What's the Verdict on Infernium? (Also, Mirror Drop)

King of Posters
#1

I’ve been curious about this game for a while, and it’s currently discounted a little on PS4. I see that a couple people on my Steam list have played it, but I don’t think anyone’s talked about it here.

Descriptions I’ve read make me think of the parts in Silent Hill 4 where indestructible ghosts chase you around, passing through walls and damaging you just by their proximity. I like that aspect of Silent Hill 4, but I can also imagine this being one of those frustrating stealth games that I really don’t care for.

Edit: Oh, I guess someone around here has talked about it, though elsewhere:

http://thatsnot.fun/page/8/

I think I’m going to have to try it, though at the moment La-Mulana 2 has cut short my return to No Man’s Sky and will likely crowd out any other games for me for a while.

1 Like
#3

I was madly addicted to it for a week or so, then put it down from a little exhaustion (tapped out by the final challenge). Spoke on that here

I started writing, a little breakdown of what you can expect, and my takes on how INFERNIUM lifts, but really, that’d contain some small revelations which are better to discover yourself. Things I do want to note

  • The enemy kind that clip through walls are a rarity
  • Stealth game only in terms of your proximity to baddies (there’s no hiding, only getting away)
  • Die a lot, start conserving a lot
  • You’ll never forget the…cloak getting closer -and- death noises
  • It can be a very frustrating time

If navigating tightly in the pleasure of tension, experimentation with very few tools, nearly no guidance, and unforgiving “how do I even do this” layouts

sound enjoyable with the aesthetic you’ve seen, you might dig it.

I should sit down and finish it, but all that fervor’s got me looking back at the first La Mulana…!

1 Like
#4

Well, I’m finding that this differs significantly from Pac-Man in that it has dead-ends everywhere. I like the way you have to puzzle out how things work, though the game seems to punish exploration of the environment.

After I completed the first area, I wanted to go back and see some of the spots that I’d obviously missed. But it seems that the only things left to discover are new places to die when an enemy chases you to the edge of a cliff. So I guess I will focus on forward progress rather than looking around, unless I encounter something that indicates that I’m wrong about that.

I’m glad that the game has those “Accessibility” options, since I can imagine becoming too frustrated to continue at some point. Or maybe this will be like Celeste, where the difficult parts just make me more determined never to use them, even temporarily.

I like the atmosphere, though I think some of the graphics and the jokes on the loading screen cheapen things a little. I looked up how “permadeath” works so that I can avoid that, but I may want to experience it once because it’s apparently meant to be simply how your story ends when it occurs.

#5

I have been playing pretty much everything I glanced at but didn’t have the headspace for this year over the past week or so and I honestly cannot get over how coy this game is being about its whole hook and the level of technical ability and sheer dedication it takes to follow through on it to the extent that it did, especially given that it’s so uninviting at every turn. Videogames are a real weird medium but we still have solo creators putting out stuff like this (and like, on switch even, because why not) and that just blows me away.

This and Mirror Drop both represent such astonishing craft and creativity and deep knowledge of the medium, they bespeak practically on their own a 3D indie renaissance comparable to the 2D one a decade ago which I’m not sure is even coming. Maybe these are it! But they’re extraordinary.

3 Likes
#6

ironically I think they’re actually less appealing to selectbutton tastes than they might be if they were even more oblique or lonelier rather than being so fully realized. Like, this is not a weird broken thing, it’s a complete work which only initially seems like it’s going to be weird and broken then reveals itself as incredibly demanding.

It may be easier to respect than to love but that’s not because it’s dry, it’s because it’s so fucking stressful

and like there’s absolutely no way this ever recoups its development costs, that can’t even have been on the table, there’s no audience for it. Yet it’s still a commercial work.

#7

I almost feel like the prevalence of walking simulators is selling something like this short

Because this is videogame

#8

My impression was that Mirror Drop might be similar to Ilamentia, but that might not be accurate. I guess I will have to try it.

I like that Mirror Drop is only 28 MB installed.

