I’m less patient than I used to be, or I am starting to see through bad storytelling that doesn’t respect my time.

Sakuna starts off with an exposition dump, a ton of minor characters, and a framing conceit to convey. As much as I like story in video games, I have to care about the world and characters before I can care much about the story. This game starts by trying to foreground the characters and their motivations and their relationships with each other before I care enough about any of it to engage. I suppose the story was meant to get me to care, but without it being threaded into the gameplay, it lost me before the whole thing could even get started.

Eventually, the gameplay kicked in, and I was able to actually do something aside from speed read/skip through dialogue. I was placed into a 2D plane and made to fight various creatures as I moved left to right across the screen. Tutorials popped up to teach me light and heavy attacks, traversal with my scarf, and how to jump. The tutorials continued all the way through my gameplay, far longer than they needed to be for me to get the combat and movement. I found it all quite basic and painfully repetitive, but I did like the ability to whip around the stage with my scarf and link that into attacks.

However, the stages felt sparsely populated with enemies with way, way too much empty space to do nothing with but walk through. Add to that the fact of very little enemy variety, and I found the whole experience quite a slog. Tie that all together with the far-too-much dialogue—including a long, unskippable cutscene—and my feelings calcified: Sakuna isn’t a game for me.

The realization I am having is quite bizarre, though. I have often sneered at folks who skip cutscenes and barrel into gameplay. The story, for me, has always been the thing. But, my god, if the story is badly told or too info-dumpy, I am with the cutscene skippers. There is too much to read, play, and watch to stick with something that wastes my time, and Sakuna feels very much like a game that’d refuse to respect my time with either satisfying gameplay or compelling story.

Verdict: Played enough to immediately uninstall.