|
GulagDolls posted:a giant monster existing somewhere you're not supposed to normally be able to go is pretty scary. I think Silent Hill 2 did this with the prison, didn't it? I know there are definitely a few times where the game uses James' "auto-look at something interesting" mechanic to have him look towards an area you can't see because of fixed camera angles, giving the impression that there is something there and that the player will never be able to find out what.
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2017 11:27
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 24, 2024 17:15 |
|
|
The prison had the invisible monster that may or may not have been a bug
|
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2017 11:37
|
|
|
Deadly Premontion is on sale for $2.50 at GOG this week btw, if you require undeniable proof that Games Are Art.
|
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2017 12:06
|
|
|
Sakurazuka posted:The prison had the invisible monster that may or may not have been a bug I doubt it was a bug, because it kept chanting something resembling "ritual" and was the only monster in the game known to do that. Given how much of things in Silent Hill 2 seems deliberate and full of symbolism, I have trouble believing it was just an unintended bug.
|
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2017 13:32
|
|
|
The show "Boundary Break" on YouTube is a neat watch for the topic at hand. The host has zero charisma, but the episodes themselves are pretty interesting. Something that comes up repeatedly and that I find sort of creepy is a lot of games have huge, completely modeled areas where you will never be able to go. Dark Souls in particular has this come up a lot - the areas around Firelink Shrine/Undead Burg and Anor Londo are fully realized towns with doors and stairs and such. Even in Dark Souls 3, the Undead Settlement has another town in the distance, fully modeled and totally inaccessible.
|
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2017 15:48
|
|
|
exquisite tea posted:Deadly Premontion is on sale for $2.50 at GOG this week btw, if you require undeniable proof that Games Are Art. Does it not implode if you so much as sneeze at it?
|
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2017 16:30
|
|
|
SkeletonHero posted:The show "Boundary Break" on YouTube is a neat watch for the topic at hand. The host has zero charisma, but the episodes themselves are pretty interesting. Something that comes up repeatedly and that I find sort of creepy is a lot of games have huge, completely modeled areas where you will never be able to go. Dark Souls in particular has this come up a lot - the areas around Firelink Shrine/Undead Burg and Anor Londo are fully realized towns with doors and stairs and such. Even in Dark Souls 3, the Undead Settlement has another town in the distance, fully modeled and totally inaccessible. demons souls even had an entire other area planned as well with beast people, which explains the ruined archway in the nexus. i guess it didn't work out the way they'd hoped but there's a fair amount of stuff hidden away if someone digs around in the files.
|
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2017 16:45
|
|
|
Here's another free horror game that looked promising but... welp. Dudes who have played STASIS feel free to chime in about that one, because this one makes me wary of trying it. SPOOKY G4MES: The Ghost Dimension 1. Stories Untold 2. Rusty Lake Hotel 3. Rusty Lake: Roots 4. Left in the Dark: No One on Board 5. Daily Chthonicle: Editor's Edition 6. Eleusis 7. Dead Effect 8. Dead Effect 2 9. State of Decay 10. Dead End Road 11. Goetia 12. EMPORIUM 13. F.E.A.R. 14. F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin 15. F.E.A.R. 3 16. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter 17. Bloody Streets 18. Layers of Fear 19. Dark Fall 2: Lights Out 20. Painkiller: Black Edition 21. Doorways: The Underworld 22. Doorways: Holy Mountains of Flesh 23. Yomawari: Night Alone 24. IMSCARED 25. Detention 26. Coma: Mortuary 27. Disturbed 28. CAYNE    Video games are no strangers to gore, with some of the most widely-known titles positively wallpapered in ichor and entrails. It certainly doesn’t work for every title, and some suffer from trying too hard to ick out their audience with blood and guts. CAYNE is a horror adventure that attempts to anchor its scares in vats of gore, and finds the foundation far too fluid to stand on. It’s a prime example of trying too hard, something that could be forgiven if the puzzles or the story were really worth slogging through to experience. Young Hadley is pregnant, and decides she’d really rather not be. She’s sedated for a routine procedure to address the issue and wakes up in a terrifying techno-organic facility. The beings there want her baby and don’t really mind if extraction kills the poor girl, so Hadley strikes out to escape their clutches. Along the way she teams up with an unseen ally and learns more than she would ever want to know about the CAYNE Corporation, holders of the horror