03.06.17

I had time to play some stuff after all.

First up was Rain World. I'd had my eye on this for a while even before it launched. It looked fairly unique and I liked the setting. I wouldn't say the gameplay trailers were misleading or anything, but in retrospect, they clearly had people playing who already knew what they were doing. I did not. And sadly I couldn't keep my patience for long enough to start understanding the game enough. So, rushing ahead, I ultimately didn't like it and gave up after an hour or two of struggling. And oddly enough, it was all because of the difficulty. I'll try to break it down in some arbitrary order.

The first thing you'll notice is how the world looks. It's... gray. Every single non-living thing is mostly gray. And this is a problem because it makes it difficult to tell things apart. It doesn't help that there isn't any visual difference between the scenery and the interactables. Spear? Nope, just a pointy piece of scenery. Rocks? Lost somewhere in the grass, good luck finding them. Climbable pole? Nope, not this one. So there's a lot of trial and error involved, but I don't feel it contributes to the experience.

The second thing you'll notice is that your slugcat is quite unwieldy. With the animations being somewhat procedural you have a hard time understanding what your character is doing. Jumping is for the most part a tiny, rather useless, hop. (Although it can be used for some clumsy wall jumping and combined with some other mechanics to kind of approach the basic jump functionality you've come to expect from games, but it's far from consistent.) And I swear, the amount of times the adorable white blob refused to grab poles and instead fell all the way down, destroying my progress... The amount is troubling.

Then somewhere along the lines you'll realize that the timed shelter and food system is putting quite the pressure on your exploration. Fail to gather enough food - dead. Fail to find a new shelter? Better hope you have time to run the entire way back, or you're dead. It's essentially a checkpoint system, not much unlike Dark Souls. And you don't even lose any progress, because aside from exploring the map and managing to navigate it, there is no progress. I wouldn't complain about the infrequent appearance of these checkpoints, but I would complain about the fact that I am put on a time limit.

One part of the difficulty that I did like was the sense of discovery. The game tells you pretty much nothing about any of the systems, only the very basic movement. And if you always try to play it safe, it's possible you won't learn much. But it's moderately surprising how many elements of the world you can interact with and how those elements can interact with each other. There's always more tricks to be found to help you survive, and that's an acceptable substitute to character progression. The latter of which, as mentioned, doesn't exist here.

So, if you don't like the fact that you'd finish the game with the same character you started with, you probably also won't like that this game doesn't tell you anything about where you're supposed to go. It's generous enough to give you a map of explored locations, but navigating around the place is hell even without the constant threat of wildlife. So when you find out you also have no idea where you're going, and if the struggle up these pipes and ledges is difficult because it's the way forward, or because you're not supposed to get up there.

In conclusion, I didn't like it because I crumbled under the difficulty, but for some, this particular type of unfair struggle might be enjoyable. If you can embrace your role as the incapable slugcat you are and are dying to get to know all the secrets that sewer system has to offer... maybe you'll like it.

Not having any gaps between classes the next semester nor over the summer obviously, I won't really have an excuse to watch any anime. In any case, I currently finished Angel Beats. It was a rather badly put-together jumble of action, comedy, music, and tragedy. It was difficult to follow, felt somewhat rushed, and there were logical inconsistencies everywhere. But darn it, it made me sad multiple times and even cry at the end. I'm honestly confused since the characters and the entire story were too fake to be relatable, and yet they got me.
This is getting a little long, but it's apparently from the same company, Key, that is known for making sad visual novels. Planetarian being one I've played, but there's also Clannad, and other, slightly less popular ones. I guess they know their stuff. And for me, the animation and voice acting helps deliver the emotion better than static pictures and whatever voice I can come up with in my head from reading. Well played, Key. ;_;

And two more new games from this week. I swear I'll try all of them during summer. 1-2 per day. It's going to happen.
MidBoss (not to be confused with a different developer of the same name) is a rogue-like. Crawling randomly generated dungeons, as per seemingly usual, with the twist being that you can take control of the bodies of your enemies. Not too popular, and also tagged Casual, but it looks good enough to warrant a try.
Vanquish is probably some rather popular game that I don't have a clue about, because it was only ever available for consoles. Well, this is the port, and people seem to like it. You're in a... nice suit. And have a gun to shoot stuff. Which probably shoots back. Lots of shooting, lots of action. Looks cool, hopefully it's fun as well.