Wormerine

That's not something I noticed about previous worlds. Majority of tracks in the basement can be easily bypassed using shortcuts in the main, wide-open hub.

All of their games have different artstyles. This is, however, their first 3d game, therefore a different feel.

I must say, basement made the game make a turn from "awww, that's such a cute nostalgia fueled platformer" to "holy crap, that's dark". I did make a leap further, to father being abusive - if you die in the one of the final level, you get killed by "fathers expectations" or something like that. I saw the lava monster in the intro, as personification of the father.

The card thing doesn’t sell it to me either (meh, bought it anyway. Klei is yet to disappoint me), however, it is just a game mechanic, so whenever it will be good or bad has nothing to do with “card system”. Every game is abstract to some extend, though personally, I find cards work well for tabletop, but feel weird in a digital setting. If I remember well Invisible Inc, started as a card game concept. Klei is a small company, which games benefit from smaller focus, so Griftlands RPG did sound like a dangerously ambitious project. Whatever it is they want to do, I am game.

It’s not out yet. As the original post stated the alpha releases on July 11th.

Then people are silly. Instead of being upset for the reasons that exist, they are upset because of a conspiracy theory propelled by a reddit analysis, which was disproved by people who are not amateurs. If someone doesn’t want to buy from Epic, because it is a half baked service with a roadmap, which aggressively buys its relevance and tries to create a fake value for itself, while offering much worse service to consumers then the competition- fair enough. if someone doesn’t want to buy from Epic because they are spies for Chinese government... Ha!

Why? Alpha have always been not very advertised - with Invisible Inc. having to be bought on Klei website if I remember well, and ONI only accessible via link from official forums. GL will come to steam in early access, which means it will be available on the most popular and widely accepted platform when in development. Also nothing stops anyone from buying game on Epic Store - using the software is free and you get steam key eventually anyway. So yeah, it doesn't diminish how many players can play the game. If you prefer not to use Steam.... well, it is just as if someone complained that Klei blocks players from playing ONI because it is not on GOG. You want to play alpha, you buy on Epic and move to steam for EA. You don't want to use Epic? Just wait till EA. Nothing stops anyone from anything.

Eh, comeon. It's Alpha. If you are willing to stomach the issues an alpha will have, an Epic shouldn't be a big deal. You'll get the key for steam anyway - and for early access nonetheless. Though considering that in previous instances Alpha were released in a sneaky way, does it mean that Klei believes that only the most die hard fans will buy on Epic? Anyway. Personally, the "card" thing isn't selling it for me, so I might give it a while and see how it's shaping up first. Also: I really want Invisible Inc. 2.