Dang you’re both synched up
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There are only four chapters in the final game, plus the prologue, but yeah, it’s kinda hilarious. I guess they call it the prologue because what pushes the plot forward (Dad leaving home) doesn’t happen until the end of it.
But yeah, the game is pretty slow, but I enjoy that about it. You get to settle in with some people and learn their whole country and such, which is a neat way to do things (and something a lot of the first games in each Trails sub series really like doing).
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Possibly good news on this front: It is becoming clear that I while good with numbers am no longer knowledgeable enough at more abstract math concepts to deal with The Message from Deep Space as I am utterly lost in the late 80s (87 to be exact) out of, again, 975 or so stages. I still have placeholder terms for the last five “terms” I’ve been given as I have no idea whatsoever what they are supposed to represent at this point, I’ve made it this far via pattern recognition and again being solid with numbers themselves but I worry I’ve hit a “you need to remember these concepts from math class” point and… I don’t.
I’m at 101 minutes and hence am at the “gotta figure out if I should just refund it or if this is surmountable” point and gotta sort it out quick.
1 Like
If its any help, you should get a reference tab on your computer if you haven’t already. It provides all the high school math, chemistry, physics, etc. you may need for the rest of the game. I’ve found the game has been mostly good at providing all the tools you might need to solve the puzzles (though I ran into one typo in a message somewhere in the late 100s that made it unsolveable without googling that particular message, hopefully that gets patched)
Checking where you’re at, you’re near the start of the geometry section of the messages. I feel like even that spoilered word would be more than enough to get over the hump
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Myself, I’m getting near the end of the game. Up to the 700s. If I may be sincere, one of my biggest weak spots for sci fi is stories of first contact that emphasize the staggering difficulty behind trying to make a connection with another living being across the galaxy. The obstacles to communication, and the wit required to overcome those obstacles, on both sides of a message, makes me feel optimistic at the barely tapped potential of thinking beings.
Even though the particulars of the game’s writing are fictional, it still feels like an exacting recipe for how to communicate to an alien species where the only things we necessarily have in common are the rules of logic and the physical parameters of our universe.
I find myself thinking that this is how humanity would want to portray itself to the rest of the cosmos, not as a short-sighted violent animal but as a thinking social being that wants to reach across impossibly vast gulfs in order to make someone else feel less alone, someone unrecognizably different from us.
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Yeah i do actually generally like slow openings in JRPGs, so i wouldn’t really call it a criticism (at least not until I’m 50 hours in and if it’s still going at that pace). I did find it funny though that it’s basically 10 hours of following two kids going through their on-the-job training though
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If you aren’t enjoying the game at this point, I wouldn’t keep banging your head against the wall. The part you’re at requires making the largest inductive leap yet in the game (the concept which Tulpa hinted at), but that leap is the meat of the game, if it’s frustrating there’s no need to frustrate yourself further.
Also, I do agree with Tulpa that this isn’t the sort of game where we should dwell on the whole “Jam packed with 900+ puzzles!” The “size” of the game fits with the narrative intention. If the creator were to edit the puzzle count down, it would mean editing down how deep this simulation of language interpretation goes.
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The whole game is kinda them doing their on the job training, though each town they get to has its own little stories as well, and it doesn’t really come together until the final town. It’s definitely a unique contrast to a lot of other modern RPGs. I wrapped the whole game in under 40 hours, though I’m sure you could go much longer if you wanted to.
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I’ve been playing Straftat with my friends, which is a free to play twitch shooter. You play as goofy aliens in nascar suits smoking cigarettes. It’s got a bunch of kooky weapons and the movement tech is ridiculous, you move around the map at mach speed. We do free for all with 4 people and go first to 50, which usually takes about 3 hours.
What I love about it is that there’s such a clear hierarchy of skill order that extra effort matters very little. We instead use our energy shouting ad hominems at each other. Rather than developing any meta of actual player skill, we’re getting increasingly elaborate at calling each other sweaty losers, it’s great fun.
My friend remarks once a session that the game reminds him of Quake multiplayer, something he’s never played, which makes me think a lot about the repackaging of aesthetics to appeal to misplaced nostalgia. I mean, we’re all 27, Quake’s older than we are. And the game doesn’t feel like any of the Quake I’ve ever played. I suppose it’s fast and sort of has the same desaturated polygonal style? I guess you don’t have to have played Quake to feel nostalgic for it.
