Hollow Knight is my favorite search action game ama
it also feels like it is laser targeted at me and it fuckin got me, 360 no scope vertical takedown FLAWLESS VICTORY
It’s the only search action game ive played (that doesn’t start with M and end with etroid) where i didn’t feel like scouring the map and fighting everything out of compulsiveness, i actually wanted to find secret stuff. And the secret stuff is usually something more unique than a health upgrade or whatever. There are hidden NPCs and scenes that exist just to make the world feel more mysterious. There are reams of optional bosses with no huge reward, other than getting to fight more bosses.
i feel like it nails what the IGAvanias were always going for post-SotN, they seemed like they tried to make the evolution of your moves feel good in combat as well as in exploring the world and couldn’t always strike the balance. You end up getting a lot of movement options in HK and it never feels like you’re just fighting dudes on giant shelves, you actually can platform around and use the environment in combat in a dynamic way.
to be fair, my response is ultimately reactionary in the sense that i only played the game in the first place because i heard it was good. then i played it more than i should have because i wanted to enjoy the stuff people had praised. i probably wouldn’t have tried the game at all had i not heard such good things about it
i also feel compelled to talk about it when HK comes up not to be a downer or w/e but because i still feel legitimately confused about how it scrapes nails on a chalkboard so frequently despite on paper appearing like something i’d love
when i say the game feels mean, i really feel that! it honestly is, or it felt that way to me when i played it. it has some cute stuff, but some of the mechanics felt mean! i mean, that’s fine, i love mean games - normally i like that sort of thing, but hollow knight never sold me on it.
i think something about it is almost exactly what i want, so in some ways i’m wanting to go back and play it again. the circumstances in which i initially played it definitely could have made me hate it! i had it installed on my computer until last week, just sitting there on my desktop (i don’t keep a lot of games installed and i don’t play pc games too often). i dunno, i’ll shut up about hollow knight! i don’t want to say it’s bad, i want to say it’s good for some people and bad for others and that makes it interesting to me
Hmm im curious what you mean by mean! (lol) The only mechanic i flat out dislike is the death collection spirit thing. It’s just a nuisance and a poor fit with the game, it’s the most inelegantly blatant thing they nicked from Dark Souls
yes that’s a big part of it, but also the way mapping works coupled with the extremely confusing and inherent metroidvania structure of the world. it’s cool! i wanted the game to compel me to engage with it, but instead it all felt frustrating, opaque, and more difficult than i was willing to allow. i felt like no matter what i did i was going the “wrong” way and everything just got more and more confusing!
i’m sure if you eventually map everything out you conquer that anxiety and frustration and it becomes your palace. but for me it was a frustrating way to play. and now not having “won”, it nags at me, too.
Ooh ok! Yeah that definitely comports with what you said about the game working better for some and worse for others, that specific feeling was one of the things that grabbed me about it. You can get lost and confused and not know how deep down you are, or even your relation to familiar territory.
There’s actually an area you can stumble into early on that the game deliberately traps you in, to play on that tension. That happened to me on my first play through and i loved it, but it’s a risky move and def not going to play the same for everyone. And of course it’s a feeling that kind of ebbs away as you unlock fast travel and map out more of the world.
The only reason I played Hollow Knight is because I like worlds based on insects. I thought it was a pretty decent game overall but way too long and I felt kind of sick of it by the end. I really liked the Spider section in particular. The way the map functioned was neat too but other than this I don’t have a lot of fond memories of it despite there not being any major issue.
One thing that bothers me generally about this genre (and Souls-likes) recently is the obsession with having thousands of bossfights. There was a point in the base game where I was slightly fed up of new bosses and then quite a lot of the post-launch content layered more on. There wasn’t really enough to keep interest exploration wise for me.
Yeah this is how I felt about it. Like, the aesthetic did nothing for me and I didn’t care for how the game felt but I just kept plugging at it, thinking that if I got over the opening hump I’d be rewarded, but it never clicked. It really expects a lot from you and that’s fine but I was totally not interested in solving any of the game’s mysteries or exploring its world and I wish I’d quit playing it way earlier than I did and just gone back to, like, La Mulana 2 or something. Something that’s also huge but its screens are more compressed and its focus is less on action.
Also fuck boss fights, God do I hate almost all boss fights in all games.
I got nothing against the game and I get why other people dig it and I envy their enjoyment but I know way too many people who kept playing it even though they were never really enjoying it and that is why I am making this post…!
Yeah, it’s really more a Japanese railway business empire simulator than anything else. One of the rare PS1 games where the manual has like a hundred pages all of which are immensely helpful in understanding how you’re supposed to play.
I put Stardew Valley to bed finally, and then played a few minutes of Hyperdot which is an okay-ish little time-waster. And then I played most of the way through Streets of Rage 4 and decided I’d had enough somewhere around stage 10 so I just decided to go look at the character designs and listen to the soundtrack instead.
I’m off for a week so I’ve decided to dip into Saturn emulation and off the bat I’m really impressed.
Panzer Dragoon’s soundtrack blows the remake’s out of the water.
Saturn Bomberman I immediately get why people say is the best in the series. Banging soundtrack, absolutely gorgeous graphics with so much going on in the back/foregrounds. Great enemy design, just feels like it has an immense amount of love poured into it.
Dark Savior I’ve had on my list since seeing it in magazines. I always had an intense love of Landstalker so this is an immediate treat. The way the opening chapter is timed and completely changes the rest of the story always sounded so cool and it doesn’t disappoint. The starting ship is laid out in a really detailed way, lots of little shortcuts to shave time. The controls feels a little weirder than I remember Landstalker feeling but that might be an emu/DS4 issue. I immediately ordered a Saturn USB pad so we’ll see if that helps.
Saturn and Dreamcast both are real blank spots for me unfortunately and I keep meaning to track down the consoles and games myself but I don’t really have room for a CRT right now. So far I’m really charmed by the Saturn at least and wish I’d I dunno, mowed a few more lawns back in the day.
starting a new thread on what it means to “engage” with a game, asserting that this is just as valid an engagement as “playing” a game. mostly as an excuse to look at sprite art from old beat-em-ups
I mean, the more I think of it my enjoyment of the belt-scroller genre basically flows from Character Designs/Environments > Music > Systems, I’ve played through some really mediocre games just to see all the enemies/bosses
This is me with, like, 80% of games? I mean, like, Dragon Quest is just a parade of excellent character designs and music, which explains why I never really finish them, just see the bulk of stuff and move on.
I remove so many games off of my backlog by just accepting that I can look at character art and listen to an OST. Saves so much time and I get about as much enjoyment. Most games are pretty shallow design-wise.
