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I 100%'ed Aeterna Noctis the other week. It has a fair bit of jank, but something just clicked while I was playing and I had to do everything. The platforming is fun when the art direction isn't getting in the way. There are a lot of instances of obstacles not being very visible or just too much going on in the background or foreground. I also wasn't a fan of how many enemies explode after you kill them. It makes for a lot of standing around and waiting towards the beginning of the game. After you get some more abilities, it's less of a problem. I have mixed feelings about the skill tree. It has three main upgrade paths, and you don't get enough skill points to max them all out. You can respec at any time, so the game encourages you to experiment with your build based on the situation. I like the idea, but some of the endgame and optional bosses basically required you to invest in certain skills instead of using your favorites. Overall it borrowed from Castlevania and Hollow Knight in good ways, the bosses were fun, and there were some good movement gimmicks. Pretty fun time
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Dec 20, 2022 21:42
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I got the first Axiom Verge on sale and and I've been playing through it. I get the feeling I'm something like 75% through since I'm in the phase where actual plot developments start and where to go next for the next gets unclear, so you really have to just scour everywhere. It's okay, but I think overall nothing special. I got the sense from reviews when it came out that it was significant mainly for being a new Metroidvania at a time when there hadn't been one for a while and the genre hadn't taken off in the indie scene yet rather than being particularly unique or significant. It definitely wants to be more on the Metroid side of things than the Vania, but it seems to more broadly want to homage the whole NES and SNES era, but with muddier, grosser graphics. At least after the first area it turns away from the flesh aesthetic. That actually made me kinda sick. The glitching stuff is kind of interesting, and there's one actually novel traversal mechanic, but I think probably the most innovative mechanic is the way that the low health beeping fades out after a little while so that it's not as annoying. The level layout isn't very good, and makes me appreciate how other games have more thought to their structure with main pathways to branch off of rather than just everything kinda laid out at random. When backtracking, there's not really any upgrades to get around faster or easier. The game also gives you a wide array of weapons, which suffers from there seldom being any reason to ever use more than one or two weapons, and also the weapon switching system is really bad on a controller. Aesthetically, there's some interesting designs, but it's very much just trying to be wild and crazy videogame stuff rather than looking like anything specific (except when it's trying to be gross). The plot is barely there, but what is there sounds dumb. Not super dumb, which might've been more fun, just a standard amount of dumb.
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Dec 21, 2022 01:46
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I started playing Salt and Sacrifice, and I have a question. When you teleport back to the hub, am I missing something, or can you not warp back to the obelisk you teleported from? Do I actually have to replay big chunks of the level every time I leave to do character or equipment maintenance?
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Dec 21, 2022 22:11
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King of Solomon posted:I started playing Salt and Sacrifice, and I have a question. When you teleport back to the hub, am I missing something, or can you not warp back to the obelisk you teleported from? Do I actually have to replay big chunks of the level every time I leave to do character or equipment maintenance? That is correct. It's....not a particularly well-designed game. The idea is to unlock some shortcuts to make those run backs a little faster, but...yeah.
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Dec 22, 2022 00:40
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Morpheus posted:That is correct. It's....not a particularly well-designed game. The idea is to unlock some shortcuts to make those run backs a little faster, but...yeah. Yeah, that much is becoming pretty apparent pretty quickly. It's kinda surprising, the first game was actually a solid Metroidvania, and this one just seems like a pretty major step backwards.
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Dec 22, 2022 03:03
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King of Solomon posted:Yeah, that much is becoming pretty apparent pretty quickly. It's kinda surprising, the first game was actually a solid Metroidvania, and this one just seems like a pretty major step backwards. Yup. I like the concept of a.monster-hunter-esque souls game, but everything from encounter design to map structure to the pacing of the game is poorly done and it just makes it drag. Funnily enough I enjoyed fighting the non-mage bosses. They didn't have a host of absolute bullshit to put up with.
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Dec 22, 2022 05:02
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I’m playing Souldiers and I’m waiting for the shoe to drop on what makes this game have Mixed reviews, because so far it loving rules
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Dec 23, 2022 02:11
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The 7th Guest posted:I’m playing Souldiers and I’m waiting for the shoe to drop on what makes this game have Mixed reviews, because so far it loving rules I think it had some issues around launch that have since been largely patched out.
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Dec 23, 2022 02:28
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Half-wit posted:Astalon: Tears of the Earth sure does like making you start at the start of the castle, alright. Why even have save points? I think it's going for a sort of rogue like experience. So you die, you go back to the start, to you explore more, you die, repeat. Eventually, you'll open up the elevators which let you jump ahead. It wasn't the world's greatest mechanic, but i didn't think it was a hindrance.
