Troll and I Steam key

Troll and I pitches itself as a boy-and-monster buddy story set in 1950s Scandinavia, drawing obvious spiritual lineage from films like Pete's Dragon and games like The Last Guardian. Otto, a teenage hunter whose village gets razed by mercenaries chasing a mythical creature, winds up bonding with the very troll they're hunting. Together the two flee through Nordic wilderness, and on paper the asymmetric duo dynamic sounds genuinely appealing: switch between Otto's speed and stealth or the troll's ground-pounding, single-hit-kill strength to tackle enemies, environmental puzzles, and a rudimentary crafting system that has you fashioning spears, clubs, and upgraded gear from foraged materials. The crafting loop is probably the game's most realized idea. Weapons degrade and break, so you're constantly scavenging rocks, ores, and branches to rebuild your arsenal. Clubs can be reinforced with rocks and spikes, spears fitted with carved ore tips. It's not deep, but it gives the exploration some forward momentum. Combat splits neatly between the two characters too: the troll bulldozes large threats in a single stomp, while Otto handles faster, smaller enemies that the lumbering giant simply cannot corner. The local split-screen co-op mode, available on PC, lets a second player take one of the two roles through the full adventure, though reviewers widely noted the co-op pacing is uneven, with one player frequently idle while the other completes solo-only sections. Here is where the honesty starts. Almost every other system in this game is broken or unfinished to a degree that actively fights the player. The climbing sections are slow and stiff. The camera is rarely where you need it. Objective guidance is nearly absent, leaving you wandering large maps with no clear direction. Texture errors, shader bugs, and screen-shaking glitches were reported within the first few minutes of play at launch. Voice acting is wooden, animations are sub-par even by 2017 standards, and the overall visual presentation reads as a previous console generation. Metacritic aggregates the critical consensus as "generally unfavourable," which is putting it diplomatically. There is a small group of players who found something endearing underneath all of that, comparing it to the nostalgic feel of a mid-2000s PS2 adventure, rough edges included. If you have a high tolerance for jank, a genuine fondness for creature-companion stories, and a friend willing to split the couch co-op with you, there are flickers of the game this could have been. For everyone else, the gap between the concept and the finished product is simply too wide to overlook. Alex, Scout Team