VagueRant posted:

Wait, I know about the texts, but what does the diary say?

BobTheJanitor posted:

This has been one of the more amateurish game designy things that's kind of bugged me about LiS. Overall, it's been great, don't get me wrong, but I don't like how missable a lot of details are. And I know, a lot of this is on the player to catch these things, but there's a way of crafting the scenes that would encourage messing around with everything, and the game usually doesn't do that. In almost every scene where you're free to poke around, the game gives you something that feels time-sensitive that you should be doing instead. Someone is always waiting on you to do something (sometimes even sending you text messages about it), or someone is about to come in and catch you, and that encourages immediately going to do that main goal thing instead of stopping to smell the metaphorical roses, which is easily a good 50% of the game. If you always do the goal in each scene that the game is rushing you towards, you'll miss so much.

BobTheJanitor posted:

Also I don't think it tutorializes the 'you've learned something so you can rewind and redo this conversation differently' mechanic well enough. I missed what the little "<< (speech bubble)" icon was trying to tell me the first time it popped up, and I probably played half the game through before figuring it out. Somehow I confused it with the similarly opaque 'flappy butterflies' icon and didn't recall what either of them were indicating. Not that I wasn't sometimes rewinding and redoing conversations anyway, but I just wasn't making the connection to why that icon kept showing up. They probably should have tossed up actual directions, like 'this icon means you can go back blah blah' in a few conversations until the player had done it a few times, just to make sure it's hammered in. Or just forego the cute icons and use the TTG method of just telling you in text every time. "Chloe will remember this (but not if you rewind)"

Dolash posted:

Edit Edit AhhhHHHHHH TELL CHLOE DAMNIT WHAT'S THE POINT OF TIME TRAVEL IF YOU NEVER TELL ANYONE

dmboogie posted:

There is really absolutely no way that telling Chloe would go well for anyone. "Hey, Chloe, I saved your beloved dad's life, but then I had to kill you! Whoops! So I killed your dad again. No hard feelings, right?" Poor girl doesn't need more mental trauma on her plate.

Dolash posted:

I was thinking more introducing the fact that she can travel into photos and conspiring with Chloe on how to use that to get the outcomes they wanted. Instead she gave up at the first hurdle without even trying to jump over it. It's almost enough to say "why bother introducing all this if it goes nowhere?", I get that it has potential character development implications for Max to see the 'what if?' possibilities without the writers wanting to restructure the whole story around alternate timelines but it's such a clumsy, heavy-handed way to do it that leaves Max looking dumb. Jumping into photos is 10x as powerful as rewinding but let's drop it down the memory hole because it's harder to use.

Dolash posted:

I was thinking more introducing the fact that she can travel into photos and conspiring with Chloe on how to use that to get the outcomes they wanted. Instead she gave up at the first hurdle without even trying to jump over it. It's almost enough to say "why bother introducing all this if it goes nowhere?", I get that it has potential character development implications for Max to see the 'what if?' possibilities without the writers wanting to restructure the whole story around alternate timelines but it's such a clumsy, heavy-handed way to do it that leaves Max looking dumb. Jumping into photos is 10x as powerful as rewinding but let's drop it down the memory hole because it's harder to use.

seravid posted:

Not pictured: Max saying those lines out loud; the little jingle that always plays when the icons shows up.

Sakurazuka posted:

She saw first hand what loving with the timeline that much did and didn't want to risk making things even worse.

Pimpmust posted:

The problem with mysterious time powers that come out of the blue is that you have no loving idea how they actually work or when they'll go away / stop working / do something unintended. I think the game is doing a decent job of getting that across and even Max is catching on (a little).
It's all fun and card-jumping time adventures until some day you find yourself stuck on the wrong side of a photo from your parents vacation album from the 70ies

Xanderkish posted:

Card-jumping Max tries her powers on a photo taken exactly nine months before her birthday, and has to spend the next 600 rewinds as her mom's ovum trying to make sure the right sperm gets embedded so she doesn't end up an eighteen-year old dude named Marx Holden.

Sakurazuka posted:

She saw first hand what loving with the timeline that much did and didn't want to risk making things even worse.

Plom Bar posted:

Man, it really bugs you that Max doesn't approach situations the way you would, doesn't it?

And it's way premature to say that all of that amounts to nothing. You still have about 40% of the game left.

epitasis posted:

i find your criticisms tedious

Codependent Poster posted:

I agree.

