a lot of people i know have been praising it and the demo kinda impressed me so i bought and started Inscryption for real last night but. man. i really think i’m totally sick of this already. the card game was interesting purely as a vehicle for the cabin puzzles and i was enjoying the way they interacted a lot but now that the cabin puzzles are over and i have to beat the guy to get to the next “chapter” i’m getting so exhausted and demoralized by how tedious that process has become, it feels like a weird game design truism shoved in here against the flow of the rest of the work.
the card game is a cute way to deliver clues and is fine enough but it’s just another part of the puzzle game and really isn’t that interesting or functional as it’s own gameplay system, and i think that would be totally fine if you weren’t expected to start treating it like one before you can move on to the rest of the actual game. on a holistic level the things that actually matter and contribute to what this game is really doing (using UI to gradually peel back the layers of evil software, etc) is like, the gathering of information from various sources and applying it to the space around you to solve little puzzles, withholding the next iteration of that entirely until i can clear a mechanical threshold that the game didn’t really prioritize at all up to that point is so confusing and exhausting lol. you basically have to cheat to win in the first place so why not just literally have the solution be cheating? i thought finding a way to cheat was the point of the cabin puzzles in the first place lol
like i said, the card game is not balanced like a real game at all so eventually you’ll just have stupidly broken low or zero cost deathcards that can win any encounter on turn one, but getting lucky enough to roll them when you need them takes sssoo many attempts during which nothing involved with or relevant to the larger experience is happening, you’re just now playing a mid roguelite that’s simultaneously way too piss easy to take seriously and way too RNG dependent to reliably clear before your continues are out. it gets worse if you have a run where you die before you get anything good because now you’re polluting your deathcard drop pool with stuff that’s absolutely useless.
i already know about the chapters after this (spoilers are basically how i determine if i actually wanna play something or not) and i’m sure they could be interesting and cool but this section feels so ill thought out and pointless that it’s severely harmed my confidence that this is being directed in any kind of pointed way. i don’t have the energy to spend a couple more hours getting past this part if this is the spirit the rest of the game was made in lmao. sorry for infinity paragraphs but i felt like there was too much nuance to how this was getting under my skin
Japanese PS+ gave me that Rondo and Symphony Collection. I’ve started Rondo on 4 devices this year. I have to accept I don’t like playing it. Yes it is filled with wonderful unique enemy sprites that they would use for 15 years. The secret placement is great. The secret path stuff is cool and well choregraphed in the game.
I really don’t like Richter. I don’t like his verbs. The jump commit got me killed so many times in bosses because a touch of pixel. The bosses frequently require you do a standing jump. Or react.
I hate the backwards flip for this same reason! It requires a strange neautral stance that talking with Fighting Game Friends they liking it made sense.
Also didn’t seem that helpful against moving hitboxes if you are flipping back in the same direction as the danger.
Maria addresses a lot of these concerns and I almost have fun with Maria. I still feel like the needle is to big for the thread.
It stresses and frustrates me in a way that other Castlevania’s don’t. Had a great time up in this thread with Super and Bloodlines. I’ll sit down and play through 1 in about two hours. 3 is cruel of course.
Then played a little of symphony and I should play the Saturn version on my laptop for Maria mode.
yeah right after i posted this i realized like “wait there are tons of posts that take up way more lines than this like, on this thread even” lol im just gonna fire off all cylinders even harder next time
The death cards are the earliest hint that the game can be broken in half but your mistake is to rely on them. Any strategy that hinges on you getting lucky with that one draw is inherently bad in the face of an opponent who can draw whatever they want.
Instead you’re meant to find ways to make your whole deck overpowered, which mainly works by moving sigils around. The first and most reliable thing is to activate a squirrel totem as soon as possible by going to the carver. If you’ve really searched the whole cabin you already have the squirrel totem, so set it up with either unkillable (no need to pull squirrels anymore!) or triple blood (which means you can summon any blood-based card with a single squirrel, so you can put heavy hitters on the board as soon as you want).
Using sacrifices, put death touch on cards with low attack, put multiple strikes on cards with high attack, put defensive abilities on cards with high HP. Note you can have more than one sigil per card.
Basically the idea is that your deck should have less and less useless cards as you advance through a given act 1 playthrough, and it’s a lot easier than it seems. Making punctual cards with high stats is a distant second priority (just a death touch sigil is more powerful than any stat if the creature can survive until it can deliver it), and in truth there are much more powerful ways than death cards to do that (the mycologists, stuff like the ourobouros).
