Before Your Eyes has a neat gimmick in that you control progression by actually blinking. The narrative conceit is that you are a soul looking back on their life trying to craft a narrative that paints you as worthy of entering Paradise. The catch is you can only view memories for as long as you’re able to keep your eyes open. Blinking progresses you forward in your life but by inconsistent amounts (moments to decades).
This turns the core progression mechanic into something that you cannot help but do. It’s a convincing metaphor for trying to maintain a memory. People are talking at you and you are literally straining to listen the longer they talk. You will also just accidentally blink while playing which means that entire scenes can just fly by without any chance to go back. Some scenes challenge you to read something which is very difficult without blinking in general you just become very conscious of your body.
Involuntary bodily reflex as a game mechanic should be explored more. My shitty WebCam turned out to be quite an accurate controller so this seems like something that other games could easily experiment with.
Story is a little schmaltzy, prestige indie and the suburban American family, in which you are the only child, feels a bit stock. It eventually gets into the question of “a life well lived” which leads to the twist:
It is revealed that you were lying to the underworld ferryman and when you revisit your memories truthfully the game becomes about terminal illness and the blink metaphor loses its distinctiveness. We just get slow mouse with cool abstract visual representations of pain. This sounds a bit crass but I think experiencing Alzheimer’s would be a good focus for this type of game. The game does eventually introduce the mechanic of just closing your eyes to listen to things that the character didn’t directly witness (parents arguing about whether there’s something wrong with the kid, your mum telling your dad she hates your creative writing project).
It was about 90 minutes and while I don’t think it paid off emotionally for me, I’ve not really played much like it?
Part of why Hades felt like arcade-pace Diablo to me is because all/most of the skills you picked up were immediately very strong. In retrospect remembering Diablo III where you’d pick a class and then play it for XX hours until you grinded out a set that let you actually play Y build felt really weird.
I feel like I’ve played games where incremental progression was good because you could min/max your stats on purpose by stacking like, 15 different 2% bonuses, but I’m struggling to come up with an actual example of this?? Maybe I just played this game in my mind while I was doing something else
more games need to let me min/max like, 2 hours in. that’s one thing I like about Nioh 2 actually is that it let me build a glass cannon well before the end game
i am also thinking about ginormo sword, which is like “incremental growth but it just keeps going” which i love
Bonuses as small as 2% are usually permanent upgrades. Like Chrono Trigger had those items that gave you one single stat point.
The most broken version of that I can remember is the Robot part system in SaGa 3. In the endgame I spent down my entire 999999 max gold on hundreds of single-stat upgrade items for a single Robot-type party member, and the incremental upgrades basically added up to Machine God
Yeah I think in general you want unique effects rather than small marginal benefits. Marginal upgrades are usually to give the player SOMETHING for accomplishing a milestone of some sort, which I feel is better served by a “LEVEL UP” fanfare and confetti rather than having the player muck with the numbers themselves.
In the Diablo example, it annoys me to no end when my friends are like hemming and hawing over what items to equip when we’re in the early stages of the game. It literally doesn’t matter because
the game is easy enough right now that you will still win if you don’t min max
the items will literally become irrelevant 15 minutes from now
All the interesting and late-game viable items in Diablo tend to be sets or legendaries because they have unique effects designed by hand, not some range of percentage boosts.
It also reminds me of the difference between like the design philosophy of DOTA 2 vs. LoL. DOTA tries to give heroes and items completely unique effects (like my character’s ability lets them swap places with any other character; this item locks a unit in a tornado for a set amount of time!) while LoL is more of a number soup where all characters do everything but in various degrees and items tend to be more like stat sticks.
That’s not to say DOTA doesn’t have marginal upgrades at all or all of League’s characters and items don’t have unique effects but it’s clear there’s a difference in the high-level design.
Games feel a lot more dynamic when a base set of rules are established, and then subsequently “broken” with items or abilities or characters. When the difference between one character and another is simply “this one does more damage w/ ice spells, this one with uh fists” it’s not terribly compelling.
path of exile is all about layering incremental upgrades from various sources and it would probably drive everyone bothered by “+8% critical hit while you’re on fire and facing south” items completely up the wall lol. it’s so complicated that fans even built an open source reimplementation of its character building system in order to prototype and discuss builds (and for some builds see their total damage numbers at all, ie. summoners who can’t see the dps their minions are doing in game or weird builds that like, scale damage on how good their health potions are)
this game 1000% caters to minmaxing weirdos like me tho, the Real Game doesn’t even start until you’ve finished the campaign and enter the indefinitely scaling endless endgame where not only are you trying to minmax rolls on gear but on the actual levels themselves (ie. rolling monster modifiers like “every monster can poison you” to boost difficulty and possibly reward, if you can survive.)
it’s really overwhelming (and a lot of the community is a gamer toilet) but there’s not really much else that scratches this itch for me haha
Another weapon like that is Chicken Knife in FFV. The more you run away, the more overpowered it is.
It’s retroactive so usually by the time I get it it’s already at max strength. It turns out I was incrementally strengthening this weapon all along. By being a coward
can confirm, i’ve both tried to play and hated playing PoE
a good roguelike gets me min maxing but a good roguelike also tends to have a very wide variety of potential skills/effects/items and only gives you access to a small subset of those options every game. the game is more about trying to find the optimal path through the limited resources that are available to you that will maximize your chance of survival
yessss this rules, i kind of wish i had the brain for it.
so like yeah i don’t think incremental upgrades are inherently bad but like, you gotta do it right and you have to essentially design a Forever Game. I do not want to get an 8% bonus to ice damage at hour 3, save that shit for hour 521 or whatever, y’know?
god this rules, i love a risk/reward mechanic taken to absurd levels, one of my favorite things that games do
oh also thinking about Factorio where you definitely do a lot of incremental upgrades but it results in these monumental shifts occasionally when a bunch of these upgrades add up. at least, that’s how i remember it but i dunno, i just liked making conveyor belts
want to revise this to say that i think this is fine for level 48 and 49, y’know? like if i’m that far in a game then a 2% reduced damage probably does mean something to me. but level 1 should be something monumental, like a new skill. and level 2 should add 50% effectiveness to it. my resources early in the game are scarce and so they should be meaningful, but once i have copious resources it’s okay to give me small things for them.
