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CharlestonJew posted:correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Dark Descent have that exact style of design? I remember multiple safe hubs to let you catch your breath that broke off into multiple areas you could tackle in any order, where all the real hosed up poo poo happened the big difference is that dark descent's design is still, essentially, a linear path with some forks to remove a single obstacle along that path, with the safe zone hub being temporal to the section of the game you're on. there's an everpresent forwards momentum and single objective that keeps things tight and tense, even if you have the opportunity to tackle one of three things in a varying order the concern with standard open world design is that you must allow the player to travel relatively freely, since the big draw of it being open world is the ability to explore, discover, and consume pieces of content. this is anathema to weaponless horror design, since you have both far more opportunities to simply back out of situations you don't want to attend to at that moment, as well as running the risk of drying up the horror by having genre-designated bite sized content slices that quickly go from "terrifying" to "dull" through repetition
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Dec 1, 2022 22:37
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Evil Kit posted:have they confirmed times for when it's released, or if it's rolling vs a set time based on a certain timezone? Cause mine says "Locked till 12/2/22" it's timezone-based, steam's unlock puts it at literally midnight in my time zone and my particular zone ain't ever used to benchmark releases like, say, EST is
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Dec 2, 2022 01:07
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1stGear posted:It's weird to me that Frictional keeps going back to Amnesia, especially when SOMA was such a success. Were there people clamoring to expand on the deep lore of a naked guy who you defeat by pushing over some pillars? SOMA was a walking sim that was too embarrassed of the title to fully own it, so it's this moody, introspective exploration of consciousness that gets rudely interrupted by slide puzzles and monsters that hit every postprocessor effect in the book when they catch you. it's pulling out all these halloween haunted house tricks to scare you as if the concept of being one of the last humans alive with no hope of recovery isn't already terrifying i think frictional realized that the far more direct threat of actual monsters and physical terror meshed better with the kind of games they wanted to make, so returning to the amnesia well is natural enough
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Dec 2, 2022 03:58
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Gaius Marius posted:No game, not Pathologic, not System Shock, not even it's preceding games has managed to generate the sheer horror and dread that Silent Hill 4: The Room has. Whenever I finish a realm and see the cheevo pop up that says "complete your first trip to X realm" I feel a scream let loose in the back of my skull at the implied "second". i saw a pretty clever priming trick in this indie RE7 knockoff ABG covered where you get a key after like, 15 minutes into the game and it gives you a "press shift to run" prompt without any actual danger until a while later
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Dec 2, 2022 07:01
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sad to hear about callisto. might end up holding off for a sale, especially since i'm stuck playing the denuvo-ridden PC port if i wanted to try it if it truly is a turkey it'll probably be 15% off next year, and that might be a more acceptable price for a middling experience poe meater posted:Watching Callisto a bit and it made really made me appreciate Resident Evil. Callisto got some jarring animation cuts especially with like death animations. capcom had the license to build a new engine from the ground up for RE7, since they knew they'd be using it for a whole series of remakes and mainline titles, so it's tailor made for horror games with how it tweens animations and deforms body parts unreal engine 4 is a workhorse, but it's also very much a generalist engine that's hard to contort into a really focused shape if you're trying to do something where the animations and atmosphere matter a ton like a horror game
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Dec 2, 2022 17:36
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dead space 3 is this weird time capsule of MTX when they were still figuring out what worked and what didn't, so it's a mixture of standard lootbox stuff, "pay for convenience" mobile game poo poo, and some truly bizarre inclusions like a voice pack for your gathering drone (??????)
