Nu-SW did have a DMC like grading scale for your encounters but I could not tell you the criteria for getting good scores. I’d have some where I’d take no damage and complete the fight quickly but still get a 1-2/5 star ratings. Though I never felt hindered by it. I played in a what it takes to survive style and still had enough skill points for the important things by the second or third chapter.
It was pretty much completely about attack variation from what I could tell. The more damage you did with more different weapons and abilities, the better your rating.
I was the opposite, I played all the way through nuWarrior and enjoyed the scoring system (once I figured it out) but couldn’t get into Hard Reset at all
Momodora III: I hate the bellkeeper boss, a gauntlet of surviving the very same patter time and time again.
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you gotta love bosses that are more about maintaining an attention span than adapting to complex situations
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Finished Soul Reaver. It ends on a gosh darn cliffhanger! Good thing I have every other Legacy of Kain game in my Steam library!
I’m…still really torn about this game! The block pushing levels off after the midpoint, thank god, but the puzzles never felt very…interesting. I feel that in a good puzzle, discovering the correct state of the objects is only half (or less) of the actual puzzle. Getting the objects into the correct states should have unforeseen roadblocks, or at least require some thinking. In Soul Reaver, the puzzles felt more like “okay you figured it out, now to do all the mind-numbing tedium to get it into the correct state”. I very rarely felt challenged after a small amount of thinking, only annoyed.
The combat is garbage.
The bosses are also puzzle-like in some cases, like the one that you have to get to follow you to a giant incinerator. But again, the puzzle is usually solved in my mind long before it’s actually solved in the game. It’s just the tedium of getting it to work.
It must be something about the weird alternate fantasy world that intrigues me. I love the idea of vampires ruling a ruined world, and becoming gross parodies of their former selves through the sheer force of time. The world feels left behind in the best of ways, and the oddness of the graphics (i.e. standard PSX-era wobbliness) accentuates this. The structures in the game feel appropriately large but also somehow claustrophobic, thanks in part to a very narrow field of view (maybe).
All in all I feel like it was time well spent. I used a walkthrough for about 20% of the garbage, typically because failing to solve a puzzle properly usually just means backtracking for ages. So I would get worried I was going down the wrong path and that I’d have to retread old ground like 50 times to move forward. That said, there were definitely a few parts where I would have been utterly helpless to move forward…usually because I’d missed seeing some ledge just out of camera view.
I rarely finish games nowadays, so it was nice to see one to completion.
Started Soul Reaver 2 a bit too, it seems much more dull but we’ll see. There are a fair amount of cut scenes and honestly, those are the best things about these games.
OH and it turns out Soul Reaver runs on the Gex engine. Cool, huh?
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Yeah all these games I could be playing and I’m hooked on stupid Alto’s Journey on my Kindle
tried shadow warrior 2 and wasn’t crazy about it – it’s not as aggressively trashy and co-op-y as borderlands, and not as solid as nu-doom. the production is fun (I noticed they were playing the song from the 80s transformers movie in the opening cutscene after saints row 4 used optimus prime and megatron’s dialog verbatim during the final battle, so this is obviously a trend now), but not really fun enough to keep me at it.
also tried thumper and enjoyed it well enough but frankly found it a little too stressful for the limited variety and reward. I’m actually feeling a little out of touch with indie releases this year – with the exception of the witness (and ultimate chicken horse, but that didn’t really have any press at all) I’m finding a lot of them to be a little bit too boutique. the only “scene” people I really follow are quinns from shut up and sit down, and bennett, but a lot of the stuff they’ve been promoting has been tough to get excited about and seems to have a really small audience.
videoball is one thing, but did anyone here get anything out of quadrilateral cowboy or stephen’s sausage roll or thumper or soft body or offworld trading company? because for the most part I haven’t. between this and the pretty flat response to deus ex and mirror’s edge I don’t think it’s just me but idk. at least hitman is punching way above its weight.
Of your list I’ve only played Chicken Horse, Videoball, and The Witness, but there are so many indies it may just be an increase in noise not commensurate with signal.
I liked Oxenfree, Firewatch, Stardew Valley, Superhot, and KRZ act IV. I haven’t touched the others in your list or Headlander, Hyper Light Drifter, Furi, Wasted etc. but I think this year is about on par with any other. (This is mostly predicated on my love for The Witness and KRZ Act IV.)
I also have the same impression from AAA - if you’re looking at DXMD and Mirror’s Edge I understand the disappointment, but (Microsoft first party aside) DkS3 and Doom were solid and Titanfall 2 is two weeks away.
I think you guys have forgotten no man’s sky, the most indie and good game in the last century
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yes. it is a wonderful puzzle game but i’m also a puzzle nerd sooooooooo
If No Man’s Sky had puzzle panels I might agree.
you liked hyper light drifter, right?
jokes aside I’ve put off most of the games released this year thanks to executive dysfunction. But I’ve been playing Wuppo, and it’s pretty darn charming.
it’s a bit clunky but I will abide a game its clunk
I did, but I found it insubstantial in spite of itself. I’d put it behind hitman, chicken horse, furi, the witness…
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I’ll play Stephen’s Sausage Roll once it backs off its price a little bit.
I just finished up The Witness and I hurt my experience a bit by playing longer than I should have, but before that I thought it was pretty great.
Furi was this year and it my by my game of the year… out of the half dozen or so 2016 releases I’ve played.
I’m currently playing through a puzzle game entitled Patterna that is a bit inspired by Hexcells (the store description says so!) and will probably write something up about it once I finish it, but I likes it.
I’m tempted to start a Mirror’s Edge Catalyst topic and C&P what I wrote about it elsewhere just so something will have been said here about it, but it is… okay?
I don’t think it’s a signal to noise thing exactly, I feel like I’m specifically bouncing off of the current crop of “prestige” stuff in a way that I previously haven’t. might be my imagination though.
How long is Soul Reaver anyways. It is one of those games I feel that I should go back to someday but I always worry that it’s gonna be like 25 hours long and… no.
Yeah, the middlebrow games rising up in the non-AAA not-really-indie space are separating from the prestige indies a bit. Thanks for clarifying the categorization.
I don’t mind inside baseball, but it seems like the games created as part of this increasingly direct dialogue between high profile designers (if that’s actually what it is) are … overly literal? granta this is not. on the other hand, last year was the first time in a while that I agreed with almost all of the IGF awards (in addition to there being at least four or five releases which I liked better than anything this year), so who knows. maybe this is just a blip. it should almost certainly be a good thing that the medium is finally reaching a point where it can sustain this dialog separately from everything else, but I worry that the – very broadly speaking – derek yu era of indie game design is ending, and what’s replacing it is a little too straightforward.
when is lucas pope’s next game