Mad Max was precisely enough Open World and Batman Combos whose true play time is governed by how much you care about collecting (s)crap with occasional upgrade gating. The curious prevalence of American accents to Australian ones hurts the fiction massively but Good Lord the V6 engine sings and should never be upgraded to the V8
Deedlit entertains more promise as a demo and feels curiously flat as a fleshed-out experience. Makes me yearn something hard for that Action Zelda game that blew my mind way back when
the funniest thing about this to me is imagining that in the future the rest of the world is still basically normal, but australia is like that for some reason
Was pleased to discover that Inscryption has a part 3 that lets you go back to exploring a 3D room, but with a whole other card game attached.
I think bunny’s critiques of the card gameplay are all accurate, but Chevluh hit the nail on the head. In all chapters of Inscryption, the card game is sort of loose and janky. Its mechanics are not tightened down and polished to the extent you’d normally need for a roguelite deckbuilder like this. In each chapter, as you sneak around the edges and discover secrets your opponent doesn’t want you to know about, you steadily realize that there are always ways to completely break the game in your favor. Normally this would kill the replayability of a game like this, and I was worried about that when I started using squirrel totems to just blow through chapter 1.
Now I haven’t finished the entire game yet, but I think its roguelike trappings are really a decoy, and it’s not meant to be played indefinitely. The roguelike premise is there to give you a seemingly cruel, restrictive, and locked down system to chafe against until that eureka moment where you figure out how to completely subvert it. It feels great, but it also feels underwhelming – is this game really this thoughtless in its design? Did I just ruin it? And at that point the game pulls the rug out from under you and you realize what you’re really in for.
i had already gotten triple blood squirrels in a previous playthrough before making my post, as well as having two triple attack cards from sacrificing mantis gods to an 8 attack and a 7 attack card respectively. i agree the game gives you lots of really strong things but like i said initially, that’s not the problem i’m having, the problem i’m having is consistent access to what i need to actually facilitate and make plays like that before the game kills me with something i don’t yet have tools to respond to.
i’d really like to emphasize there’s not some mechanic i’m missing or ignoring here, i really try to make myself fully aware of all the tools/options available to me in any game that i play to avoid roadblocks like you’re imagining i’m hitting, the problem i have is how many eventless repeat playthroughs of the same card game i have to play before i get all that stuff in the right order to move on. after my playthrough with the triple blood squirrel totem i played four or five games in a row hitting every totem station on the way trying to get it or something equally useful to spawn and i just got garbage like sprinter and loose tail totems that i couldn’t work around.
like i said, mechanical ignorance isn’t the source of my issue, my issue is i can tell it’ll probably be five to ten more games of fucking around with things until i can curbstomp funny slavic deity man and his epic planetary body and i just stopped feeling like it was worth the energy to do that right now because this card system has too many holes in it to be inherently engaging on it’s own to me regardless of whether i win or lose.
it’s really funny seeing people apparently want this to be a physical standalone TCG lol, i kinda want that too because i feel like it’ll elucidate the degree to which a lot of the depth people are perceiving is based on deathcards and totems and sacrifices that wouldn’t really be fair or make sense in a pvp TCG context at all.
yeah this is the crux of what i was trying to say, i think it just became a source of frustration to me because i had the eureka moment the night before yesterday and now i just feel like i’m spinning my wheels waiting for the decoy game to give me the chance to actually implement it
Quick FYI just in case, here’s something you need to do before your beat that part of the game: Use the knife to pluck our your eye, and then choose the weird magical looking rune-inscribed eyeball as your replacement. Then look around the cabin. You’ve probably already done it, but I wanted to mention it because if you beat the game without doing that first then I expect you’ll be pretty frustrated.
yeah no worries i got the film out of the clock already (the eye gouging sequence was sick as hell lol), i figured my goal was to get some around the second or third death sequence where you can grab his camera but can’t use it to save yourself and he taunts you over not having film, i think they do a good job of implying that’s what you need to deal with leszy permanently so i didn’t really focus on beating the card game till i found it. honestly if i found that out the hard way i might’ve gotten a little frustrated but i do think it’s a good choice anyway and makes a lot of sense that you can’t escape your situation just thru card gamin’ alone
I mean, that’s what I find bewildering, basically after beating the angler I found the game never managed to throw anything that stopped me in that act, it was a straight path of victories all the way to the moon. And I had way less powerful cards than you did, like 7-8 attack mantis gods seem crazy to me, I beat the moon with stuff like an undying wolf, a couple turtles and a rock.