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Dec 23, 2022 17:28
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GOG is giving away Greak: https://www.gog.com/en/game/greak_memories_of_azur I would say it's Metroidvania-adjacent rather than a Metroidvania proper but I figure it would appeal to people here. It's got a little bit of Lost Vikings character-switching puzzles to go with the action
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Dec 23, 2022 19:04
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I played Greak a while back and thought I had stumbled upon a hidden gem… but the beginning of the game is basically all there is to the rest, right down to the same 2-3 enemies. The character switching is good in theory but doesn’t add up to much.
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Dec 24, 2022 02:47
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So on my holiday flights I started a replay of The Messenger to kill some time because I was too sleep deprived to start a new RPG, and now I've already put six or seven hours into it again. Fantastic and underappreciated game with some really fun map design, entertaining writing, great gameplay and a top tier soundtrack. I always feel like it's a game that tends to remain under the radar but it's on the holiday steam sale and absolutely worth a look.
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Dec 25, 2022 17:28
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The Messenger did well on the Switch since it got promoted in a couple of Nintendo Directs. At least, it did well enough that Sabotage had a successful Kickstarter for Sea of Stars. I think the consensus is that the stage-based 8-bit part is great but the 16-bit backtracking parts is where it falls. Also people don't look kindly on the Jordan Peterson reference. Personally I enjoyed the game enough to 100% it. It may not be the best Metroidvania I've played, but it's unique and worth a look. Also from the interviews of the Sabotage folks they sound really genuine and passionate of their work. I don't really get the Peterson thing myself, but I think it's a stretch to cancel the Sabotage guys because of it.
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Dec 25, 2022 18:11
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I didn’t know anything about the Peterson thing but otherwise yeah the 8 but part is way better (and the music owns.) I backed Sea of Stars, which is aping Chrono Trigger, not an MV, and it got a release date for 2023 recently.
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Dec 25, 2022 18:45
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Yeah, if there was some sort of controversy about it I totally missed that. I rather liked the expanded map in the second part of the game due to the gimmicks but since the areas are largely linear it is a bit less prone to the kind of expanded traversal options a lot of the games in the genre get.
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Dec 25, 2022 20:25
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I think the Peterson thing is that one of The Messenger's cabinet rants presents a philosophical argument that's attributed to him, which itself is inoffensive, but since Peterson has made hateful statements in other contexts people have canceled him, and thus, have transitively canceled anything related to him. I mean, I get it, some people are beyond redemption. Like I will never engage with J. K. Rowling's works while she continues to regularly make hateful statements on Twitter. But I also acknowledge that Harry Potter itself serves as a vehicle for self-discovery for many (marginalized) people and I don't judge their continued engagement with it.
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Dec 25, 2022 20:35
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It's literally presented as a quote from "Jordan the Wise" which is a weird look if you know anything about Jordan Peterson, actually.
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Dec 26, 2022 00:12
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Are you all media illiterate? The speaker presenting Peterson quotes in Messenger is intended to come off as a pompous idiot who obviously doesn't know what they're talking about. It's hilarious in context
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Dec 26, 2022 00:15
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Yeah as I recall it's just one of many examples of that character wasting your time with long stupid rants that are intentionally just obnoxious walls of text to skip through
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Dec 26, 2022 00:42
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Vadun posted:Are you all media illiterate? The speaker presenting Peterson quotes in Messenger is intended to come off as a pompous idiot who obviously doesn't know what they're talking about. I would not describe it that way, no. It's lead up reads as more sincere than the other stuff that guy says and he's also their 4th wall breaking authorial voice guy. Your read is I suppose possible but definitely not the only one. In any case the Peterson stuff referenced on the game is the inoffensive clean your room stuff and not any of his weird alt right shtick. It wouldn't be objectionable if it weren't for the other stuff he I'd known for saying
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Dec 26, 2022 01:09
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The second half of The Messenger desperately needed a real fast travel system. What they gave us instead is the worst thing they did.
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Dec 26, 2022 04:31
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I rec Messeger and didnt notice the jorp reference. The soundtrack by rainbowdragoneyes is incredible tho. If they had tightened up the back half for collecting it could have been like a 10/10.
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Dec 26, 2022 05:36
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I think from what I've heard from analyses of Jordan Peterson's actual prose is that he usually does his best to be mostly vapid and not really say anything, and it's just from context with other stuff and what he says in public that it really goes bad.
