WHAT I was led to believe it had online co-op what the hell balls
I know that a lot of indies do local co-op nowadays because of Reasons but boy does it make things hard!
boy having looked into this more thoroughly for the last ten minutes or so this sure looks like a master class in point-missing
though full disclosure I am playing elliot quest atm
anyway, still curious, please report back, etc
wind waker link inarguably rules
2 Likes
wind waker link inarguably rules
Is this the charlie murder guys?
hmmph.
1 Like
ska studios, formerly totally screwed studios, mostly the work of one james silva and now his wife too apparently
developed the best river city ransom fangame, zombie smashers x
i haven’t gotten to play any of his stuff for like a decade because he went x360 exclusive with using xna and all, so this is cool
So yeah this is pretty much exactly what you would expect when you combine Dark Souls and Symphony of the Night times Indie Budget (not a bad thing, just means no VO, etc.)
Kinda hard to tell how big it is at this point, but things are already branching around nicely, and I wandered into an area I shouldn’t have gone and was promptly annihilated by a surprise boss.
You guys would actually really like this game.
Although I should point out that this game doesn’t wear its inspiration on its sleeve so much as don a skin suit made from it, such is the attempt to cling to the aesthetic and feel and soforth. Weirdly, though, it works.
based on their previous games I have zero faith this game has good friction and I hate flash-style art.
2 Likes
I was wondering how a 2D Dark Souls/Bloodborne would work. Pretty interesting how it’s implemented. Thanks for the heads up!
2 Likes
Oh so by “not a bad thing” you mean “the very best thing”?
(though ok soulsgames have excellent VO, but they’re a notable exception)
Where is the Symphony of the Night part in this, aside from being 2d for budget reasons? I see nothing but a wholesale attempt to copy every single thing in Dark Souls.
Which doesn’t mean it looks awful, I might still have played it if I was desperate for more Souls content. But I’m actually a bit tired of the mechanics at this point, and the timing of release is weird given that Dark Souls III is coming out in just a week or so.
I usually give up on assuming claims like “it’s like [other videogame]” are coming from anything more than surface comparisons. My guess is that this is being compared to SotN because of nonlinear progression and castle stuff.
WW Link is the most emotive of any of the character’s iterations without being annoying. I think his design pretty easily succeeds on those merits alone. His face is wide, but it’s not really a football shape. It’s more of an imperfect sphere.
1 Like
Wind Waker link forever looks super doofy to me. Sorry!
I mean, it didn’t stop me from beating that game like it had been fucking my wife or whatever, but the entire time I’m like “AW MAN THIS GAME IS SO PRETTaw fuck I looked at Link again god dammit”
Also, yes. Symphony-esque in that it’s nonlinear and gated by skills you obtain. It’s a Dark Souls Metroidvania, if that makes more sense.
[quote=“Rudie, post:20, topic:1157, full:true”]
based on their previous games I have zero faith this game has good friction and I hate flash-style art.[/quote]
@Rudie I had the exact same reservations but I’m REALLY enjoying S&S, played for like 4-5 hours so far. Was especially concerned about the “friction” thing because I had played The Dishwasher and found it really sloppy and un-fun to control, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Platformy jumps feel right, the weapons are satisfying and actually feel unique. While it’s not the most weighty and precise control I’ve ever experienced, it certainly doesn’t ruin the game at all… and I feared it would going into it, solely judging from some screenshots and the dev’s resume.
I’ve always appreciated the Souls games conceptually a little more than I’ve actually gotten into playing them, mainly because I’ll always prefer 2D to 3D… so I’m very much enjoying the blatant Souls-cloning elements smacked into a pretty well done Metroidvania. The visuals work for me too, it’s a little monochrome but there’s an actual sense of style. I can forgive the somewhat flash-like sprites since the backgrounds and levels look a lot nicer, and I’m more drawn to the overall screen presentation.
how does it compare to a Dust The Elysian Tale in the physics?
I’ve barely touched Dust, but from the little I played that one seems a little more ice-skatey and button mashy (probably why my attention waned quickly). Seriously, S&S is worth a look if the stickiness and control feel is your concern. I tend to hate how “indie platformers” feel, and this doesn’t bother me in the least.
And the game is zoomed out enough that Flash looking sprites aren’t too troubling to me either. I could see complaints that the game’s a little too gray and monochromatic, but I think the aesthetic works pretty well and feels like proper fog and grime.
