herd the enemies it can be annoying to go from full health to death in the span of one attack sequence that you had no way of getting out of.