maybe the lack of a hunger mechanic has something to do with it? As far as I’m aware, the only real penalty for dawdling is the random events, some of which seem to just be flavor text (hum of machinery) while others are dangerous but likely not game ending (the wall-destroying energy crackle). Enemies spawn, but irregularly enough that you can’t really grind, especially given the scale of EXP requirements and rarity of useful item drops.
A number of other things set it apart, I feel. If you take notes you can identify many of the strange devices (for those who haven’t played: equivalent to tools or non-equipment artifacts) based on weight/use, but the pills (potions) don’t have a conventional metagame attached. You can eat them blindly (bad idea) or pay to have them identified at the library, with the cost of the latter defrayed by the general safety of pills obtained from vending machines. However, the only place you are guaranteed to find a library is, I believe, the detention area - which is only (?) generated if you get caught, something that involves some automatic penalties and a number of variable risks. Either way, while you will still spend a fair amount of time on item management/stashes, there aren’t any necessary breaks to test B/U/C status or reevaluate your entire inventory.
There’s also a certain purity in the numbers the game tells you. I don’t believe there are ever any fractions or decimal places used. A coin is one unit of weight. No damage numbers are given in the message window, which can make combat frustrating but preserves the character of the narrative.
Tomb of the Taskmasker is great, very fun puzzley RPG. The death mechanic is great too. You’re sent to hell and have to complete a task before you can resurrect. One of the tasks involves given twenty presents to twenty demons, but the demons keep moving around and you keep losing track of who’ve you given presents to, it’s frustratingly amusing.
Let’s not forget the Myth games, people! Oni still has my favourite 3D brawler mechanics, it’s a shame about the rest of the game. Still fun to play through the first few levels now and then, though. Also Halo ODST is the best Halo. Halo 2 is the worst Halo.
I finished Pathways into Darkness! Sort of… to beat the game you have to nuke a sleeping demon under the pyramid, but first you have to find the nuke, then find the codes off a dead soldier, so you need to find a way to talk to dead people, and so on… eventually I had everything and headed down to the demon. I was unprepared combat wise and it took me so long to win the finale! I finally survived though and left the temple victorious! Except the ending message told me I forgot to set the bomb. I never finished the game properly, I just couldn’t bare to go through that finale again.
Crystal Quest already had a controller version on XBOX Live and it sucked. Also it turned it into a twinstick shooter. The game boy version… somehow was not too bad. The guy who made Crystal Quest went on to make Carmageddon! Unfortunately, the people who made the most recent one have revealed themselves to be gamer goobers (I think, I didn’t check all the details).
The Mac Crystal games are still fantastic, though.
Yeah, Tomb is the sequel. I never spent much time with the first one, the second always seemed so much better. The first one does the hell thing too, except you’re getting chased around a maze by a demon.
This guy has some OS9 stuff I had always dreamed of playing but never got the chance. Samurai is the one I wanted most, its even offered in English! I would die in Hell three times to see footage of it, tbh.
The Fool’s Errand rules, but I think of it as a DOS game because that’s how I discovered it (through HotU) even though I only had a mac for most of my childhood.
The sequel, The Fool and his Money, was finally released by the way, after 10 years in development. The DNF of puzzle games, almost
Oh man, I remember playing Lonely Time. The funny thing is that he did the English version himself for 1.0, but I guess somebody offered to translate it properly for version 1.1 and it lost a lot of the charm.