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Dec 2, 2022 17:38
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DS1 and DS2's conceptualization of horror is mostly that loud = scary, which is, in fairness, not an uncommon assumption in horror media it's odd because they do know how to create moments of genuine tension - the return to the ishimura in DS2 is loving terrifying, as is the first introduction of those bird guys in the temple - but more often than not they prefer to do the most low rent poo poo possible like the sprinklers in the asylum randomly turning on at 200 decibels
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Dec 2, 2022 17:55
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Disposable Scud posted:They probably restarted the game after the PUBG universe backlash. my suspicion is that the PUBG thing was always some stupid marketing gimmick that was meant to raise the game's public profile, since "a horror game set in the funny battle royale universe?? buh????" is the perfect kind of tonal clash that gets people to click on a twitter link to find out more
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Dec 2, 2022 22:03
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i'm thinking TCP will eventually land in the same basket as control did, where you've got a great looking game with solid combat that's worth maybe $20-30 and not $70+ and will eventually settle there once peak sales are over
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Dec 3, 2022 03:08
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there's this (probably unsustainable) asymmetrical arms race where the cost of extreme high fidelity graphics is going up and up and commensurately dragging box costs with it, but the actual core gameplay you're getting is not that fundamentally different from someone modding dead space 1 to have a dodge key, and that's going to be a hard sell to the segment of the market whose interests lie more with how the game controls than with how pretty the cutscenes are
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Dec 4, 2022 03:24
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Improbable Lobster posted:New games are $89 new in i still do a spit take every time i scroll through the RPG section on steam and see octopath up for like $95 goddamn dollars post-tax
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Dec 4, 2022 03:26
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Blockhouse posted:I feel like people have been saying this for years and it never really holds true there is, presumably, an upper dollar limit that people are willing to pay for 10 hours worth of entertainment, at which point profitability starts pushing certain genres out of the equation games like witcher 3 get away with spreading the actual content butter thin through open world parceling and (usually) good vignette writing, but something like TCP doesn't have that luxury, and that makes the value proposition dicey
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Dec 4, 2022 07:57
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Ashmole posted:Is "Scorn" any good? if it's still on gamepass and you have gamepass then give it a playthrough. if it isn't, then just watch someone's LP of it it's an incredibly gorgeous art gallery tour with like an hour and a half of system shock 2 level gunplay and something like 4-5 total hours of runtime BisbyWorl posted:They're talking about Alpha Beta Gamer, a youtuber who does commentary-less playthroughs of indie games. yup, sorry for the ambiguity, was phoneposting; the game itself is LAZARET it's one of those titles where you can clearly see the dev team straining against the confines of their budget, but it''s really trying and i sincerely admire that in indie titles far more than someone trying to make something clean and presentable Vermain fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Dec 4, 2022 |
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Dec 4, 2022 17:22
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Sakurazuka posted:Well I finished Callisto Protocol, it was fine if uninspired until it introduced the one boss type enemy it had which I can't believe made it in to a finished game they were so poorly designed. i'm still supremely miffed storyline-wise that the source of the infection was exactly what i thought it was going to be, which is some gleep-glop they dredged up from the mines and which the nefarious cult-corporation decided to go full albert wesker with i know every story's been done already, and horror's necessarily a kind of derivative genre as it is, but it seriously reads like a first draft idea that didn't get workshopped enough
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Dec 4, 2022 17:39
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Oxxidation posted:the basic steam port takes a lot of work, it has AA and 60 fps but terrible default brightness settings and no widescreen it's also got some weird issues with mouseaim, but there's a fan patch (dead space mouse fix) that largely fixes it
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Dec 4, 2022 19:59
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al-azad posted:Mrkravin i like manlybadasshero a lot, since he's a very levelheaded personality and covers much the same horror ground as ABG does. i wouldn't be surprised if people saw him in their feed and didn't click solely because that sounds like the kind of name best avoided on youtube, but he's genuinely great if you want horror playthroughs without markiplier screams as previously mentioned, alpha beta gamer is also great if you just want the playthrough with zero commentary; survival horror network is another good resource for no commentary horror LPs, especially for larger, longer properties Jack Trades posted:Has anyone made a 12 hour long essay on the story of Signalis yet? any game that's been out for longer than half a day will have a lore video up, especially for cerebral stories like signalis Vermain fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Dec 4, 2022 |
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Dec 4, 2022 21:54
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1stGear posted:First 18 minutes of the Dead Space remake. Very close to a 1-to-1 copy for the original, though Hammond's new voice actor sucks. the original guy wasn't daniel day-lewis or anything but man, you could get someone who shows a little emotion when the ship they're in charge of loving violently crashes one thing i'm actually not a fan of sound design wise is the new necromorph sounds. i get what they were going for, but the originals sounding more like a foley artist going "graaaagh!!" with a bit of modulation actually made them a lot more frightening because of how relatively human they sounded, whereas these new ones have a level of reverb that is, for lack of a better term, trying way too hard to be scary
