In the age of Wholesome Games, Start-to-Love is the new Start-to-Crate
22 Likes
It solidified how I thought about NPC dialogue. Itās clear that the text is written by someone used to working in interactive fiction, and the team thought, why not apply technically-skilled prose to a Zelda-like? Good + good = more good?
But itās so clear that when a game embodies the player and the pace is normally structured around walking, running, jumping, climbing, hoverbiking, itās too much of a context shift to briefly nod at an NPC and get 5, 6, 10 dense paragraphs. It doesnāt respect the playerās mindset or the rest of the experience.
The amount of detail is also really strange to my relationship to the player character. The weight of Zelda expectations prep me to expect a half-inhabited body ā a character capable of acting, but who Iām responsible for reacting and contemplating. Sableās anonymous, masked character reinforces this expectation. Itās my comfort spot in games: to exist, subtly. But the dialogue insists on an intimacy and a personality for the main character, my character, that fights against the presentation, and pulls it away from me. If this character has already existed in the world I need more of the experience to reflect their relationship to me.
17 Likes
Action games should have as much dialogue as silent films.
6 Likes
Counter Point: Dog Days
2 Likes
Thatās a movie
rpg where every enemy in every random encounter says āi love youā right before you kill them
14 Likes
Basically Undertale
7 Likes
But while Iām not shitposting let me talk about Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. I didnāt particularly care for it enough to keep playing for more than about 20-30 minutes. But, I will say the opening credit sequence is pretty funny.
Back to Psychonauts 2. It is comforting to see these weirdos again after so many years.
2 Likes
Let me think, for me I guess Iām tired of that business form āindie gameā, you know, beautiful lovely pixels, shiny colors, boring story on damsel in distress, metroidvania, and enemy farming with boring loot. I wish I could play something more creatorās fetish game, so a high-heels-latex-swimsuit-model doing parkour on a void space, running on wall, jumping between on whales doing gymnastics acting, if it not so terrible on control, then I will be love it.
Man, I really miss Oni on PC.
11 Likes
As Iāve noted elsewhere twice now, for me this is forever the āparkour on a whaleā game.
23 Likes
āThey did parkour on a whaleā is the new āsurgery on a grapeā
14 Likes
I think I can only enjoy a āfetish productā game if thereās enough care put into the mechanics that the whole truly represents a personal vision. Thereās a higher bar to cross the exploitation threshold on Steam and with sloppy, poor action it comes off as cloying and desperate rather than personal ā itās hard for me to imagine this represents anyoneās ideal of movement.
1 Like
I still havenāt played it, so Iām reserving judgement.
but then, this is a higher standard than Iād apply to some dirt-cheap pre-video exploitation film. Is that unfair? Yeah!
I donāt think itās anything more than the patina of time-travel that old sleaze offers. If I think about unlicensed Famicom Disk System eroge, it doesnāt feel quite as distasteful to me (but, like modern games, the repetition and mastery a game demands makes it way less enticing than giving a bad cheap movie a couple hours).
2 Likes
i meanā¦ i get it. iām not arguing for more pixel games lol. i just donāt think that particular game felt that great or inspired to play at all. it did feel someoneās weird demoscene fever dream/passion project though, iāll give them that.
2 Likes
Reminds me of Iām very deeply love to play The Hong Kong Massacre without using bullet time. Hotline miami is perfect, but I love this more. Runfa zhou caught me.
3 Likes
played like an hour or so of wrought flesh now that itās finally out, i wanna play more but im liking it a lot so far. it has tribes style skiing as the main navigation mechanic and enemy ai will actually jump around and dodge and stuff unlike a lot of new lo fi shooters so it forces u into this really cool aerial combat dance that calls on the same mechanical literacy as like, quake multiplayer or something. ive been having a lot of fun just jumping around and getting into random ficeā¦ iām generally not someone whos squeamish about gross monsters at all and find a lot of them pretty cute but some of the enemy designs in this i genuinely do not want near me lol, take that as you will but i feel like this game nails itās aesthetic goals pretty hard. itās not as heavy on rpg stats/build based elements as i thought, itās more about like finding modular upgrades that push u in a clear direction and stacking them which for what i assume is a 3-5 hour game seems like a nice way to give it a kind of dynamic cycle? obvs i need to see it bear itself out more to see what its really doing but i think moment to moment itās very sick and vivid.
have u seen the hong kong massacre devsā latest game, it looks absolutely nuts. im extremely into the huge saturation of particles and smoke and muzzle flash all over the screen
https://twitter.com/vreskigames/status/1453796018290634755
10 Likes
This video is pornography
5 Likes
feel like hyper-simulationist action games definitely have room to run once people finally start shipping stuff that requires current generation hardware (which is going to be, like, 2023 at the earliest)
3 Likes