factory she finds herself in. This is indeed a horror adventure, but the horror takes a different form than most of what you see in the point-and-click genre. The CAYNE facility is a veritable abattoir of fleshy constructs, abominations of nature, and unabashed gore. One of the first scenes in the game features a giant organic tentacle that reaches up inside someone and guts them before exploding in a shower of flame and meat juice. Nearly every room in the game is caked in blood, with those that aren’t featuring a foul and bizarre fungus spreading throughout the building that is never fully explained. You’ll chat with brains in jars, marvel at a cadaver mobile, and pry open an artificial womb to fill a tub of viscera. Such a cavalcade of carnage threatens to push from horror into bleak hilarity throughout, and what puts it over are the inhabitants of the facility. At regular intervals you’ll find PDA logs of the scientists running the facility, a cast of the most depraved individuals imaginable. This isn’t some Norman Bates/Hannibal Lecter poo poo either, these are people who bioengineer sex slaves and gently caress mutated orifices on their test subjects. Every single person has some sort of dark sexual quirk, either trying to sleep their way up the power structure or being turned on by mucus sacs and cannibalism. There’s a place for erotic horror and meaning within it but this is around back behind the dumpsters of that, humping away at an insectoid real doll and shouting ARE YOU SCARED YET?? It’s a small blessing this grotesquerie is told purely through text logs, logs so numerous and poorly-written you’d be tempted to skip them anyway. They’re hardly the worst design sin of the game, either. Scenes in CAYNE tend to have plenty of features to mouse over for descriptions but only one or two to interact with. Finding the right interactions requires a lot of slow plodding around the facility (even Hadley’s run feels glacial) and in particular a terribly-designed hub room that places key features at the farthest corners from each other. The lack of a journal or notes also means that if you forget a code or lose your path you’ll be doing a lot more needless trotting around. By far the worst part is the puzzles though, strangely obtuse offerings that are only manageable because of the distinct lack of interactions. The very first puzzle in the game requires extremely specific timing after an absurdly long wait to get right, so long that I thought it might have bugged out. Other puzzles require clicking on nondescript parts of scenes or working through long terminal interfaces. The worst, though, was having to make a replacement fuse using an access card and protein powder which, while I understand in hindsight, is still the least sensible process for resolving the issue I can imagine. Between the slow pace of exploration and the confusing puzzles, I was reaching for the walkthrough in record time here. It’s all terribly unfortunate because CAYNE has some definite bright spots. The main plot (discounting the outlandish supporting cast) is quite interesting, and uncovering the secrets of Hadley, her baby, and her unseen ally was enough to get me through to the end. The graphics are wonderfully detailed, with bright colors and a wet sheen marking the more grotesque features of each scene. It’s also one of the better treatments of 3D characters on 2D backgrounds, a style I don’t care for but is used to fine effect here. The sound design is on point as well with some moody, oppressive tracks that provided the only real spooks I felt here. I wish these were enough to recommend CAYNE, but looking back on it I can’t say my time was well-spent. Very little of the intriguing world was ever explained, leaving the curious mish-mash of space-age tech and organic growths a mystery. The gore and gross-out factor is beyond reason, the dialogue is similarly overblown, and none of it provides any sort of horror or foreboding needed to sell the experience. I know this is some kind of companion piece to STASIS, another horror adventure I was interested in, but if anything this has mostly tempered that interest. CAYNE is an amateur attempt at shock and gore wrapped up in expert aesthetics, but nothing can save this title from humiliating itself.
|
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2017 17:09
|
|
|
SkeletonHero posted:The show "Boundary Break" on YouTube is a neat watch for the topic at hand. The host has zero charisma, but the episodes themselves are pretty interesting. Something that comes up repeatedly and that I find sort of creepy is a lot of games have huge, completely modeled areas where you will never be able to go. Dark Souls in particular has this come up a lot - the areas around Firelink Shrine/Undead Burg and Anor Londo are fully realized towns with doors and stairs and such. Even in Dark Souls 3, the Undead Settlement has another town in the distance, fully modeled and totally inaccessible. I never knew Dark Souls had those areas, I love that poo poo but I want to visit it so bad. Is there a good video/pic dump?
