|
I just finished Painscreek Killings and I really don't know what to make of it. For the most part I really liked the game, I was impressed with how it managed to string together a pretty interesting investigation in a way that I'm sure was carefully gated but never felt (at least to me) like I was following a fixed path of evidence discovery. I always felt like I had two or three different lines of investigation I could follow. The game also managed to be pretty consistently creepy even without a lot happening. But woof that ending. If you're going to pivot from being a walking simulator to having a forced chase sequence (which was an absolute terrible idea IMO) you better execute it loving flawlessly. I hated the choice to begin with because it felt so out of keeping with the rest of the game, but on top of that it was buggy and slow as hell, I had to try a few times because the door in the church basement wouldn't open the first couple of times, loading times were weirdly bad, and the character model for the bad guy was pretty drat bad. Plus I had no loving clue where I needed to go and ended up having to look it up, it turns out I had to lead him to a spot that I missed entirely because I didn't happen to use one particular stairwell in the hospital and didn't know it led to the roof where there was apparently a broken balcony, blah blah blah. Just a shocking pivot to really terrible game design decisions that killed most of my goodwill for the game up to that point. I'd say it's still worth playing but I got frustrated enough with the ending that I just looked it up on YouTube and I'm glad I did, because nothing about it felt fun to play. I get what they were going for and why they'd choose to end the game that way, but I think it was a really poorly calculated choice with terrible execution. I'm fairly sure they could have not gone that direction and still given the game a satisfying ending. It does make me wish someone would make a good game like this, a horror/suspense game where you're reconstructing a mystery and left largely to your own devices and expected to take your own notes. That sort of game definitely exists, Return of the Obra Dinn did it really loving well, but I liked the atmosphere of Painscreek a whole lot and wish it had been just a little better. I also played A Hand With Many Fingers, which was great for however much I paid for it, but feels more like a proof of concept than a full game, and ends just about when it finally gains some momentum.
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2022 18:10
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 11:25 |
|
|
Tired Moritz posted:I think we should go back to games just being about messed up cults rituals loving things up. I agree wholeheartedly, though I guess I'm in the extreme minority as someone who thought the weird gnostic cult trying to bring about hell on earth was the most interesting part of Silent Hill games, even if those characters weren't always written very well. Honestly I'm kind of over horror games that try very hard to have a point or a deep metaphor or say something profound about the human condition because so few actually manage it without being totally hamfisted. The horror I've enjoyed the most lately is stuff like yeah, Convenience Store or the other Chilla's Art games that are more weird and atmospheric, or Puppet Combo games where they lean hard into horror tropes but execute them with some style and humor. Sometimes horror just needs to be fun and scary. I would have enjoyed Visage about 1000% more if it was just a weird haunted house game and wasn't trying to tell me a very tired and overused story at the same time (though the controls didn't help either).
|
|
#
¿
Feb 23, 2022 16:58
|
|
|
I hope The Quarry manages to capture the same feel as Until Dawn, I feel like none of the Dark Pictures games so far have managed it, at least for me. They've all had some varying combination of pretty dumb plots, unclear objectives, and characters that are deeply unlikeable but not in a fun way, like a couple of UD's characters. The third Dark Pictures game was definitely an improvement over the first two, but it still felt a bit like they were trying to cargo-cult their way into what made UD so unique and memorable.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 18, 2022 16:09
|
|
|
CuddleCryptid posted:Imo the Dark Pictures stories have been experimenting a lot, but they mess up with the main thrust of those kinds of games in a way that UD didn't, ie the fight to keep all the characters alive as the story tries to kill them off. In Man of Medan it was too easy to get everyone home, in Salem it killed off half the cast at the end of the game for plot reasons if you didn't play super artificially, and in Ashes it kept putting you in situations where you are supposed to dedicate to something that looks like a trade for the life of one character for another, which players will naturally refuse to do. There seems to be a bigger focus on replaying the game which is a bit naive for such a long game. Oh yeah the bearings are just miserable. When I played UD the second time it was with a big group of friends and they were all really into checking the butterfly effects and figuring out how our choices impacted the game, which was great, because it reinforced that yes, you really did make your own lovely bed that you now have to sleep in! You weren't corralled into a choice (other than some illusions of choice that just make sense once you know the whole story). The bearings were so inscrutable as to be pointless, you never had any idea why choice A impacted death C without some pretty involved logic chains, and even then some of them didn't actually involve logic, they just sort of amount to player-choice based randomizers. I know there was at least one death in House of Ashes where we looked up how to avoid it and everybody playing got genuinely mad about it because it felt like the chain of choices that lead to that death had nothing to do with it. It was basically an issue of us not picking the choices that would have saved that character, rather than us actually picking choices that lead to their death, which made it feel like we just kind of fumbled blindly into something that was more out of our intentional control than any bit of railroading in UD.