so after PREY SLAUGHTERED-ing vicar amelia and the witches of eastwick or whathaveyou on my first try, i got all cocky and ended up getting my bloodpunk butt handed to me repeatedly by darkbeast paarl, so at least this game can still surprise me.
but in reflecting on what has transpired, i remembered there is this weird moment after i left oedon chapel for the first time, where i did some random thing and then ended up suspended in mid air as lots of health was drained from me? at the time i figured it was just some new game mechanic that would make more and more sense the more often it happened, but now iām not so sure? what is going on with that?
also: iām getting to the point where i donāt really have a firm grasp on what āinsightā is for. iām not playing online at all (which is the only thing that makes me feel better about relying on walkthroughs and wikis constantly, since i miss out on the gameās built in hint system), so maybe that has something to do with it, but i feel like iām just racking up insight points constantly without any real purpose. i know that having higher insight changes enemy placement and whatnot, but it seems pretty subtle. i also have never used a single madman skull item just because i donāt know what they are for.
is polygonzo still playing this or what
i have actually been going back to the dead SB archive and browsing the BB thread there, good times. it was one of the last threads to be posted in before the fall, seems appropriate somehow.
wrt aesthetics, i feel like it is still easier for me to appreciate what they are doing on a kind of abstract level than it is for me to actually feel truly engaged with itāeven though everything looks amazing for what it is, i still canāt help the feeling that all of the environments are just too interchangeable. the benefit is that everything seems to blend in really seamlessly together, and when you open up a path from one area that leads back to some other place that was otherwise totally unrelated, it doesnāt feel at all disjointed. but at the same time, this also means that every enemy type doesnāt really feel like it ābelongsā anywhere, like you could take one enemy from one end of the map and plop it down in a totally unrelated area, and it would still look kind of like it was designed āforā that particular place.
even though i donāt really like it, i get that it is probably at least in part deliberate, since re-encountering various bad dudes in new places kind of helps you to strategize, or an enemy that was a piece of cake the first time you encounter it in one shape of level becomes a lot harder when you encounter it in a different place, or you have to deal with different groups of them and so on (one bag dude vs. one bag dude + two dogs vs. two bag dudes, etc), but it still makes the scope of the game feel more limited.
again, i suppose thatās kind of the point, there is something really claustrophobic and dizzying about the way you move through the world in the game that i think kind of parallels the way gaining more insight makes the game world more threatening and creepier as you go, rather than moving forward into exploring uncharted territory, youāre just spiraling back on your own anxiety and sense of dread, which is its own form of escalation without progress
mechanically ds also felt that way, the constant retreads and opening new paths, but in that it still felt more like two steps forward one step back in terms of what you were actually looking at. here i feel like no matter how far you go, youāll always end up back in yharnam eventually. itās cool conceptually, but at times feels like kind of a drag to actually experience.