I’ve also been playing 868-Back. I’m getting significantly better every time I boot it up, to the point where I’m almost making it all the way through a run with minimal road bumps, but I’d be hard pressed to point to the part of the game I enjoy. It gets me to slow down and really think through the design space every level. I keep coming back so something must be driving the need to play it, maybe the want to figure out more of the edges of what’s possible. Actually playing it feels a lot like doing an annoying bit of calculus. Maybe after 40 hours of game time it becomes more automatic and you start to get into a flow state with it.
I’m also playing Fez. I managed to not get too spoiled on this, or I think I have been very spoiled on this but then managed to forget most of the spoilers in the intervening decade. I’m about 2 hours in, and the game is repeatedly delighting me. I’m grinning ear to ear figuring out basic puzzles. I think I’m going to mainline it over the weekend, it’s been a really long time since I found a game so enthralling.
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i am playing castlevania games. the old ones for fami/nes.
cv1 rules
cv3 extra rules, i can’t believe how much i love it lol. i just got alucard for the first time last night and it was like. damn. how is this game so good lmao
anyone got any tips for cv2? what should i be trying to accomplish? what a horrible night to have a curse…
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I love 2 but I can’t remember how much I was able to solve on my own and how much I looked up. The action gets very easy at some point, so the main barrier is figuring out where to crouch.
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I think you can kind of just wander and explore CV2 for a lot of the first 30%. there are certain esoteric things that involve kneeling that I don’t think one could really figure out on their own. there are NPCs who tell you what to do, but the translation makes it confusing. honestly, I think there are only two things in the game that really require a guide or some passed-down playground knowledge. the rest, you can kind of just explore and do as you like.
but basically, grind some hearts at the start to get some upgrades is usually what I do. then, from there, you want to find the manors and collect the pieces of Dracula’s body contained therein.
anyway, first time through, just enjoy and explore and do your best. eventually, if you want to get the best ending, you’ll need to beat it in under 7 game days. but best to ignore that at first, I think
oh, there’s also a level-up system involving the collection of hearts, but I usually don’t pay too much attention to that
5 Likes
Finally beat Taurus Demon in Dark Souls. I feel like the game is really Dark Souls now. Really long distances between bonfires though, so you really have to stretch it in order to make progress.
The part where you are running on the bridge and then get covered in fire by the dragon is really funny. I yelled out “Uh oh!”
I’m basically David Byrne here
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Beat Lieutenant Surge. Actually somewhat difficult because I only have my Graveller and Furret who aren’t one hit KO
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Red Dead Redemption II (PS4): with the possible exception of Jack Thompson, no one will be happier than Yours Truly when and if GTA VI does, in fact, prove to be the long-awaited meteor to RockStar’s lumbering pea-brained behemoth
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I’ve completed the first two trivial cases in Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth. I might actually play this game to completion. It feels slick playing on Window Manager Only linux.
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To push back on this a bit, the size is the size regardless of why. I will play a downright poor sub-hour long game as it’s tiny, I’ll stick with an iffy but interesting game as long as it is less than several hours long, but the more time and involvement a game asks of me the better and more “for me” it has to be. If you make your game 40-50 hours long like this one seemingly is for most then there can be no maybes, it’s gotta be a sure thing or not at all.
(Also there is simply a notable difference between getting lost at puzzle 87 out of 100 as opposed to puzzle 87 out of 1000; the former is the game likely bearing its fangs and the latter is still in the introduction).
I did get a tip that eventually lead to me getting past puzzle 87 ( 86 was a sum of squares thing so maybe look at 87 through that lens) , but I’m now seemingly harder stuck at puzzle 89 and have… 8 in-game minutes to decide between refunding and moving on or dedicating a further 40 hours to it. I took a screenshot for the few here who have played it to see the exact state of my dictionary and how it makes the transmissions look, I assume it is less than ideal.
In better news in Emuurom I continued my momentum, figured out all the “second layer” stuff I recently figured out the trick for and followed up by quickly sorting out how to proceed after doing so. Do this set and it feels like it’d open something up (and I think I know what and mostly where) and that would almost by necessity be near some sort of end.
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[-3] is probably what’s throwing you off the most. If you want to keep playing, I’d suggest looking back at puzzle 40 and thinking about what else that frequency could mean.
figuring out [-20] might actually help with defining [-16], and [-17] too.
what can you tell me about when and where [-15] appears relative to [-14]? I actually had a weird idea about these ones as well and didn’t figure out the intended translation until like 100 messages later.
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