Jotun: Valhalla Edition Review (RevlidRaspin)
Jotun is a gorgeously drawn game with intriguing presentation and occasional moments of breathtaking visuals. It's also mind-numbingly tedious. Your character slogs through a parade of empty, unengaging environments as though wading through molasses, with a camera that shows only a tiny snapshot of the hollow pointless spaces you're moving through and a map that does not track your current position, forcing you to scour every corner of each boring area at a snail's pace in order to complete this glorified collectathon. Even the camera's movement is uncooperative, tracking carefully over the landscape as though desperate to make sure you've paid the proper amount of attention to the latest batch of nothing, before it deigns to reveal that the new area you've just reached does, in fact, contain even more nothing and you should turn around.
The moments of combat, few and far between as they are, do not improve matters. This is, at last, a brief sip of something approaching gameplay - but your attacks are slow and clunky, and do little damage with less reach. You have exactly two attacks, a slow and pathetic jab and a downright glacial heavy attack, and progression will not increase their variety or effectiveness. A favoured trick of several bosses is to sprint, jump, or teleport to the other side of the massive map - shrinking your character model down to a size that makes it even harder to judge attacks, and dragging out the already tedious fight by forcing you to lumber after them like an arthritic tortoise while hoping they don't just pogo away again once you get there.
I finished this game in four hours out of sheer sunk cost fallacy. Then I checked the achievements and saw challenge runs and time trials, and laughed and laughed and uninstalled. Don't make the same mistake I did. Steer well clear. Watch a Youtube playthrough on double speed if you really care that much about seeing the landscapes.