I think I’m close to the end of this game now. I rescued the cousin and now have to solve the water problem (which I assume means a final boss fight).
The additional volcano monsters all over make backtracking kind of a chore. I don’t know that I will spend much time trying to tie up any loose ends. I’ve collected only 2-3 of those special red pieces, but I’ve noticed extra contraptions in several areas that I didn’t end up using that are probably related to those.
One thing I would still like to figure out how in the world to protect those two blue glowing spots from the waves of enemies. I tried stopping them with the purple beam, but it isn’t quite wide enough and some always get through in the last big wave.
I also have one gold barrel and one red barrel outstanding, but I’ve explored those areas pretty thoroughly. Maybe I’ll make one more sweep with my new teleportation device.
It’s been a long time so I forgot a lot of the puzzles and mechanics and still have a lot of muscle-memory.
It’s very point-n-click adventure, where you can progress until you get the right verb… but sometime that verb is a in-game item, and sometimes it’s a new skill. But the game does a horrible job of guiding the player (which I like, makes the puzzles not tedious busywork). The ‘tutorial’ is just hoping the player gives up on hard puzzles and bumps into an easier one that triggers an insight they can use to progress. That’s the heuristic! Or at least what I used now, half-remembering everything.
I guess also the room names in the map are clues sometimes.
The saccharine posters/phrases after each puzzle were fun to see as they confirmed that your ingenious solution was in fact predicted by the designer. The biggest improvement to the game would be to put them before the puzzles? Or the room names.
It’s a shame that the level design layout was so great at ensuring you couldn’t sneak behind a puzzle and not that you’d have a narratively-fulfilling difficulty ramp-up.
I still like the aesthetic, the weird sound design work with chickens and rain, and the voluntary/forced vertigo effects
I didn’t feel like that, but then I used the map heavily to go back to unresolved puzzles. I thought there were plenty of challenging puzzles, like Not Enough Pieces, Lighting the Fuse, Pulling Both Ways, Rings in the Dark, The Butterfly Effect, and Stuck in a Rut
I just replayed the whole game last night just to see if I was misremembering. I think Antichamber and Supraland share a similar design flaw! The means of interaction are so constrained and the puzzle design only seems more confident/less arbitrary once you have a few additional verbs. Unfortunately, you don’t get those verbs until well past the halfway point and they are hardly used before the game is over.
yes, I think the first half is much better encompassed by
and (agreeing with your observation for the most part) I liked that part considerably better, as I found the puzzle design not very interesting when it leaned more heavily in that direction
A game where I buy powerups and the ability to hold more money to do so while someone says come back with a double jump or a flux cube is the hell of game design for me.
Oh, I want to clarify, I was talking about Antichamber in my post. I do think that supraland has a more interesting first half, with the proviso that the puzzles are just… not good until you have more ways of interacting with the world, but this corresponds with a general decline in level design, switching from dense layered spaces filled with secrets to huge empty spaces with a small handful of actually decent puzzles
Antichamber is the only game in thread I’ve played for more than an hour and plan on definitely coming back around to.
I don’t doubt Talos has greatness, but I was burnt out on that type of opening; framing of a larger story early on, fair regard here makes me think I’ll probably pick it up again eventually.
Yes, exactly; I’ve seen people iterate on level design as they’re building up their basic mechanics and codebase, if they’re in a stable base engine like Unreal, and then charge forward once they’ve got those mechanics ready, like they’re laying railroad track.
I have now seen the barrel, but I still can’t reach it. I guess you must be granted the ability to break those metal bars at some point, but I find myself kind of trying to resist playing along and remembering where they all are.
I don’t know exactly how to reach the final area, but in my last couple sessions I’ve just been wandering around and not specifically looking for it.
I reached the end last night. The final boss did make me ask myself why I was even playing this game.
But I also spent a little more time just wandering around and trying to find more chests. That aspect of the game remains enjoyable even as some other aspects disappoint.
Overall, I’ve spent a lot of time fighting with the physics. Sometimes because I thought I had a solution but it didn’t quite work, and other times because even the intended solution seemed a little broken. (Which is not necessarily a bad thing. I like messiness in independent games.)
I suppose I remain ambivalent, this being one of those cases where I care about the bad only because I see a lot of good and a lot of potential.