Vangers is a very unwelcoming game that points towards depth that may or may not exist. I can’t tell because I can’t remember the five-thousand made up words and the multiple factions and I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be doing. I mean, it basically seems like a top down driving game where you do fetch quests but there’s this whole thing about competing hives and alternate dimensions and weird currencies and and and
It’s also ugly as sin.
It’s amazing.
I propose that the comfy middle is to not know what the fuck you’re doing in the macro but the moment to moment control is really tasty
A lot of titles still balls up the latter entirely
yeah stardew valley was great for me until i learned you get judged after three years
(nah jk it’s still the bats/mushrooms choice that i’m stuck on)
Zyrinx’s Red Zone was the first game to come to mind when I saw this thread. The odds are so heavily stacked against the player that I can’t help but laugh. Like, IIRC, if a radar dish spots your helicopter (before the mission where you disable them all), it will summon every fighter jet in the enemy’s air force — and you literally do not have enough firepower to take them all out when they’re in the air.
I also remember there being extra bases on the first outdoor map unrelated to the game’s missions, but I never managed to access them and suss out their purpose (if any). I dunno, it feels weird to play a game where the player is both so aggressively antagonized and feels almost like an afterthought in the world’s design (this is less true of the more linearly designed on-foot segments).
(I’d probably be more willing to go back to it if the controls were a touch less slippery.)
I am responding to this now. I also like playing a game wrong. Testing the boundaries of what I can do. But that is when I know there are boundaries.
From some anime: NOTHING IS PERMITTED AND EVERYTHING IS ALLOWED.
When I don’t even know what I can do “ahhhhhhhhhhh”
It’s two years isn’t it? Same, that dumb little thing, even though you can apparently keep going and do everything after, is enough to stress me out too.
I just started playing Atelier Totori, and despite being about a frilly little girl prancing around picking berries and collecting driftwood, the game feels super stressful thanks to the time limit with vaguely defined objectives and minimal feedback to let you know you are making progress.
I know that by just playing through however I want, I am probably locking myself out of several endings and major plot points. I think one of the main characters just permanently left my party because I leveled up too far ahead of him.
I’m not normally too concerned about ‘doing it right’ in games, but this game seems to be a perfect stress mix of impending doom and vagueness, all wrapped up in a dainty little bow