|
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2017 17:13
|
|
|
Grand Theft Auto 3 had the famous intro cutscene, a fully modeled street hovering in the middle of nowhere that you can only reach by flying the tank or clipped plane. I think there's even a message spray painted on a wall that says you shouldn't be here.
|
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2017 17:37
|
|
|
Johnny Joestar posted:demons souls even had an entire other area planned as well with beast people, which explains the ruined archway in the nexus. i guess it didn't work out the way they'd hoped but there's a fair amount of stuff hidden away if someone digs around in the files. I'd love a revamped re-release of Demon's Souls that put that stuff in like Dark Souls 2 got
|
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2017 17:45
|
|
|
Mindblast posted:Does it not implode if you so much as sneeze at it? As far as I know you still have to download the Durante fix to get certain things like native resolution working, but it now has novel innovations such as "controller support" patched in.
|
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2017 18:00
|
|
|
Do the likes of the new wolfensteins count as a form of horror insofar as someone being in a horrible and monstrous society at large? I mean yeah, still shooter about killing nazis, but its brutal to the protagonist in such ways that if you went a little bit farther with it you could probably make something of a horror game that doesn't rely on the supernatural to create a scare or an oppressive environment. Just ordinary people letting many suffer just so they could live in comfort.
|
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2017 18:23
|
|
|
Not sure if this is kosher or not BUT I figured this might be of interest to some of you: My game dev team and I will be interviewing/chatting with indie horror developer Depressing Drawers (Dead End Road, The Nothing) today at 5pm EST on our Game Development Twitch channel https://m.twitch.tv/deliinteractive/ So come on by if you wanna join in on the discussion! Also if anyone has any good interview questions that would make for an interesting stream I'm all ears! Incidentally I picked up The Nothing during the sale and played some of it last night, and while it's clunky as hell it has a killer drat nightmare surrealist atmosphere for a 2D side scroller roguelike if you like that sort of thing.
|
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2017 18:34
|
|
|
I remember liking his Let's Play of Jurassic Park Trespasser
|
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2017 19:10
|
|
|
al-azad posted:Grand Theft Auto 3 had the famous intro cutscene, a fully modeled street hovering in the middle of nowhere that you can only reach by flying the tank or clipped plane. I think there's even a message spray painted on a wall that says you shouldn't be here. All the classic GTA games had those. Vice City has a literal chocolate Easter egg that you can find by flying a helicopter up to one particular building and phasing through the wall. San Andreas has a few things that can only be accessed by jetpack or parachute. If I remember correctly, the one in GTA 3 you mentioned is part of the main map but it's an area that's normally inaccessible unless you go to a lot of effort to leap off a vehicle over a wall.
|
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2017 19:10
|
|
|
DeathChicken posted:I remember liking his Let's Play of Jurassic Park Trespasser Oh my lord it took me this long to realize he was a goon. Welp! Diligent research, here we are!
|
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2017 19:22
|
|
|
Stream just ended and I'll say Paul is simply a joy to chat with. Very funny honest dude, who is extremely passionate about having artistic integrity in what he makes. And also wrestling. Good stuff. A fine reminder to support the man in his endeavors, I mean good god Dead End Road is a little over a buck at the moment. Speaking of the sale, why the hell isnt the Goosebumps game on sale for this? Anyone play it who can vouch for it at its regular price? The series was my introduction to horror as a kid so I've been curious to pick it up for nostalgia kicks.
|
|
#
?
