I played The Savior’s Gang for a bit yesterday with Alicia. We got it on the switch because she thought it looked very funny in the trailer. And also it was $5
It’s about being the spirit of jesus guiding your followers through, like, traps and shit? Because God is pissed at you (Jesus) for wasting your life and is going to destroy the world? The whole time there’s also an ongoing group text with God, Satan, Joseph (aka stepdad), and like…other people I guess. It’s fucking weird and pretty bad but I kinda like it.
Also it was made by a Spanish team and their English isn’t exactly on point, so you end up with things like a screen showing Jesus smoking a big blunt that simply says “Fucker savior”
Okay you know what I really like about this game? You have this big group of followers and like, 4 will get hit by a spike and it’ll tell you their name, age, and give a little epitaph, and they are universally bizarre.
“Oh well, whatever”
“Excuse me for not rising”
“I have nothing futher [sic] to say”
I’m glad the Wild West of Weird Video Games is back
while i wait for the XB version of Bloodstained to be patched, i spent the weekend playing through Cadence of Hyrule and beat it.
i really enjoyed myself and the fact that the game exists makes me really happy, but i do really hope they add some more to it at some point, because once you get going in that game, it loses pretty much all challenge.
Isn’t that just games with the Nintendo brand on it? I mean of course not exclusively but if there’s Nintendo on the box nowadays you can be sure it’s going to be weak sauce even though every other design aspect of it is stellar.
It’s not like I’m complaining about it though because 1. I don’t like too much of a challenge in videogames anymore and 2. I don’t play Nintendo games anyway so they’re clearly not made for me.
I realize this particular game is by the Necrodancer people but still, Nintendo might have had some influence, no?
that’s usually a hard rule for your initial experience of the game – it’s impossible to get a real challenge by default, or in the first hour – but they’re pretty good lately at giving you the real game if/when you want it, so it’s reasonable to expect they’d patch something in later, especially since a lot more work seems to have gone into the world generation than the game really makes use of.
The unlockable character is pretty tricky, but yeah, it could stand for some more options that bridge the gap between the standard mode and that character.
Permadeath mode is pretty difficult, too, but I suspect only at the beginning. Once you get a few items/hearts it shouldn’t be that hard to avoid death.
I’ve been stubbornly sticking to 1-reach weapons because the spear seems too easy
But I never had this much difficulty with Crypt of the Necrodancer, so I’m in a lot of weak loops where rooms are rather complex and I’m blindsided. My average survival is something like 6 tiles, which feels insanely terrible (I’m at about 1:30 in?). The tile bounds also seem to play a huge role in making this more difficult for me, I find myself trapped against walls way more often than Crypt, where I could back up while familiarizing with a pattern.
I’m shocked they don’t consider ‘Wait’ to be fundamental enough to make intrinsic, I only recently found the wait drum. That’s another huge party of my playstyle I was lacking.
I think this is good game design. It makes the environment more relevant to encounters since you can effectively wait by walking against a wall. In Necrodancer this was known as a “tactical dig”. Necrodancer killed your multiplier when you digged against an undiggable wall (which made stronger shovels more useful), whereas CoH doesn’t. Also, you can make a tradeoff of deliberately missing a beat if you think the wait is valuable enough.
I think they had trouble translating this from Necrodancer, where not having a wait button is an explicit mechanic.
It works better there, because the only way to wait without an item is to dig, so waiting is a resource (since there are only so many diggable walls, and the terrain around you changes when you do it). If you ever try to move into a wall that you can’t dig, you lose your multiplier.
In Cadence of Hyrule, there are a lot of undiggable things on the Overworld, which would have made dig-waiting much harder, so they don’t drop your combo when you run into a wall. But I think that feels a lot mushier and isn’t nearly as interesting.
Yeah, this “feels right”, and it’s one of the reasons why I played a lot of Aria in Necrodancer, which aligns incentives so that this attitude makes sense (missed beat = death). It’s not really the case in any other mode though, and Necrodancer speedrunners deliberately miss beats all the time since it’s often optimal to do so in modes that don’t ban it.
My personal ideal Necrodancer character would make you lose health for missing beats without insta-killing you, but that isn’t a thing.
I’m at something like 98.7% complete on Bloodstained. The final boss is both pretty cool and a pain in the ass. Maybe I’ll finish it sometime later today!
Overall I’ve really enjoyed it. Part of me wishes it were longer, but uhhhh I guess that’s what the stretch goal content will be for?
okay but why, though? it’s ugly, the world, plot, characters, monsters, etc. are dull and derivative in all the worst ways, it tries to ape both Symphony and Aria simultaneously despite not understanding what made either work… it’s just kind of a hot mess on every conceivable level.
