I keep hearing how one of the later levels in the game is a wonder of game design so that is motivation to maybe pick this game up on super sale at a later date and transfer my save date from the demo over
imo it’s nothing that wasn’t done as well or better in titanfall 2 or hitman, both of which were a lot more fun and rewarding overall
still a generous demo that is very easy to recommend
in other news I’ve been catching up on KRZ during bouts of insomnia on this work trip (finally finished act 2) and really adore it, even though “genuinely great game writing” and “perspective shifts that fight against the accepted model of Game Engine” aren’t as novel in 2017 as they were in 2013
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it’ll never not be a Great game
I don’t think we’ve had many other successful example of theatrical mindset applied to games, either. KRZ’s blend of theater and early text parser games is pretty unique
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it does also make you really appreciate that we finally, finally no longer have to always fall back on “well, the writing is pretty good for a videogame.”
the number that rise to actual literature could probably still be counted on both hands but we’re finally at a point where game scripts that are on par with the best genre movies are not unheard of
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plus they actually have those unique advantages from being an interactive medium that we like to talk about sometimes, except those aren’t always undermined by garbage writing anymore!
Act III is where the stage play aspects and text game start to be more than conspicuous influences.
Kentucky Route Zero
Best time to play it imo. My favourite 4am game?
Man, I’m gonna come back to this. I gotta think about it (and play it again) to really soak the ambitious design before I can fully critique it.
Exactly. Theatre (and acting in general) is more akin to videogames than cinema will ever be. They pertain to a magic circle that film abolishes by the nature of its medium.
I think designers would bode well to learn some improv acting to further understand space and its relationship with objects. The future of games is more of a topological problem now than anything fundamentally geometrical.
The trick with KRZ is that all the dialogue is open-ended. No definitive answers that leads to definitive events. The dialogue leads to more questions than answers and sets the scene without ever having to EXPLAIN it. Most of the questions don’t align with how you think as a player but more so how you choose to play out the dialogue trees. It’s not about you being the characters as it is about you casting the scene for the characters to be.
i think ‘Lynchian’ is a really lazy way to describe KRZ but like you said, not actually explaining things works so much better here than in most other games that seem to reach for this feeling. i trust that they aren’t going to try and answer everything in the last act, but i feel like the episodic release nature has given them the freedom to not explain things just by virtue of ‘oh they still have time to deal with this’.
I was going to link the KRZ designer (Jake Elliot)'s game for an M83 song (it was exactly the shallow expression called for) but now this is all that remains. Boooo internet
I used to try saying this all the time when people would be like “this game is ruined once I act like a jackass while these npcs are trying to talk serious about the dumb plot etc” you can be hamlet in a play and decide to just start assaulting the audience too, why is that shakespeares problem
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HORY SHEEZ guys it’s out!
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Wow, how have I not heard of this game yet? There is a 360 version eh? Will pick one up post haste. Shmups are my one true love.
I bought all chapters of KRZ to play on my flight to and from australia but I ended up falling asleep instead so
I guess I need to play it!
Still on that FM17 kick (ha), my fake San Jose earthquakes are playing above expectations but we’ve hit some weird issue where we just seem to concede goals that we’ve never really had problems with so I gotta get on that tactics menu
maybe I’ll try moving the 2 defensive midfielders to just midfielders and see what happens possession-wise, I’ve never been great at figuring out how to build defenses
I mean the steam version is WAAAAY cheaper and probably better…
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I don’t doubt that, but I can’t really hook up my PC to my tate’d crt tv and that is not optimal.
Yeah Bullet Soul is cool! Region free too! Bookiboy and I talked about it when it came out and I mysteriously found copies for 800 yen.
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