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 18, 2022 16:43
|
|
|
Oh yeah I also despise the traits and trait-locking, not in and of themselves, but because it's impossible to infer what the consequences will be, the actual consequences tend to not make a lot of sense and feel more like punishments for playing the game "wrong" rather than presenting the player with an interesting outcome based on their roleplaying, and sometimes traits changed in response to dialog choices that were telegraphed in ways that were so misrepresented as to feel like the game was trying to punk us. Like I can't think of an exact example of that third problem but it'd be like the choice wheel said "I disagree" and when you choose it the character actually says "You are full of poo poo and I curse your family for a thousand generations," whoops Bob became more Aggressive and his relationship with Linda has gone down!
|
|
#
¿
Mar 18, 2022 21:00
|
|
|
There were a few instances in UD where if a trait got too high it locked you out of making certain decisions, but I'm not certain the game necessarily told you that was the case for all of them. It sort of made sense because there were some choices that would have felt weirdly out of character if you'd been playing that character a certain way the whole game, but in my experience they didn't really come up in UD. In the Dark Pictures games they can get "locked" in which case that character always acts that way given the opportunity, I think. It's equally opaque as to how they actually work in the Dark Pictures games, but the system is just visible enough to occasionally make you feel like you aren't given a choice in some situations because you didn't play the game certain (mostly arbitrary) ways. It's not inherently a bad system or a bad idea, but it's pretty half-baked in all the games, and in Dark Pictures it's presented in a way that makes it seem more important than it is, while also obfuscating how exactly you're interacting with it, so when it does come into play and railroad a choice, it feels weirdly punitive.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 18, 2022 22:44
|
|
|
Bogart posted:
The answer to both is "cspam," and there's probably not much more explanation that warrants the time it would take
|
|
#
¿
Apr 23, 2022 23:45
|
|
|
I am unabashedly the target audience for any kind of VHS filter, analog horror nonsense. I'm just a sucker for anything lo-fi, and I'll take lovely looking horror with visual filters over something polished and semi-realistic like Visage any day. Hell, The Last Door is about as lo-fi as you can possibly get and still have visuals, and there are some genuinely creepy moments in that, imo. I get how people can get burnt out on a particular look, though, so I understand why the VHS filter could turn people off at this point. Like any other interesting idea in horror games, it was bound to be driven into the ground.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 25, 2022 16:05
|
|
|
Blockhouse posted:My only spicy Silent Hill take is that I think SH3 has a worse story than 2 but in exchange has a better everything else. I had almost the same experience, two of my friends and I rented it on release, and played through the entire game that night. I remember we finished the game at about 4AM and most definitely stayed up until dawn just because the game was so compelling and we had so much to talk about, definitely not just because we were so freaked out we couldn't fall asleep until the sun was up... I've played maybe 15 minutes of Homecoming and none of Downpour, and I'd have a hard time remembering enough about the first four games to do a real pro/cons list, but just in general SH games have more individual moments that have stuck with me than just about any other horror series. The very beginning of 1 when you wander in the alley, the whole section with Cybil later in the game... A whole slew of bits of 2, but specifically the apartment building and the prison stuck with me... 3 had the mirror room, Borley Mansion, I still think of "they look like monsters to you?" every once in a while... I don't remember a lot of 4 because I've only played it once but Walter freaked me out a lot at the time, the apartment itself was great, also there was a giant head at one point that really unnerved me. Shattered Memories was a bad game in a lot of ways but it was one of the more interesting uses of sound design in a game like that, I think. I remember I played it with a bunch of friends one night and we were all crowded around the Wiimote to listen to the creepy phone calls you'd get throughout the game. It often wasn't all that scary of a game, but some of those moments were pretty eerie in a memorable way.
