This is roughly my third fourth attempt at muddling through writing this Zenith review, because there’s something very difficult in trying to talk about a game that gets so many of its base mechanics so hilariously wrong, yet still winds up being okay in the end. It manages that feat mostly because its sporadic highlights are based around something as subjective and intangible as humour.
You probably won’t laugh at every joke, but Zenith spreads them around with such a sense of reckless aplomb that it’ll be unlikely you’ll find nothing to appreciate inside its ten or so hour lifespan. It pokes fun at itself, at fantasy tropes, at the genre, at pop references, and even at its own reliance on pop references. Early in the game, you’ll meet caricatures of famous Final Fantasy protagonists whose overstated personality quirks openly annoy the people around them. There’s a sense that, even though the game has staples like a big evil trying to destroy the world, it’s incapable of taking anything all that seriously. The threat is never diminished; you’re under no doubt that something very powerful wants everything very dead and is very capable of making that happen. It’s just that it sometimes wanders by to casually chat and catch up on old times. Like how he was once thwarted by an elephant that you had to use as a substitute for a machine part, which has since been recognised as a holy symbol referenced throughout the game.
Staff review by Gary Hartley (December 17, 2016)
Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you. |
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