So I’m some hours of time into this now and it’s not bad but I feel like I have to vent about part of it and I’d rather not drop that in the big what playing megathread so this gets bumped up instead.
So the game starts with you in your anachronistic little village (how they have space travel yet so little other technology is baffling) waking up next to your space ship, but you can’t use it as you lack the launch codes. Instead you have to walk through the whole village getting some background info and walking by optional tutorial stuff (and a magic statue) until you get them, at which point you can take off and fly and eventually die and wake up back outside the space ship back at the start of the cycle. Fortunately you never have to go through all that village stuff again as you remember the launch codes, you learned that once and because of that you basically unlocked a knowledge gate and can just go straight to flying instead. I think most people would agree this is good design.
…And then the entire rest of the game so far seems to treat that as if it was actually bad design and should be avoided like the plague. To pick a random example I go to the binary planet system with the sand flying from one to the other and eventually find the abandoned alien ship, follow the path it leads through a maze of caves until I reach the underground city they built there. It is filling with sand so I can’t reach the lowest levels, so after I die and restart I head there again, go through the cave maze again and get to the bottom door. I open it, am treated with another cave maze that thanks to spikes and sand makes me wait around, accidentally die and have to repeat all that once again. Second time through I nearly die as there is a blind choice cave search with sand rapidly rising (the power line you follow goes though a crack and you have to poke around blindly until you find the right side path that leads back to it) and this eventually leads to a place that either branches off to a complex place where they are doing some sort of warping experiments or where that is the only destination there. poke around, full of interesting things, see that it has a door at the top that leads right back to the surface. I mess around and run short on time, read the alien swirl writing that notes that the door can’t be opened from the outside for science reasons, which explains why if you were to just land outside this place you can’t just enter initially and must brave the maze to get here.
The thing is this is a perfect place to put another knowledge gate, have an alien swirl you translate to let you know that they put in a fail safe in case on had to break back in from outside, just… bump into on off color rock or something, I assume they could come up with something cleverer than me. They don’t though, if I ever want to go back to that place I have to head here as soon as the cycle starts, go through the multiple cave mazes once more and basically do everything again.
So far the whole game is like this and it is slowly driving me nuts. If it was good to not make you repeat busywork at the start because you did it already, if I am keeping what I learned from each cycle then why can I legit not do anything with said knowledge? I don’t want to do that darn thing anymore (I legit have put off going back to said larger underground place because I have zero interest in doing that first maze bit for the eighth or so time), if I figure out what that thing in the observatory could mean and want to check I don’t want to have to do the whole annoying path to get there again because its door is permanently one way, let me learn some neat way to open it! Let me feel like a single thing I’ve read or learned so far means a darn thing, clearly it will at the end game or final act but if the whole game goes “yes this is good design at the very beginning and very end but would be wrong to implement at any other time” I’m gonna yell at it.
Also this will sound dark but this game desperately needs a kill yourself button, even if it is just to let me pull off my space helmet and let the vacuum of space do the rest. Deciding I am short on time and would be better off starting from scratch with a new cycle currently means I need to look around for the quickest way to kill myself and while I appreciate how every Groundhog’s Day story must have a chapter like this a quick way to restart would be rather nice.
On the off chance this is all wrong and I have missed what I want at literally every turn my bad I would not be surprised (I have triggered literally zero trophies and that feels vaguely concerning), my fear is that I actually am stuck in this endless cycle and will be repeating this same 22 minutes forever.
Anyways I don’t hate my time in the game when I am doing something new or on the rare occasion where I figure something out, but I am running out of new places to go and have yet to get past my initial feeling that I’ve been playing this wrong.