|
|
#
¿
May 16, 2022 21:18
|
|
|
I remember watching the original BlueBox "leak"/reveal happen, and it was sketchy as hell, it really felt like the main guy there thought it was funny that people thought they were making the new Silent Hill... then started to go along with it... then started to wonder how he could make money off the rumor. It was pretty blatant and very dumb, especially when he started hinting that he wasn't not working with Kojima on this unannounced, definitely not not Silent Hill game... but all the hinting tongue-in-cheek tweets also seem to be gone. Like 90% of twitter these days, it's probably safe to assume that everyone involved, devs and leakers alike, are either grifting or looking for attention.
|
|
#
¿
May 17, 2022 18:12
|
|
|
Ibram Gaunt posted:I always feel like there's a disconnect when people bring up that stuff in good faith where they think advocates for Content Warnings want the game to open up with a list that says specifically what every possible PTSD inducing scene is in exact terms, or that they're talking about things that just make them feel bad. That behavior might have been more common in the early to mid 10s Tumblr generation but it's basically died out entirely. (thank god) A game having a disclaimer that "hey this game deals with sexual assault/suicide/etc" doesn't hurt anyone or take away anything from the game. I definitely know at least a couple of people (that should know better) who still think of trigger warnings as "list of icky things we're going to talk about" rather than a genuine warning that they may cause an uncontrollable physiological and mental response in some people. I think to some degree, it's easier for people to understand what epilepsy is without having it. If you don't have PTSD and have never had a trauma reaction, you may not have any idea what that experience is like, or how involuntary it is.
|
|
#
¿
May 18, 2022 16:01
|
|
|
Hel posted:Didn't the Dark Pictures Anthology devs go out of their way to explicitly say their latest game wasn't going to do the same cliche as the previous ones. They did, and it didn't! I'm still not sure it was very good though. The Dark Pictures games have consistently been a letdown imo, they have some moments but all three ended up being either super heavily cliched or just kind of boring for most of the game. House of Ashes is probably the best in large part because it doesn't try to get clever with its premise, it just delivers basically exactly what it tells you it's going to be, and that's fun in its own way. I'm hoping The Quarry is going to be closer to what I want, since they seem to be suggesting it's more of a direct spiritual sequel to Until Dawn than the Dark Pictures games are, whatever that distinction may mean in real terms.
|
|
#
¿
May 18, 2022 19:54
|
|
|
FreudianSlippers posted:I like House of Ashes for having a pretty novel twist on vampires. Even if they hide that the monsters are vampires and not just Pitch Black Aliens until fairly late in the game. In general I thought the Dark Pictures games are full of characters that are generally mostly forgettable or kind of obnoxious at worst, but House of Ashes had a couple that I thought were pretty badly written all-around. There was a lot of clumsy writing in House of Ashes honestly, but most of it was pretty forgivable if you treated the whole experience as a campy b-list horror movie, or it didn't matter that much in the big picture anyway.