Oct 29, 2017 01:43
|
|
|
Crabtree posted:Do the likes of the new wolfensteins count as a form of horror insofar as someone being in a horrible and monstrous society at large? I mean yeah, still shooter about killing nazis, but its brutal to the protagonist in such ways that if you went a little bit farther with it you could probably make something of a horror game that doesn't rely on the supernatural to create a scare or an oppressive environment. Just ordinary people letting many suffer just so they could live in comfort. As an aside, I must admit that Blazkowicz's terror campaign also unnerved me a bit more than most people. Sure, MachineGames did carefully omit any civilians out of the levels with major attacks, but when that car bomb ripped apart the London Nautica and when that spindly torque shredded that troop train and span of the Gibraltar Bridge, I wasn't exactly feeling like a hero. (I suppose it doesn't help that I stubbornly kept thinking of my enemies as "Germans" rather than "Nazis" through the entire game.)
|
|
#
?
Oct 29, 2017 04:29
|
|
|
Marshal Radisic posted:(I suppose it doesn't help that I stubbornly kept thinking of my enemies as "Germans" rather than "Nazis" through the entire game.) *Jeff Foxworth voice* You might be a Nazi if
|
|
#
?
Oct 29, 2017 04:31
|
|
|
Finished Dead Effect 2, and I think I honestly liked the first game as far as zombie blasting simulators go. If they had just separated the weapon type upgrade paths (buying +dmg, capacity, etc) from individual weapons, it would have flowed a lot smoother. The ending was some real bullshit though, even for a cheap-rear end game.
|
|
#
?
Oct 29, 2017 05:37
|
|
|
Pyrolocutus posted:Finished Dead Effect 2, and I think I honestly liked the first game as far as zombie blasting simulators go. If they had just separated the weapon type upgrade paths (buying +dmg, capacity, etc) from individual weapons, it would have flowed a lot smoother. The ending was some real bullshit though, even for a cheap-rear end game. Interesting, I haven't finished Dead Effect 2 yet because I keep getting hung up on doing side missions. I agree about the upgrades, it kinda sucks to sink a ton of money into a gun so it'll be super good, only to know that in another few levels you'll be throwing it out for one just a few levels higher. At least you get tons of money to keep the cycle going pretty painlessly. Anyway, here's one last free game to take a look at, and a real good one too. SPOOKY G4MES: The Ghost Dimension 1. Stories Untold 2. Rusty Lake Hotel 3. Rusty Lake: Roots 4. Left in the Dark: No One on Board 5. Daily Chthonicle: Editor's Edition 6. Eleusis 7. Dead Effect 8. Dead Effect 2 9. State of Decay 10. Dead End Road 11. Goetia 12. EMPORIUM 13. F.E.A.R. 14. F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin 15. F.E.A.R. 3 16. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter 17. Bloody Streets 18. Layers of Fear 19. Dark Fall 2: Lights Out 20. Painkiller: Black Edition 21. Doorways: The Underworld 22. Doorways: Holy Mountains of Flesh 23. Yomawari: Night Alone 24. IMSCARED 25. Detention 26. Coma: Mortuary 27. Disturbed 28. CAYNE 29. Blameless    There are plenty of ways to make a short game work, and Blameless takes one of my favorite routes. It’s a game centered around a single payoff, and everything within it serves only to make that payoff even sweeter. Games of such limited scope usually don’t work on larger scales, and many fail to make the buildup or payoff all that they can be. Blameless threads that needle though, giving you a dark and moody house to creep through before up-ending everything on you. You play a freelance architect, summoned to a remote house in the dead of night. The fellow showing you around wallops you one over the head, and you wake up in an unfinished section of the property. Using tools and construction materials lying around, you must escape your makeshift prison and escape the house before… well, before things get any worse. In your search you’re sure to turn up just how much worse things can (and will) get for you, giving you all the more reason to puzzle your way out. There’s not a lot to do in Blameless besides wander the incomplete halls of the construction site and piece together tools and clues, but these interactions provide more variety and immersion than a lot of indie horror joints manage. Right from the initial room you’re dropped in, you’ll find a wide assortment of items laying around with all the construction accouterments. There’s a vice you can open and close, pliers in a nearby drawer, a hammer, a pipe, and other makeshift tools that will help facilitate escape. Throughout the house there will be more items secreted away just by their natural placement, and used to further your escape and explain just what the hell is going on. Blameless is a short game but can prove pretty challenging simply because of how detailed it is, and how well the key items blend in with those details. The graphics are remarkable for a free title, with just about every room filled with unique bits of brick, rebar, piping, and mud. Immersion plays a big part here, and I couldn’t help remembering that feeling of wandering around the construction sites of new houses in my neighborhood when I was a kid. Poking through those incomplete shells was always