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Dec 6, 2022 00:22
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i'm fine with isaac talking to himself about the central mechanic of combat considering how dead space 1 handled it, but i'm going to swear at my monitor if he gets to the medbay and goes, "wow, it looks like there's some stasis pads i can use my stasis module on to move these scanners out of the way"
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Dec 6, 2022 02:35
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Bumhead posted:Dead Space is a weird blind spot for me considering my other tastes. I played and loved 2, but bounced off 1 back in the day after about an hour for reasons I don't remember, and have never gone back to it. DS1's biggest problem is that it severely drags its heels in its last third, where it runs out of new enemies to throw at you and the plot lingers interminably in the "please go fix the space gizmo, isaac" mode of storytelling that DS1 largely favors. DS2 obviously leans way more into action than horror, and i cringe whenever i think about all the stupid jumpscares they shoehorned in, but its pacing is top notch and encounter variety and resource scarcity are balanced out in a way that meant i was never bored of the game (with the sole exception of a couple segments in the mine)
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Dec 6, 2022 17:53
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playing it now, i think signalis really cements how the effectiveness of certain mechanics depends significantly on the game's total runtime. the 6 item carry limit would drive me up the wall if this game were any longer, but i think it's effective enough at curating a sense of loadout tradeoffs when paired with respawning enemies as a mechanic for a game this short i think it's one of the best uses of the haunted PS1 aesthetic along with no one lives under the lighthouse, although the blending of the thick lineart anime-style portraits with the shaderless low-poly models is inconsistently good. i think going for a straight up chunkier style with limited lines ala the ol' SNES out of this world aesthetic would've worked better, but the dissonance might be part of the point
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Dec 8, 2022 00:35
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i definitely think there's potential for a TCP sequel, since soulslike survival horror combat is a relatively unexplored niche really, i think there'd be far less of a discourse surrounding the game if there wasn't the $70 price tag weighing it down. i'd absolutely buy and play it for $40 and probably have a good time, but $70 is a tall ask for 10 hours of kinda janky combat and a plot that feels like it was written via tvtropes Vermain fucked around with this message at 04:05 on Dec 8, 2022 |
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Dec 8, 2022 04:03
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i do think you gotta play ball with the conceit of "our prison planet full of zombies also has a surfeit of bottomless pits and space meat grinders to throw them in"; it's not really any more absurd than "this police station i'm hiding from the zombie apocalypse in is filled to the brim with run time lengthening art puzzles" on its face
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Dec 8, 2022 17:12
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al-azad posted:Resident Evil at least explains why the police station is a clockwork maze. IIRC, that's only in RE2R, with it being presented without comment in the original
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Dec 8, 2022 17:49
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Hector Delgado posted:
those are some goddamn pecs
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Dec 9, 2022 05:03
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it's a single dude's passion project and it absolutely looks and feels like it, but it's the kind of weird jank i treasure out of indie titles so it gets a pass most importantly, it's not trying to be anything other than its absurd premise. if you wanna play a game where you're constantly pursued by an evil train spider on a railway and you gotta level up enough to defeat it, then that's exactly what you're getting
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Dec 9, 2022 19:09
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i think the unique vibe of the necromorphs came down to them looking manipulated. your stock-standard william birkin deal in RE is a human with a whole bunch of cancerous growths sprouting out of him, which usually results in a whole lot of extra claws and teeth, but necromorphs look like humans that have been bent and contorted into a form that best suits their new purpose - they all look very deliberately twisted, which is a large part of the horror. i don't think one is necessarily better than the other, but TCP having generic looking monsters to pair with their paint-by-numbers story leaves you with the same impression as, like, watching a netflix original film from a director and company with a barren IMDB who're clearly just trying to show that they know how to make a movie
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Dec 10, 2022 04:37
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Basic Chunnel posted:Oh drat everyone having spike legs is a wonderful bit of design sleight of hand, because it looks aesthetically distinct, gives the corrupted units more of a monster vibe, and probably saved their animator the incredible headache of trying to make the twinstick movement not look awkward as hell with elster's feet tapdancing around
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Dec 10, 2022 07:27
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Bogart posted:There's a growing divide, I think, between filmmakers who want to make a hosed up scary movie, and those who want to make a horror movie, if that makes sense. It Follows, Midsommar, Get Out are all hosed up scary movies. Paranormal Activity, The Boy, Rings, and Annabelle are horror movies. my entirely arbitrary distinction is how much of the intention is to provoke disgust and disquiet - a kind of sympathy for the hopeless situation someone's trapped in - and how much is to draw the audience in sufficiently that they feel the same dread and terror that the characters experience
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Dec 11, 2022 05:38
