i want to believe this but my experience has borne out over a long time that
novelty (in multiple meanings of that word) is a relevant component to an experience
i think sometimes some try to actually scrub this component away because it makes things more complicated, but, like
dragon’s dogma felt fresh enough nearer to release for a lot of people (but clearly not everyone) that the downsides weren’t nearly as relevant. they become larger in hindsight
might give up on the platinum in dysmantle because it wants you to dig up every random hole in the ground…
re: dated games, i love thinking about Jet Set Willy in this context
if you played that game in the right context in 1984, it may have absolutely obliterated your mind - and fair enough! it’s a cool game and considering the hardware, it’s very fucking impressive
trying to actually have something like that experience today seems almost entirely impossible. i guess i consider that part of what people refer to as things becoming “dated” over time
Sort of like how when I was a wee urchin, Spelunker was the hot shit but by the time I had gotten to iit it had become something peoplle mostly enjoyed ironically (the added sound fx in the Japanese release may have something to do with that)
I genuinely liked E.T. on the Atari 2600 as a kid. It was a game that felt mysterious in a way most didn’t. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to like it.
The modern Dragon’s Dogma experience probably suffers considerably from not having this be the first thing you hear when you start up the game.
As a Dragon’s Dogma palate cleanser I played Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs.
I’m a huge Frictional fan so it was always weird that I just never got around to this one. Short version is that it basically de-gameifies and walking-simizes the first Amnesia. I gather that after Amnesia was this huge sleeper hit that launched a thousand screaming youtubers’ careers, this new direction was very unpopular.
But I dug it hugely. I would say that de-gameifying Amnesia is “a mistake” in that the overall product is less granular and compelling, so like the first game is better, but making a sequel with the same mechanics would have been worse than what we got in AMFP. Whatever else you want to say about Frictional, they don’t rest on any laurels. They are always doing something crazy and new with each game.
The writing in this one is really good, and it’s compellingly dark. The story is better than Amnesia’s, actually, by a good margin. It just doesn’t do as good of a job at leveraging interactivity to bake it in (Gone Home and Frictional’s own SOMA are the gold standards here).
I have a pet theory I’ve been nursing for a few years now that art’s chief purpose is purveying novelty. Boredom is the gravest crime a work can commit. On this scale, AMFP succeeds admirably.
Actually I’m heartened to hear AMFP is a bit more of a walking sim because I hated the mechanics in the previous Amnesia games. (At least they ditched the awful combat from the first Penumbra game though!)
I found the concept of AMFP really interesting, but it was very boring to play and the story felt like it wasn’t told very well. I wanted to like it more than I did. Much better than Dear Esther at least, that game suuckkssss
wait, how many people here liked the first Amnesia
been willing to give AMFP a try only specifically because it was not by the developer of the first game, which i felt was overwrought, tedious, and uninteresting. a game i actively disliked playing
it’s been many years since i played it now, so i don’t have the clearest memory of it. i might be down to give it another try… at one point it put me in a flooded basement with monsters and i got so frustrated by what the game was asking me to do and so bored by what it wanted to show me that i quit the game there. and have mostly just assumed people here didn’t like it either, i guess? idk, had that impression
would like to hear what’s good about the first amnesia. i was a totally different person when i played it last so… maybe!
First Amnesia would be better without the final section running around the catacombs. Its best tricks are everything up to and including that spiral staircase.
i liked the first amnesia! it’s been forever since i played it, though. the invisible monster in the water is one of my favourite horror videogame moments ever. and i really enjoyed the spookiness of the mansion. i remember not liking some of the puzzle stuff (some of it felt a bit like filler) but didnt have any major problems with it. are the catacombs the bit when you rund around grabbing stuff while monsters are running about? that bit felt a bit too much like pacman to me BUT ASIDE FROM THESE COMPLAINTS i really liked it. but its been like a decade.
I liked Amnesia 1 a lot better than 2, even though the writing probably was better in the second game if you were to convert them both into short stories or something.
The flooded basement with monsters was one of the first game’s highlights for me, because one of the monsters is invisible and I remember that making the scene tense. Also, you find acid vats that you can throw whatever you want into.
i think my love of dragon’s dogma these days is borne of it feeling like a nice comfy sweater that you put on to stay home and do nothing so i get people bouncing off of it playing it for the first time in 2023
it does seem to be laser targeted toward me, it has a bunch of systems that i just love
i first played Amnesia 1 back in 2012 upon purchasing the Humble Bundle V, which included the following (the latter 3 only if you “beat the average” bundle price):
Amnesia: The Dark Descent Psychonauts LIMBO Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP Bastion Lone Survivor Braid Super Meat Boy
quite a strong group of games! i think i spent more time with Amnesia than any of the other games, though, as Psychonauts had horrible graphical issues on my AMD Radeon HD 7770 and i really wasn’t able to get into Superbrothers/Bastion/Lone Survivor. LIMBO is one i thought “cool, i’ll play this later” and set it aside for over 10 years until I recently played thru it on PS5. Braid and Super Meat Boy were fun for a little while but i never really got stuck in and only really dabbled.
so that left Amneisa, which had already been praised up and down since its original release in 2010. a combat-de-emphasized first-person game that reeked of “survival horror” with strong immersive elements? i’m sold!!
but whatever was able to hook other people with the game, it never happened to me. from the very start, i found the writing and tone largely insufferable, the gameplay tedious, the mysteries banal. hearing now that it is apparently an SB darling is kind of breaking my mind a little bit because i was quite confident at the time that this was another naked emperor situation.
guess i gotta dive back in at some point and get a clearer picture
The peak of indie horror games came a little later, when the Limbo team made Inside and the Amnesia team made Soma. I don’t think anything since in the world of horror video games, indie or otherwise, has again reached those heights.
I loved dragons dogma at first but… I had the issue where i could always find a way to cheese monsters that should have just killed me outright, resulting in these precarious, protracted battles of attrition. Id get in over my head, die and lose abunch of progress. Eventually i just got tired of it.