All the criticisms are from treating it like a video game where you already know the rules and that it's a work of fiction, rather than immersing yourself in the game and seeing it from Max's POV. She repeatedly says she doesn't want to rely on her powers because she doesn't know if they'll go away, and it taxes her, and it can cause even worse things to happen. Also, the fact that she's a teenage girl and is dealing with some heavy poo poo; it's not going to give her the time to think straight or rationalize after going through so many traumatic experiences.

blue squares posted:

That I get. My complaints are about the writing (I'm a writer) and then just how dumb the two main characters were in the final episode, chasing after Nathan when they had everything they needed to sink him. Call the drat FBI. But it's a game so I just rolled with it.

I was really peeved that the writers were so lazy they just had Nathan text "HEY IM DESTROYING EVIDENCE COME GET ME," but that turned out to be a trap so it wasn't as bad as I initially thought.

Codependent Poster posted:

I agree.

All the criticisms are from treating it like a video game where you already know the rules and that it's a work of fiction, rather than immersing yourself in the game and seeing it from Max's POV. She repeatedly says she doesn't want to rely on her powers because she doesn't know if they'll go away, and it taxes her, and it can cause even worse things to happen. Also, the fact that she's a teenage girl and is dealing with some heavy poo poo; it's not going to give her the time to think straight or rationalize after going through so many traumatic experiences.

Dolash posted:

But ha ha let's forget all that time travel mechanics nit-pickery because ah holy poo poo near the end of episode 4. They didn't rely on time travel for the kicker this time, it's just straight up psycho family abuse-fetish-murderers. I didn't expect things to turn so sharply in this direction.

Dolash posted:

The false choice between the two timelines feels contrived, not by the limitations of Max's perspective and character but just by the writing. She does mention not relying too heavily on her powers from time to time and she certainly doesn't understand them well enough that worrying about them failing on her is a valid concern, but she seems to treat the problem like she can't fix it rather than she won't or is scared to try.

Plom Bar posted:

Did you by chance miss the sequence in episode 2 when you lose your powers and are unable to manipulate the conversation with Kate? You know, where it's shown that Max's ability is not 100% reliable, thus completely validating her concerns?

Dolash posted:

Yet it didn't stop her from trying to save William in the first place, or letting him die again (which was really choosing to meddle a second time, it's not an undo button). The thing that discouraged her was seeing that saving William had an unexpected knock-on consequence of killing Chloe, but we weren't given some kind of The Time Machine idea that time required one of them to die, it was just a freak happenstance. Rather than try to fix that too, though, it makes Max turn back (which means using her powers again anyway), which is frustrating because she was willing to try so much and there are viable solutions in reach but why she won't keep trying is sort of intangible. Do other solutions just not occur to her, this time? Is she misunderstanding the situation and how her powers work? Is she more scared of her power failing the third time than the previous two? It's frustrating.

One of the weird upsides of the sequence being so isolated from the rest of the story is that it's possible to just sort of ignore it as some big, weird dream Max had.

SirSamVimes posted:

Their Monkey Island game starts out a bit slow, but it gets really good if you get into the second half.

Plom Bar posted:

Setting aside for now that we're dealing with an incomplete story so neither of us can say definitively what Max will or won't try, this still boils down to Max approaching situations differently from how you would. Yes, I get it, if you suddenly discovered you could jump through time by looking at photos of yourself, you'd Ashton Kutcher it over and over again until everything was just right. Max isn't you. She's much more cautious. She discovered the ability by accident, tried to make the best of it, and realized she screwed up. But because she's way more cautious than you, her first instinct wasn't to immediately try to set everything back the way it was, because she didn't know if she could or if it wouldn't have some other averse effect. Only after losing Chloe forever did she finally decide that it was worth going back to set things right.

Plus, what kind of message would it send if the writers told us, flat out, that killing William is preferable to paralyzing Chloe? They had to show that the alternate reality was Worse by having it end not just in Chloe's death, but in the Price family's thorough ruination.

Dolash posted:

I don't follow the bit you said about the message though. Maybe a conversation between Max and William where Max reveals her power and William asks her to change the timeline so he dies but Chloe lives might've worked. I think that might've committed harder to the idea they were going for, or let us explore Max's fears about making things worse, your replies have plenty of reasonable points but they feel very speculative since the game didn't give us much of a chance to talk it out or define how Max feels about the incident.

Dolash posted:

seravid posted:

Max's ability to travel through photographs requires a landing spot (she has to be in the photo) and limits her actions to the picture's immediate surroundings only. Given these constraints, what "root issues" could she possibly fix?

Dolash posted:

The root issue for most of Chloe's problems seemed to be her dad dying, and she was able to fix that, but then the car accident became the issue of the new timeline. We don't know what photos are necessarily available from around the same time (it's unclear if New Timeline Max didn't visit Chloe after she moved either, or if she just stopped visiting after the accident)