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it's actually kind of surprising that companies haven't branched out more into doing indie collabs, where they loan out the IP and some resources and get solid lower rent titles out of the deal. if i were konami, i'd absolutely trust handing out the license to a team that's already proven that they know how to make classic style survival horror and can tell an interesting, cerebral story to boot
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Dec 19, 2022 18:08
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Hel posted:Isn't this what the original idea for Square Enix's Collective was, let indies try to crowd fund stuff of their less used IPs? though I think only Fear Effect Sedna was actually an existing IP, but they also let the people behind GNOG/GoodBye Volcano High do an expansion for Lara Croft GO. riot did it with the league IP, but it was one of those "time to launch this program immediately before covid" situations, so the most we've gotten is an actually pretty good JRPG (ruined king) and another platformer title that might see the light of day eventually i do think it requires a good amount of quality control to make sure you're not cranking out turkeys, but handing off the property to diverse interests can produce surprising results. like, yeah, disney star wars is mostly loving drivel, but then they handed it off to tony gilroy and got probably the biggest shot in the arm to the franchise's longevity in years out of it
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Dec 20, 2022 20:10
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Morpheus posted:That letter must have been added after playtesting or something. It makes it such a complete non-puzzle entirely. it's the kind of thing you'd only ever find in an indie game with a shoestring budget where they can hire on a couple of people to rigorously playtest it after everything's been largely completed, and it would require a bunch of awkward reshuffling of assets and pacing to repair it, so slapping a prima guide page on the desk next to it is your next best bet
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Dec 24, 2022 01:32
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it is, at the least, extremely on brand for the found footage horror game franchise to become progressively worse and worse with each subsequent sequel
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Dec 24, 2022 03:17
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signalis perfectly replicates the feeling and flow of PS1 survival horror, for both better and worse i think i liked it a lot less because of the respawn mechanic, since the efficient use of resources that i find compelling about survival horror becomes far less important compared to doing usain bolt sprints past everything and abusing patrol route resets
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Dec 24, 2022 10:45
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the first boss's cardinal sin is that the most obvious strategy - baiting out the shots and then hiding behind the pillar to avoid them - feels like you're breaking the AI, and nothing saps the tension out of a horror game faster than the artificiality of the whole contrivance being laid bare
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Dec 25, 2022 17:42
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i do think there's a theoretical angle for some commentary on the puritanical sexual mores of cold war-era america, but it is not one that i would expect the followup to outlast 2, the game about a baby-murdering cult and a catholic priest molestation flashback plot, to handle with the needed care
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Dec 26, 2022 06:18
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veni veni veni posted:I haven't played Dusk, but I played another game he did called Iron Lung and it was a pretty fun way to kill an hour (it's really short). Pretty original idea for a game. iron lung has such an incredible gutpuncher of a setting conceit that it wisely does not extrapolate much on, and it's a creativity i wish more sci fi horror games would embrace instead of 90% of them being "what if the people on Space Station X turned into legally distinct zombies"
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Jan 3, 2023 19:52
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chilla's art creates some truly wonderful atmospheres; it's hard to nail something being both quaint and creepy, but they somehow manage be sure to check out the rest of their library if you like the convenience store, since they're all mostly in the same realm of 1-2 hour playthroughs of small town japanese horror
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Jan 7, 2023 22:06
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dead space remake launch trailer it's leaning way more into the action-adventure side of things than i'd prefer, but i guess that's the market now, so whatever. i'm liking the visuals of the marine necromorphs at least, and the fact that isaac now looks like a proper engineering doofus instead of a mid 2000s grizzled crew cut boxart man is a nice change
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Jan 12, 2023 00:49
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so, uh, don't hold your breath for a callisto protocol 2:quote:According to MK-Odyssey (via VGC) The Callisto Protocol cost 200 million won ($162 million) to develop, a truly triple-A budget that the game has not been able to recoup. The game was so costly to make in fact it was referred to as "quadruple-A" during development. It is a budget even more notable considering the game was a new name in a genre that is relatively niche. $160 million for such a totally unremarkable title is baffling, and i don't think you're being invited back to the investment table if you miss your sales target by 3 million. they can probably make back the budget with future sales but still, yeesh
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Jan 17, 2023 04:28
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it's really hard to wrap your head around a number like $160 million for a game that has, like, 4 different enemy types, one miniboss, and one proper boss, and whose gameplay consists of running through corridors and pushing everything into spike racks or OOB instakill zones there's something ridiculous even from a business standpoint about pumping what amounts to major hollywood film budgets into a game that a tiny percentage of the world actually has the capability of even loving playing without their PCs exploding
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Jan 17, 2023 04:41
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