|
|
#
¿
May 18, 2022 20:04
|
|
|
Oxxidation posted:THE GAME YOU’RE ABOUT TO PLAY SUCKS rear end. CONTINUE? Picture me, sweating bullets, waffling between "YES" and "NO"
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2022 02:58
|
|
|
My friends and I split the price on it so we got it at full price, and that felt like a reasonable way to do it, but if you're playing it solo, I wouldn't talk you out of waiting for the price to come down. IMO it's a comparable quality and length to Until Dawn, in general all of the production values felt like they were a step above all three of the Dark Pictures games, especially the writing (though that may be as much preference as actual difference in quality). It's the first game since Until Dawn that I immediately wanted to replay to see if I could keep everyone alive (or kill them all, I'm not picky). I never really had that feeling with any of the Dark Pictures games. For me they ranged from okay to fine, lol.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 8, 2022 16:31
|
|
|
catlord posted:Apparently there are rumours circling that they're going to announce a new Alone in the Dark. I'm a big fan, so I'm excited, but at the very least it can't be worse than '08 and Illumination, right? Well now you've jinxed it.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 12, 2022 04:03
|
|
|
Nyoro posted:are the castlevania games horror games I ask that every once in a while online and I think the answer depends entirely on who you ask and can easily be either "definitely yes" or "absolutely not", but that it's maybe a problem of definition and media expectation. I definitely know a lot of horror fans for whom the term means "any media that elicits a visceral fear reaction" and I think for me I want a more concise word like "horror" that covers stuff like Castlevania, where they're not really explicitly meant to be frightening, but have a kind of dark, gothic aesthetic that shares a lot of DNA with other horror stuff. I guess "gothic" might be the word I want but that also has other connotations, and doesn't really cover a lot of horror-adjacent media. If you ask me, Castlevania games count as horror but I get why some people would strongly disagree.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 27, 2022 22:44
|
|
|
al-azad posted:Dread X has been trying to spread into publishing more so like they recently published The Mortuary Assistant which was well received. I didn't realize they published that, that's great. I didn't play it (my patience for actually playing games that lean into jumpscares has become slim over the years) but watched MrKravin's runs of it and I was pretty impressed.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2022 03:06
|
|
|
Nah I'm with everyone else, even playing in the dumbest way possible to get everyone killed my group of friends thought Little Hope was powerfully boring, and it's the only one of the Supermassive games that any of them just checked out on completely. It's the worst of all the games by a solid stretch, though some of the possible outcomes of Medan do give it a run for its money. It also has some of the blandest and worst written cutscenes propped up by some pretty dire performances, and the vast majority of the game is extremely boring environments. If I had to guess I'd say most of the problems are probably a result of being badly rushed as part of the push to start the whole yearly Dark Pictures release schedule, because so much about the game felt like cut corners. I genuinely don't think it's worth the time it takes to play.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2022 16:20
|
|
|
veni veni veni posted:There’s no way little hope is worse than hidden agenda or the inpatient. Honestly I forgot they both existed, and hate you for reminding me of them
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2022 17:46
|
|
|
Sakurazuka posted:Pretty sure that's the point. yeah I'd assume that was very intentional, especially after playing the AWE DLC for Control
|
|
#
¿
May 25, 2023 15:43
|
|
|
Read After Burning posted:I remember being super disappointed at first by Alan Wake vibes-wise, because someone told me "It's Twin Peaks: The Game!" Yeah, there are totally references, but the V I B E is definitely more Stephen King than David Lynch. I haven't watched them since before AW originally came out but I vaguely remember the six episodes of Bright Falls feeling much more like they were going for a Lynch-inspired horror vibe than the game actually ended up having, I think that had some hand in coloring the way the game was pitched on the internet at the time.
|
|
#
¿
May 26, 2023 21:19
|
|
|
Lisa thematically has more overlap with horror video games than most RPGs that are mechanically similar, for sure. I don't know if I'd call it a horror game really but it doesn't strike me as weird to post about it here, the plot is a real undertaking of an experience in some ways, many of them horrific
|
|
#
¿
Jun 7, 2023 18:01
|
|
|
I grabbed the fanatical bundle, but I already have the first Dread X. Anybody want a key?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 11, 2023 21:18
|
|
|
Gromit posted:I'd love to get this if it's still available, thanks. Just sent it over!
|
|
#
¿
Jul 12, 2023 22:16
|
|
|
Morpheus posted:Little Hope was better in terms of story structure, though the story itself wasn't as good, if that makes sense. Man of Medan was just a bunch of jumping around from weird thing to weird thing before it suddenly ends and then something you did a while ago determines the ending. The flipside of Little Hope is that if the story doesn't grab you immediately it probably never will, and you can probably guess where it's going from the start if you're a fan of horror games. I agree the story was better in an objective sense than Man of Medan but the group I was playing collectively found it so boring that most of them kind of stopped paying attention well before the end, and as one of the people who didn't, I can't blame them
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2023 17:13
|
|
|
I'm playing through RE4 Remaster now and boy this is excellent. It's the first of the remake/remasters I've played, since it's the one I played through the most when I was younger. I'm really pretty impressed at how well it captures the feel and spirit of the original game while being different and fresh enough to not feel like just a flat-out retread. Admittedly I probably haven't played RE4 since the Wii was still current, but it's a lot of fun hitting points in the story where I think "I know something bad is going to happen here but I can't remember what" and getting at least a little surprised. And it's tense! I'm comically bad at survival horror games but I remember kind of steamrolling RE4 on replays, even just the second time I played through it. Here I feel like I'm always on the edge of running out of ammo, and I've had to get good with the knife and crossbow to stay on top of things. I'm pretty sure I'm about to start the section with the loving regenerating enemies which always freaked me out when I was younger, I'm simultaneously excited and dreading it. Not sure if I need to spoil that but I figured this might be someone's first time playing through RE4 and that's a moment I wouldn't want to give away...