thrilling and unsettling, since you didn’t know how much was complete or safe. Here, that sense of insecurity helps build the atmosphere of horror from mundane foundations. The house in Blameless is spookier than many crypts or ruins I’ve played through because of how expertly the lighting and sound design give it sinister overtones. Lights will flicker and go out right when you think you’re about to find something. Creaks and door clicks will happen when you feel most exposed. And the climax of the game will make all of those little mounting fears explode into full-blown terror. It seems odd that such a short, grounded title could evoke a powerful reaction but perhaps it helps that the pacing is tight and the tale feels like something that could be happening in the world right now. It’s not a perfect package by any means, of course. As detailed as the items and interactions are, it’s not always clear what solution is intended by the developers. There are a few non-intuitive ones as well, like having to physically retrieve a key from a lock to be used a second time on an unrelated lock. And then there’s the voice acting, which treads dangerously close to being worse than no voice acting at all. In contrast to how effective the scares are and how immersive the rest of the game is, these are but minor quibbles. Blameless nails that key feature of horror, the threatening environment, and builds a tight and engaging tale atop this solid foundation.
|
|
#
?
Oct 29, 2017 19:06
|
|
|
the direction the story in blameless takes is absolutely goddamn terrifying due to how realistic and actually possible it is. by itself it sets the game apart from many others, the rest is just the icing on top for a relatively short and cool experience.
|
|
#
?
Oct 29, 2017 19:20
|
|
|
Hello friends. Narcosis is on sale. Should I buy it?
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2017 00:10
|
|
|
I gave Blameless a play, and you're definitely right about the voice acting. Hoo boy, that ending was painful. I'll agree that the biggest problem is how vague everything is. I had to turn to a walkthrough just to leave the first room because the essential item to leaving looked like a piece of set dressing. It's otherwise not that hard, but items that can be picked up or interacted with look identical to the main environment. There's also a few red herring items and you can only carry one large item at a time, which left me confusedly walking around trying to click on everything with a hammer for a while.
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2017 00:39
|
|
|
Marshal Radisic posted:I agree with you to a point, and I think you could make a decent argument for that interpretation of the newer games. However, while TNO and TOB (I haven't played TNC yet; not sure I want to) treated Nazism far more seriously than video games have before, I still ultimately felt like MachineGames was still holding back. As an example, when I was walking through the concrete factory in Belica, I marveled that the developers actually put the level in the game while simultaneously musing how the place was pretty comfy for a destructive-labor camp. Not that I believe this restraint is a bad thing: the Wolfenstein series is at heart a pulpy action-adventure shooter, and it would be madness to turn an installment into a ten-hour version of Come and See. I am glad MachineGames have taken the direction they have, I feel like the first two games emphasized the cruelty of the regime while not really brushing on its madness, which I feel would be even scarier. I mean, the Nazis were weird, man. They peddled in an alien morality in which atrocity became a duty, and had a worldview completely foreign to Europeans and North Americans of conventional education. That's something that frightens me more that mere cruelty; the idea of encountering people who are still H. sapiens yet not human. There's so much to unpack here but my favourite is definitely the idea that nazi ideology was completely alien to the European and North American psyche rather than being supported by the ruling and much of the middle class of basically every European nation and the USA and inspired by their previous adventures in genocide via death camps.
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2017 02:00
|
|
|
Catfishenfuego posted:There's so much to unpack here but my favourite is definitely the idea that nazi ideology was completely alien to the European and North American psyche rather than being supported by the ruling and much of the middle class of basically every European nation and the USA and inspired by their previous adventures in genocide via death camps. Hell, in Australia our PM during WW2, Robert Menzies, was an outright Nazi sympathiser... He visited in 1938: "The abandonment by the Germans of individual liberty and of the easy and pleasant things of life has something rather magnificent about it … they have erected the state, with Hitler as its head, into a sort of religion which produces spiritual exaltation that one cannot but admire”. I think that makes the Wolfenstein games scarier. The ruling classes of loads of Western countries sympathised with the nazis. Australia turned back boatloads of Jews fleeing Germany before and during the holocaust. Just a bit of historical horror for you.