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Dec 26, 2022 05:53
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So I finished my Messenger replay and didn't actually see anything attributed to Peterson. Either it got patched out, or it's hidden behind some set of dialogue triggers I didn't complete, and I went ahead and exhausted all the chats and did 100% afaik. Interesting to note it was in there at some point though. Game's good. Cerepol posted:The soundtrack by rainbowdragoneyes is incredible tho. Someone on YT did a bunch of uploads where they layered the 8 and 16 bit versions of the tracks together and they're loving outstanding. Search for "Messenger ost 24-bit" or the like.
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Dec 26, 2022 07:27
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I’m nearing the end of Bloodstained and I’m running low on interest. The last couple areas have been awful, and I don’t particularly like the combat; maybe I’m just not good enough at this particular style of combat but a single backslide dodge and some weird movement abilities mean I’m mostly just damage racing with a great sword vs bosses. Which isn’t particularly engaging. It doesn’t feel like, for all there are a billion spells and weapon types, that any of them play particularly differently. It doesn’t help my interest that the exploration and upgrades are pretty bland to my sensibilities. I guess it makes sense that I kind of bounced off SOTN when I tried to replay it a few years ago because I think it had the same problems for me. Meanwhile I’ve been enjoying sequence breaking in Metroid Dread and comparing with a replay of the same in Super Metroid, both of which I adore. I wish there were some actual viable hell runs in Dread but there’s enough to much around with that it feels really satisfying to explore. Velius fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Dec 26, 2022 |
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Dec 26, 2022 15:39
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Yeah, that sounds like an Igavania. I used to very staunchly prefer the Metroid half to the vania half of the genre label because of those exact reasons - Metroid doesn't get nearly as bogged down with combat, doesn't rely on questionably designed RPG cruft, and is about exploration first and foremost. I've since reoriented my understanding of Igavanias around their similarities to Dark Souls; action RPG first, exploration a firm second. And that helped me really get sucked into SotN. But then every subsequent one has its own weird quirks and foibles and I don't think any of them have really managed to actually nail the combat or at least innovate past the same basic action RPG format.
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Dec 26, 2022 16:00
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For PlayStation owners, Axiom Verge 2 is one of the January PS+ free games. Well worth playing.
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Jan 2, 2023 18:14
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Tortolia posted:For PlayStation owners, Axiom Verge 2 is one of the January PS+ free games. Well worth playing. Oh hell yeah, Axiom Verge 2 rules. I hope people jump on that.
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Jan 2, 2023 18:45
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Alternatively, Jedi Fallen Order, which has some kind of Metroid Prime exploration vibes, and much less body horror. I guess an issue with 3D games trying to have a Metroidvania feel is that while in 2D you can just feel out all of the spaces in the area by using a version of the "hand on the wall" trick, a fully 3D area has too much space to have that kind of intimacy with all boundaries. Axiom Verge 1 really makes you wander through the entire world every time you find an upgrade to figure out where the next progression is and the way that one of the few mobility upgrades is going through walls means that while that's a cool unique ability, it's a lot less intuitive to find the newly opened area. I think I got into striking range of the end, but when I hit a boss fight that's basically Mother Brain but a different angle and more bullet hell, I think I'm gonna move on from that.
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Jan 2, 2023 18:48
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SlothfulCobra posted:Axiom Verge 1 really makes you wander through the entire world every time you find an upgrade to figure out where the next progression is and the way that one of the few mobility upgrades is going through walls means that while that's a cool unique ability, it's a lot less intuitive to find the newly opened area. I think I got into striking range of the end, but when I hit a boss fight that's basically Mother Brain but a different angle and more bullet hell, I think I'm gonna move on from that. That’s why I liked AV2 more than the first game, though I can absolutely understand why it might be the opposite for some folks. Trying to find where to go next - or hunting for secrets - felt a bit too much like a chore in the first game, which I otherwise rather enjoyed. By contrast, once I started getting some of the movement abilities in AV2 I found myself being able to look at the maps, go “I bet something’s hiding over there”, and often was rewarded for making those connections. Also, while it wasn’t like AV2 had overly difficult bosses, I did like that the option was there to just go “nah gently caress off” and ignore them.
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Jan 3, 2023 04:25
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I wouldn't say AV1 is quite as opaque as OG Metroid but it feels close, which was a big part of the charm for me. It wouldn't be quite the same love letter to Metroid if it kept you on rails the whole time. I'd agree though that AV2 has much more intuitive exploration.