Really pleasantly surprised by this one, gonna go play it some more I think…
This is out on Vita now. Free if you already bought it on PS4.
I had stopped playing the PS4 version to wait for this port and it seems like it was worth it. I’ve had no performance issues so far, and the zoomed in perspective is very pleasant compared to the PS4 versipn.
It might make the later platforming-heavy levels might a real pain though. The right screen controls the camera so you can see a little ahead, but it’s not an elegant solution. Hopefully they changed the levels a bit.
I’m surprised SB didn’t pour over this transparent souls-derivative in more detail; but I suppose it’s easy to summarize a 2D upgrade-maze with plainly distorted figures, edgy + inane creative design, and far less weightiness or delicate design to shape the ever-so-punishing format. After a while spent on old favourites and text / card-based games, I thirsted for something both novel and toothsome, and my wandering up two Steam libraries ended up drinking from this… crusted pitcher of salted blood. I am plenty ravenous enough to partake from such regardless, so I’ve scribbled down some notes about half way through the game.
-
+The earliest bits made a half-decent impression- a dimly-lit raided ship wrecked by a standard cthluloid, a dreary enshrouded outdoors and fort, a sodden knight with aggressive and minimally-telegraphed yet fixed patterns increasing with health loss. The game may rely extremely on long invulnerable dodge rolls / shields and the hyper-focus on ledge-grabbing ends up making platforming-combat awful in a platformer, quite annoyingly. Bottomless pits are dated and dead for forsaking the entire possibility space of progression and attrition to just wipe the board clean, you can’t change my mind. Still, the breadth of power increase options and constant conscientious iteration of enemy arrangements for each zone showed promise.
-
-The game then plunges into a generic wastes, forgetting its own title and premise as any means of distinguishing the game from its direct inspirations. There’s a pile of means that could have given the bestiary and locales a distinct identity: salt-rock formations and salt-blasted structures, figures trailing in mist, denizens and destinations waterlogged and bloated with seawater, wrappings of seaweed or barnacles or mold, draping everything over with piscine fleshmantles… and instead, there’s a pile of generic armed zombies and skeletons, a mildly-betentacled or chimeric fantasy menagerie, and the standard medieval-atrocities mystic spectres. The next three required zones: a “Town of Smiles” with some traps and no name-integration beyond a sudden screaming swordghoul with her jaw punched off, a “Watcher Woods” that foregrounds platformer falling damage with waiting out poison and poking archers on a mess of branches, and a “Sunken Fort” as the third area in a row with no water or boss-enemy connection or overarching themes and instead hoards of brown xenomorphs. Aimless and disconnected. Dark Souls is stuffed with exaggerations and mutilations of human and draconic forms to emphasize the plot’s burning decay- how does this game miss any sorts of majestic or horrifying tragedy for the sake of divinely-distorted mishmash goregrounds? Where is the bloody salt?
-
?After switching up to a flintlock and swordwhip, which eased up the primary combat difficulties, S&S locked itself into a more solidified and finally cohesive affair- a stormy castle, a bloodflecked reef of torture cages, and a finally-coherent underground cove of drowned pirate / wraiths and half-crab ogres. The metrovania-aspects kick in with a long forked loop I’ve dallied back and forth in, and as a action-platformer itself it finds distinct value in the primary mobility upgrade being gravity inversion to traverse the scrambled landscapes. Still, I could make a long list of stilted issues rising up yet- the eye-rolling Plot Gibberish in half of the npcs, absurdly-time-wasting teleporting skeletons, the comical number of deathdrops. The castle has a dragon, the prisons have a torture-golem, the cove has a pirate captain, still hardly inspiring even if they actually make any sense. The game still has a variety of awful edgy writing and core framing issues to it and it made a terrible second impression, but it’s got enough hooks that I’ll keep going forward, aiming to slowly break it over my knee.
I felt a bit bad at how this came from a partner’s recommendation, but she admitted it probably blended in her mind with her enjoying Hollow Knight soon after this, and it’s been a while since I’ve gotten to enjoy outlining design principles by tearing into a game’s gizzards like this. She doesn’t mind too much considering how much I can rationalize out from such, anyway. Perhaps the most damning mark is how few screenshots I’ve taken compared to a rather obssessive cataloguing of many other games I’ve played- it’s just such a deliberately ugly game in content and visuals and spirit. Not that that’s bad- plenty of games pull on such in some reduced capacity- but it has nothing to say with that, beyond a slow descent into dull “scary” mystery.
4 Likes