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2017 02:30
|
|
|
I live in the heartland of American eugenics with Virginia having passed sterilization laws which continued into the late 70s and were never deemed unconstitutional. The man behind it all, Harry Laughlin, inspired Germany's own eugenics laws and the dude was awarded a prestigious academic award for it. I'm sure the aliens and Norse fetishism was weird to people but Nazism was scary because it was an easy solution to all your problems: blame it all on those beneath you. Even Hollywood avoided criticizing Nazis until America was pulled into the war.
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2017 02:43
|
|
|
Catfishenfuego posted:There's so much to unpack here but my favourite is definitely the idea that nazi ideology was completely alien to the European and North American psyche rather than being supported by the ruling and much of the middle class of basically every European nation and the USA and inspired by their previous adventures in genocide via death camps. Hell, there were even Nazi summer camps for kids in the states. https://gizmodo.com/how-american-nazis-used-summer-camps-to-indoctrinate-th-1743267747
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2017 02:53
|
|
|
Today's review is made possible by a kind goon, whom I hope doesn't mind how deep I buried the knife in their gift. Tomorrow's game is another... THIN offering as well so I'm afraid I'm out of hidden gems to share this time around. SPOOKY G4MES: The Ghost Dimension 1. Stories Untold 2. Rusty Lake Hotel 3. Rusty Lake: Roots 4. Left in the Dark: No One on Board 5. Daily Chthonicle: Editor's Edition 6. Eleusis 7. Dead Effect 8. Dead Effect 2 9. State of Decay 10. Dead End Road 11. Goetia 12. EMPORIUM 13. F.E.A.R. 14. F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin 15. F.E.A.R. 3 16. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter 17. Bloody Streets 18. Layers of Fear 19. Dark Fall 2: Lights Out 20. Painkiller: Black Edition 21. Doorways: The Underworld 22. Doorways: Holy Mountains of Flesh 23. Yomawari: Night Alone 24. IMSCARED 25. Detention 26. Coma: Mortuary 27. Disturbed 28. CAYNE 29. Blameless 30. Firewood    I remember when I used to think side-scrolling horror adventures were a narrow genre. After The Cat Lady, Lone Survivor, Home, Distraint, Oxenfree, Detention, and Between Me And The Night though, I have to admit it’s a pretty well-worn path for indie development. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to do with them, of course, it just means they need to do more than what Firewood does. And what it does is repeat the same jumpscares and puzzles three times over the course of an hour, which doesn’t make for much of a game. The game opens with you as an old man, visiting a monochromatic graveyard in the rain. Wandering home from your melancholy indulgence you find yourself transported from your cozy cabin to an apartment building full of decrepit residences, flickering lights, and spooky children. As you work your way down the floors you are treated to flashbacks from your earlier days, revealing piece by piece why you are subjected to this mental torment. Your only hope of escape from this meandering hell is to solve extremely simple puzzles using piano keys and mannequin parts. Firewood features the absolute minimum of interaction and control to count as a horror adventure. You can move right and left, you can check or pick things up, and you have a dedicated button for your lighter. Items have to be used from your menu with the mouse, though, so keep your pointer handy for the handful of times you have to jam keys into locks or records into gramophones. The majority of your ordeal plays out in long apartment corridors, with rooms containing puzzle pieces and usually one locked door you must locate a key for. Assembling the pieces is usually enough to escape to the next corridor, though the piano puzzle actually requires you to press keys in the order shown on a paper in the same room. Make no mistake, there is zero challenge to the puzzles or progression in the game. This is hardly a bad thing in and of itself, after all I love a good walking sim as much as the next self-important writer on the internet. But these puzzles form an unholy trinity of disappointment, in that they are unchallenging, uncreative, and repeat three times. The formula for all three segments of the game is the same as described above. You get puzzle pieces, you get key, you put it together. None of those puzzles are more creative than the piano one either, so that leaves the gameplay without any hook whatsoever. That places the appeal of the game solely on the story, and that is rocky terrain to build anything on here. You’ll wander through plenty of flashbacks focused on the man, his wife, his job, and the dystopian revolution taking place around them all. Some aspects of the story will get clear answers but there are simply too many moving parts for a game that clocks in at less than an hour, leaving much of the deeper plot and meaning obscured. It’s