True enough, I was mainly confused about how we got onto the subject of Saints Row
I’m still working through the game, because I’m lazy. I’ll try to talk more about it
I don’t like what broco called the “dramatic setpieces,” because they don’t follow any logic that makes sense for this series. they follow contemporary video game convention, by which I mean they are scenes in which you do literally nothing, and then the slow motion hits and you get The Feels. they work fine, I guess, but it’s a stilted convention that doesn’t have a place in a game about this creature being a creature
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Yeah, this game sort of simultaneously feels like it was influenced by Uncharted, but also that it was developed in a parallel universe where those games never existed.
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I’m happy with how it finished, but also not.
They’re hamstrung by how clear their previous style was, and they haven’t stretched far enough into new emotional or emotive territory. This would also play a lot better in 2010 before we were flooded with newfeel indie games; in this new world, it feels pretty conservative.
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Yeah, one game I thought about while playing this is Journey. Journey has nothing like Trico, but in other ways the games have a similar structure, and the comparison makes Last Guardian seem thin and archaic. Journey has way more stylistic variety in a much shorter game length, it has a sense of progress (which is largely missing in Last Guardian as you go up and down a lot of samey towers in whatever direction provides handholds), and it has platforming and puzzles of the same simplicity but without the unnecessary frustration.
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I’m really enjoying this, and continue to marvel at it. The lack of markers of progress is a little confounding, and I really have no idea if I’m halfway through the game or two rooms away. It’s interesting that if we think of this as a trilogy of sorts, Colossus is the clear black sheep of the group.
In truth, I’m really loving the game. My biggest problems are, kinda like geist mentions, those moments where the experience of diegetic time gets fucked with through the use of slow motion. It’s apparently supposed to heighten tension, but as soon as such a thing happens, all the tension goes out of me. The game signals to me that something prescripted is going to happen, and I can be confident that means that this time I made the jump (or Trico will intervene and save me). If, perhaps, the game uniformly went into slow motion whenever I missed a jump that takes me to my death… I still wouldn’t like it, but I’d like it a lot more.
I feel like this game could benefit from a few alternate paths or at least a few red herring platforms.
Trico is a wonder.
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I’m still playing this and I think I’m quite far? There’s been lots of Story Stuff happening lately so maybe I’m past the halfway point? I love this game but it drains me when I get stuck in a room or it takes me five minutes to make Trico do the thing I want him to do.
There are definite markers of progress but they’re tied to the characters. In the beginning you get that shield that gets taken away shortly thereafter. Eventually you get it back and by then Trico has changed in a few noticeable ways. I also at one point missed one of those slow motion falls where Trico is supposed to catch you or you’re supposed to grab on at the right moment so there’s still some drama there in that it’s possible to fail. I suppose the general criticism that the appearance of the slow motion at all kind of takes something away from the moment still applies though.
Just installed the 1.03 update and the game seems to run considerably smoother on a regular PS4. Image quality doesn’t seem to be compromised much either so that’s neat.
Just started my vacation today and won’t return to work until after the new year. I’m going to finish this game before then.
I finished it.
That was… not quite the ending I was expecting. Then again I don’t really know what I was expecting. Something more tragic? But it’s already kind of a tragic story in general.
edit-I should have waited until after the credits. Now it’s really over. And even less tragic. Maybe this wasn’t really a sad story after all.
As someone with no realistic plans on playing this game for the next decade+, I had been unreasonably worried that the dog died and am very relieved by this post.
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Spending the holidays out of town, so I can’t finish the game until January, even though I think I had just a couple hours left.
Just wanted to give a shout-out to this game’s lovely minimal menu design. The control suggestions still come up a little more often than I’d like, but I like how… not-themed and plain these menus are.
SPOILERS: Are the barrels made out of kids or are they just a reward for delivering them?
uh, let me go ahead and edit that post to spoiler tag it for you
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I think I broke Trico the other night. Was doing one of the water rooms and Trico was hungry and I was trying to feed it a barrel, but I just couldn’t get it to eat it. Its neck was turning around like a full 360 degrees and moving around in really erratic ways. I was beginning to think it was maybe irritable behavior–really distancing, too, since it was physically contorting itself in weird, alien ways–but I restarted that section and it didn’t happen again.
i just finished this and i’m sort of shocked at how good it is.
ico is one of my all time favourite games and sotc is something i’ve grown to rather dislike over time.
i was really expecting this to have been focus tested to hell with the 10 year dev cycle but trico really just feels as real as i could ever have hoped for. even when it felt a bit wonky trying to issue commands finding a workaround just seemed like when im walking my dog and he doesn’t realise he has to go around the same side of the lamppost as me.
it’s like the perfect ico sequel, aware of the diminishing returns of this style of game (puzzles, architecture, etc) so focuses on fixing the other problems with that game (princess trope, ai) and just totally nails it.
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ooh, this is interesting
Personally I find SotC much stronger than Ico, and a lot of my bore with Last Guardian is because it has the same restrictions – a linear, step-by-step journey through an environment repetitive in verbs and scenery. I adore the sparseness of it but can only stand hour-long plays with both because the sessions blend into a repetition. The open world of SotC gives me breaks to ride off and vary the pacing myself, and build the strong differences in environments which are expressed through minimal variations.
Or, with a narrative as simple as Ico and Last Guardian, 6-10 hours is too long for the amount of variety expressed.
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I’m in the SotC camp as well.
I thought Ico was alright. Pretty good atmosphere-wise and fantastic ending sequence that legitimately made me reflect about what kind of person I am.
SotC was a goddamn revelation though.
So, I’m a bit colder on this, because TLG is Ico again, except You Are the Yorda and you have a pet colossus by your side.
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i think the open world of sotc is the strongest part of the game by a long way.
most of my dislike for that game is the ending (and i’m not going to lie that games doing a similar ending since have made it worse) and also replaying it a year or so back the actual colossus fights are pretty boring (or just a drag dealing w the controls) outside of the scenery/scale.
i don’t think there was any challenge for me while going through the last guardian, it was all so comforting to go through this updated ico (and wow this game really looks unbelievably good) but it just seemed like they had coloured in the gaps wherever they could.
i guess i could compare this to dark souls 3 which i loved playing through, it felt like the first game updated to play even nicer and hit all those pleasure points, but however much i enjoyed that playthrough it’s not adding anything to counter the diminishing returns.
Yeah, the ending is so obvious that I think the best way to play that game is to step at collossi 5 or 6 – you know the only ending it can have, and you leave the story with the hero eternally condemned to his journey. For that matter cut out the narration in the intro, too.
agree