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Jan 3, 2023 05:16
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i don't remember av1 being very obtuse/hard to figure out where to go until maybe near the end of the game. what i really appreciated about av2 was how non-linear it is, it's very open-ended and you can explore in all sorts of directions, unlike av1 which has a rather set path unless you're deliberately sequence breaking.John Murdoch posted:Yeah, that sounds like an Igavania. I used to very staunchly prefer the Metroid half to the vania half of the genre label because of those exact reasons - Metroid doesn't get nearly as bogged down with combat, doesn't rely on questionably designed RPG cruft, and is about exploration first and foremost. the real problem with igavanias is the action just doesn't feel that good, they could get away with the rest if the action made up for it, but it's always just varying degrees of clunky and bloodstained was quite bad for that. sotn is at least so wildly sprawling that it's engaging enough to explore.
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Jan 3, 2023 11:36
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I don't think I played more than an hour of AV1 before deciding it wasn't for me, but I played and completed AV2 last month. The first few hours of AV2 I really enjoyed, but somewhere around the halfway mark my enjoyment of the game began to decline. I like the game's exploration focus, and I think it's got a great map with fun secrets. The basic movement feels good. I think my problem with the game is that it never develops into anything. The skill upgrades are pointless. The movement upgrades don't change much of the feel (at this point, a month later, I'm struggling to remember any of them apart from the drone's). There are only a couple of weapons, and they are all uninteresting. The combat only gets worse -- you can skip the bosses, but why would you when you can trivially kill all of them by exploding repeatedly? To me, perhaps worst of all, the story goes absolutely no where. No, I didn't collect every last tablet, but I got the majority of them, and looking around online later it doesn't seem like I missed any major plot points.
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Jan 3, 2023 13:39
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AV1 also had the loving obnoxious thing of raining the secret areas when you start a new game and they're not even specific locations that could eventually be mapped, it's just random loving was in room X that if you happen to do the dash thing through you will find a glitched or area with yet another randomly generated gun that more than likely sucks compared to the crazy wave beam that clears entire rooms. The secret detector was also bullshit in that it mildly changes the hue of your health bar from like, green to slightly lighter green or something asinine like that. All that along with the linear world design and the lazy, "here's a big hallway to link all the areas together," had me beat it the one time and then never touch it again. Is AV2 the same sorta thing with the first bit?
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Jan 3, 2023 14:25
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Fuzz posted:AV1 also had the loving obnoxious thing of raining the secret areas when you start a new game and they're not even specific locations that could eventually be mapped, it's just random loving was in room X that if you happen to do the dash thing through you will find a glitched or area with yet another randomly generated gun that more than likely sucks compared to the crazy wave beam that clears entire rooms. The secret detector was also bullshit in that it mildly changes the hue of your health bar from like, green to slightly lighter green or something asinine like that. No, not at all. Outside of the drone being a major part of your character's kit and some similar visual flair, the two games are wildly different.
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Jan 3, 2023 14:27
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King of Solomon posted:No, not at all. Outside of the drone being a major part of your character's kit and some similar visual flair, the two games are wildly different. Nice, will check it out then. The first one had a banging soundtrack.
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Jan 3, 2023 15:04
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moosferatu posted:To me, perhaps worst of all, the story goes absolutely no where. No, I didn't collect every last tablet, but I got the majority of them, and looking around online later it doesn't seem like I missed any major plot points. Beyond that, AV2 is a deeper exploration of Tom's themes of life/death/afterlife beyond the obvious "guy gets cloned a bunch" from AV1. Considering Tom's own challenges, I think that does make AV2's plot exploration deeply personal for him. Again, AV isn't a series for everyone, but I do think artistic works from a sole creator are quite interesting on their own.
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Jan 3, 2023 16:46
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ExcessBLarg! posted:AV2 is basically the origin story for Ophelia and the Rusalki, while also expanding on the fate of Dr. Hammond (Trace's lab colleague) . If AV is intended to be a trilogy, then AV2 does do a bit of plot setup that would presumably be a jumping-off point for AV3. Although, if you didn't like AV1 or follow its lore much, then the above is probably too subtle to be of much interest. Ah, that would explain it. Like I said, I didn't play much of the first. I had read that that wasn't necessary to play the second, but it seems like it might be to get anything out of the story at all.
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Jan 3, 2023 17:09
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I would argue that AV2 is standalone storywise purely from a “we did science and oops things got out of hand” perspective - the old classic “Our experiment had unforeseen consequences and we’re trapped somewhere hostile now” thing. It has some connections into a broader lore for the AV universe but more in the nudge nudge wink wink sense.
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Jan 3, 2023 18:55
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AV2 can definitely be played in isolation, and for the most part its story doesn't intersect with AV1 much except towards the very end when there's some (implied) character reveals.
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Jan 3, 2023 19:40
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