I also found probably the most important clue in the game Witness and Carmilla’s secret room by accident which kind of sucks. But I think the big issue is that it wasn’t well hidden enough.
Removing the collectibles wouldn’t make Paradise Killer better, because the island would be too large and empty, and traversal would become a real chore. You’d have to reduce the map but then the island would look unimpressive and why even have a 3D world at its point. The logical conclusion would be to either make Phoenix Wright (no 3D world at all) or Dang old Grandpa (very small closed spaces, and optionally a world map) again.
I agree that the investigation and 3D exploring parts are completely at odds with one another but I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a bad thing. The approach is similar to the Zero escape series, with clear separations between plot events and puzzle rooms, both being entirely unrelated but bouncing off each other nicely and allowing the game to breathe. Paradise Killer improves on that formula by giving more leeway to the player in terms of just how much investigation and how much 3D exploration they want to do and when
Anyway I got further in and got completely enraptured by the world, characters, style and music. Favourite track:
Honestly this is going to end up as my favorite game of 2020 which is pretty ridiculous considering I have no interest in vaporwave and only found out about this game by randomly browsing the switch e-shop
I tried a few minutes of Project Warlock and I appreciate that the game explains almost nothing, but the core shooting left me feeling a little meh. I might revisit it but probably not any time soon.
the minimal energy for gameplaying i’ve had recently (with work restarting, just haven’t been in the frame of mind) has been put into Ghosts of Tsushima. i feel like i’ll maybe never beat this game because there’s just so much stuff to do. nothing in the game ever feels amazing, but it does feel satisfying. actually, i take that back - the HDR is used to great effect.
it’s a game with hang-outitude. most things “feel good,” even if they aren’t particularly interesting.
I have been struggling to actually play games lately, but I have also entered a vicious cycle of my own creation in Yakuza 0; I’m right before what appears to be the final story mission, but nervous I won’t have enough abilities unlocked for what lies ahead, so I’m running around beating up jerks and collecting cash, then flying from Kamurocho to Sotenbori to have Majima run the Cabaret Club, send money to that mysterious “K-san”, then back to Kamurocho where Kiryu mysteriously gets a loan for a similar amount, invests it in real estate, and the cycle repeats. I’m pretty sure there’s a postgame so it’s not like I’d be missing out on anything but ability unlocks, but still.
I really love this goofy game, and in fairness the cabaret club mini game is somehow extremely entertaining to me, I just wish the ability stuff didn’t make me so nervous, haha
Yep, this is totally where I am. That room is like a liminal space that connects the third-floor hallway to this one puzzle room with ghosts. So I do need to get back in there, but the spiders are like posted up right in front of the door. They’re such punks!
I think the corridors are too cramped? Like I guess forcing you into close combat with the baddies is a way to ratchet up the tension it just sort of made me feel annoyed right away.
That, definitely, is a big part of it. Feels a lot like Wolfenstein 3D, only without the rare long, wide hallway.
Missing that satisfying weapon kick and variety from Doom and Duke 3D. I don’t know why they thought it would be fun to shoot a charge-up staff over and over at a shielded armor demon, like this wouldn’t just be tedious.
It’s almost always the case that you open a door, step back, and kill everything that moves through a doorway in a single-file line at you. Compare this to the amount of movement and strafing and herding you’re doing in Doom.
got to the demon boss hiding in the ship near the start of nioh. it’s getting tempting to give up on this game.
i got most of the way through bloodborne, but this is already starting to feel like total bullshit
The trial was sort of a weird victory lap, yeah. You accumulated all that evidence, here is your chance to shine. It does make the end feel jarringly anti-climatic compared to PW and Danganronpa which always like to throw twists at the 11th hour. (I did learn one (1) capital thing during the trial though, the fact that there were two conspiracies happening at once )
The trial is probably be more exciting if you don’t go in with full knowledge, but it’s hard/impossible to intuit when to stop collecting evidence. Ideally clues would have been harder to find and you’d thus have a bigger incentive to just drop the investigation sooner. Then the co-conspirators ratting on each other during the trial could have been awesome surprises
The execution(s) at the end were hilariously casual, I loved them. I killed 6 people and only 2 suspects went on to the next island, jesus
The game’s still the GOTY IMO and I can’t stop thinking about it. I’m glad there was no way to tackle the citizen abductions, it would have been cheap. The protagonist is not a hero
Gave Killer 7 a spin last night in preparation for the upcoming vote. I started playing it when it came out but didn’t get far, it was a transitional busy time in my life but now there’s a plague and the air quality outside is “very unhealthy” so… I’m feeling it. The style still holds up, I dig the movement and the quick method of selecting branching paths is cool. There’s a bit too much dialogue for my liking but I haven’t been playing story-oriented games in a while. The TV static transitions from scene to scene are pretty annoying though. Anyway, I stopped playing when my roommate got home because I started getting self conscious about all the weird sounds and demonic voices she might hear emanating from my room at 2am (I try to be discreet and considerate about my dark rituals).
Have finally unlocked all skills in Ring Fit Adventure after 147 days. Now the goals turn inward. The max difficulty kinda sucks because it just increases rep number but not all reps are created equal. Some exercises take like 2-3 minutes to do at max because there’s so many reps and each rep is a long action. Compare Knee lifts (60 at max, 1 rep/sec - 40 seconds of exercise) to Tricep kickbacks (24 for each arm for 48 and each rep takes 3-4 seconds for a max of nearly 3 minutes). IT often disincentivises me from certain exercises just because they become such an uneven slog and completing a single level will take up the whole session.
I know I’m in the equivalent of JRPG endgame but max difficulty is weirdly balanced.
Yeah, the abrasive sound design in that game is one of a kind and I love it but it’s definitely one to play with headphones. There are two characters that repeat “FUCK YOU”, “Awww…you’re fucked” when hitting one-shot-kill points on enemies.
I am a weirdo who got so into the robot text-to-speech voices in those games reading machine translated Japanese and still occasionally mumble to myself “it doesn’t understand…”