#9

I wasn’t quite so hot; the repeated use of circuiting the numeral input (that ‘puzzle’ where you match fires to numbers but really just have to run a pattern to buy a couple seconds away from the ‘ghost’) is really wearing on me, and writing is one of the few parts of a game that has the ability to turn me off if it’s bad, and it’s real bad.

But it is the architecture I see in certain of my dreams, good ones, and it’s phenomenal as a one-person project.

What I really don’t understand is Ghost of a Tale. One person can’t make even a fifth of that art.

#10

some of the main differences between Ilamentia and Mirror Drop:

  • the former is almost all “whoa weird!” imagery and the latter is almost all “GPUs can sure do some wild shit.” the ratio of out-there artistry to pure technical artifice is swapped.

  • there are no dexterity challenges in Mirror Drop; you move around with 6DOF controls as a headless avatar, but all the puzzles involve toggling switches on and off; it’s more like English Country Tune in terms of interaction design

it makes it a much more focused and holistic experience

1 Like
#11

and I really love that someone made a game in which you can sprint with shift or roll with Q/E in which you realistically won’t even need to test or use those controls unless it occurs to you that to you might want to, and a game that’s somehow so straightforward and ultimately not too frustrating despite requiring so much perceptual focus from one level to the next.

it is videogame

#12

I am emphasizing this because to have a block-moving puzzle game whose main hook is that it is obscenely complicated to render because it is deliberately obfuscating, and to have that game use standard FPS controls that depends on a skillset which is almost invariably developed playing fast-paced mainstream games (as, contra 2D puzzle games, it’s quite unintuitive for people without FPS experience to pick up and play) and put them toward something so delightful and ordinary and slow goes a lot way toward reassuring me that our shared vocabulary is actually useful outside of fun dumb art

gosh it makes me happy

1 Like
#13

I mean, the game didn’t sell and nobody has ever heard of it; it’s a lot simpler to say, maybe this control scheme that we and the creator think of as second nature is too niche for this game.

Now I think it’d need to be about 100 times more popular before it starts reaching people who the control scheme is turning off but I think a lot of Mirror Drop is made without thought for others; the creator is very much a bedroomed engineer.

I love the microscopic audience for that pitch, though: ‘unique renderer + minimalist puzzle game’

1 Like
#14

any other game would make me think, “you know, FPS controls are not accessible enough” (Cf watching my wife play the witness and lots of other examples) but what I’m saying is that this one being so focused in its intent while being nothing like a first person shooter (there is no jumping, for example) makes me do a total 180 to “you know, maybe this is enough of a universal after all”

because it is a shared vocabulary, damn it. And like you said, that is not the first thing limiting its appeal

#15

And for all I know the Q/E thing is default unity keybindings; “headless FPS avatar” probably is. But this makes those things feel so instrumental that it doesn’t matter that they’re as good as placeholders

#16

(pretty sure the realtime raytracing game is not Unity, although you can theoretically replace the rendering in Unity)

(dammit opening this up for the first time in 6 months and I realize it’s OpenGL and it exhibits the major screentear-like corruption all Vsync’d OpenGL fullscreens do on my graphics card NVIDIA)

1 Like
#17

I played Mirror Drop a little last night, and it took me a few stages to realize just how I was solving the puzzles. I’m stuck on the last part of stage 5, but it’s a good kind of stuck (I think).

I’m glad there are options to turn down the graphical quality, as the game suddenly slowed to a crawl when the reflection effects kicked in. For a minute, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to play anymore. (This happened to me with Blueberry Garden a couple computers ago, and I only revisited that game within the past year or so.)

md
md.jpg960×540 111 KB

#18

Vsync Fast, GSync On, Vsync off in game settings should do it?

#19

I’m not sure it’s the same experience without the reflections…

#20

Oh, it doesn’t remove the reflections when you move the slider down. It just makes the edges a little rougher on the shapes.

1 Like
#21

I believe the quality slider is straight up resolution, which makes sense as the only real setting if he’s shooting one ray per screen pixel.

1 Like