a rare complaint to level but yes, small indie games can definitely over-complicate their stories for what game they have to work with. On top of that the English text is pretty rough, making it that much harder to glean meaning and form connections with the characters you follow. I need to mention the horror elements as well, because these might be the worst part of an otherwise tolerable game. I say “elements” but really it’s one or maybe two jumpscares per floor, completely devoid of context or purpose. Early on you meet three animal-headed children who barf some Hotline Miami-style riddle exposition at you and then vanish. They love to pop in from time to time with a loud, jarring stinger just to remind you that yes, this is a horror game. Real quick these scares become more tiring and aggravating than spooky, thanks to their frequency and disconnect from anything else going on. There’s decent atmosphere in the moody, run-down halls of the place but you won’t notice much when you’re gritting or giggling through another idiotic jumpscare. The art is clean and just detailed enough for a game like this, though your character’s walk animation is one of the more unnatural waddles I’ve seen. Sound design is similarly up to the challenge and in particular does well with dropping the background tracks or ramping them up to build tension. Meeting basic expectations isn’t enough when the story and gameplay can’t clear the same bar, though. The genre Firewood falls into is plenty packed with titles more polished and competent, particularly Distraint which is essentially a better take on the same themes. It’s not bad for a first effort but developers Frymore definitely need to step up their game next time if they want to compete in the arena of spooky adventures.
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2017 16:35
|
|
|
Too Shy Guy posted:Today's review is made possible by a kind goon, whom I hope doesn't mind how deep I buried the knife in their gift. Tomorrow's game is another... THIN offering as well so I'm afraid I'm out of hidden gems to share this time around. But you see, the game was cheap as chips, so it was all a clever ruse to find out if I should waste my time with it. Next time around maybe I'll gift you a copy of a known good game as penance.
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2017 17:27
|
|
|
A warning for potential players of the pc version of Deadly Premonition: I have lost two separate saves due to bugs, both more than 10 hours in. The patches make it playable but you may still be unable to finish fwiw
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2017 20:39
|
|
|
Switched.on posted:A warning for potential players of the pc version of Deadly Premonition: I have lost two separate saves due to bugs, both more than 10 hours in. The patches make it playable but you may still be unable to finish fwiw I couldn't even manage to get it playable  I also bought it on PSN for the PS3 and found out my hard drive is on it's way out. That game does NOT want to be played by me
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2017 20:48
|
|
|
The Supergreatfriend LP is probably the best way to view it if the world is conspiring against you.
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2017 20:57
|
|
|
I wanted to LP it myself, actually  I heard that ignoring the obvious axe murderer and dark world, the mystery is solvable by Knox rules, so we were going to see if we could solve the mystery before the reveal.The hard drive should be replacable, it's just a pain in the dick
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2017 21:14
|
|
|
Danaru posted:I wanted to LP it myself, actually
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2017 21:31
|
|
|
Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter has actually been scratching the mystery itch pretty well. The horror elements are slight, but outside of puzzles you actually have to do a bit of deductive reasoning because the cases have multiple endings that can all seem plausible from the outside.
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2017 21:34
|
|
|
I was kinda harsh on Devil's Daughter because I paid full price and it wasn't as good as Crimes & Punishments but it's probably fairly decent if you can get it cheap.
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2017 23:49
|
|
|
Skyscraper posted:You won't, it isn't. There are like four "reveals" and they get crazier each time. I dunno. If you ignore the 'rule' that the supernatural is ignored as a matter of course, since York clearly is aware of it, the other rules can fit.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2017 00:30
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 24, 2024 17:15 |
|
|
From what I've been told, the dark world supernatural stuff doesn't factor into the mystery directly, aside from foreshadowing and metaphorical stuff. Everyone I've asked has kept it spoiler-free as best they can but that also makes it pretty tough to answer anything 
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2017 01:05
|
|