|
|
#
¿
Aug 4, 2023 17:07
|
|
|
ROCK THE HOUSE M.D. posted:You should play the remake of 2 after that, it is also fantastic. I actually grabbed the 2 remake on sale a while back, just haven't gotten around to it yet, but I probably will pretty soon here given how solid this one has been. I think I only ever played through 3 once when I was younger, and remember basically nothing at all about it, so I don't even have nostalgia going for me on that one, I'll likely skip it. Medullah posted:I still overall prefer RE2 remake, the story/puzzles/action is the right mix for me, RE4 is a little too actiony for my tastes. That's good to hear, I could use more puzzles with my action. Also does RE4 give you harder puzzles on the harder difficulties? Something about the puzzle design makes me suspect that's the case.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 4, 2023 17:51
|
|
|
Medullah posted:The puzzles kiiiiind of get harder in the harder modes but it's more like "Instead of the note telling you the time on the clock, it gives you roman numerals to make it harder", or "One more layer of pathing in the island door puzzles". Nothing truly difficult. That's kind of disappointing, actually. That said I hate when games give you harder puzzles on higher overall difficulties, so you're stuck with harder combat too. I don't usually have the time or patience to get very good at action games anymore these days, so I rarely play on Hard unless it's pretty immediately apparent that Normal or whatever is going to be a steamroll by the end. More games need separate "puzzle" and "combat" difficulty settings like some of the Silent Hill games had! though that said, idk how many games there are out there that actually change the difficulty of puzzles on different settings, it might be pretty rare.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 4, 2023 18:22
|
|
|
So having come off the high that was RE4R, I'm considering jumping into another game along those lines and I saw The Evil Within is on PS+ Extra, which I have for a little while longer. Is it still worth playing these days? fwiw I tried it right when it came out and I remembered being so-so on the combat (I actually found the combination of pretty essential stealth kills and limited ammo to be pretty restricting and stressful, compared to just always feeling like you barely have enough ammo in RE4, for example) and I have very little patience for "run from the unkillable boss" chase segments. How much of the game is that sort of stuff? It seemed heavy on both right at the start but I didn't get far. I'm mostly interested in the story and the setting, assuming either is good. I actually have TEW 2 because I bought it on extreme sale but I haven't played it yet, so I was thinking of crossing the first one off my list before jumping into it.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 17, 2023 19:03
|
|
|
Sakurazuka posted:TEW is an insane mess and as such is worth experiencing however it is also extremely painful to play and occasionally downright antagonistic to the player at times. And this was my feeling when I tried to play it the first time, lol. That was years ago so I was assuming some of that was colored by me being younger and dumber, though. I may still give it another shot but I think if I hit a point where it's more frustrating than fun I'll just peace out and find a good LP of it or something.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 17, 2023 19:21
|
|
|
mutantIke posted:From what I can tell all the true Vinyl Freakz prefer minidisc as their digital format du jour The true freaks have started collecting laserdiscs
|
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2023 05:07
|
|
|
I feel like I haven't seen much about Amnesia: The Bunker online for whatever reason, maybe just a product of the parts of the internet I actually pay attention to these days. I saw a couple of positive mentions in this thread when it came out, but I'd be curious to hear peoples' general impressions of it. I never finished Machine for Pigs because frankly I thought it was kind of boring, and watched part of an LP of the last Amnesia game but honestly nothing about it really made me want to rush out and try it myself. It sounds like maybe this one is closer in style/spirit to the original though?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2023 21:45
|
|
|
Oxxidation posted:a machine for pigs was a bizarre folly and not representative of the series while amnesia 2 suffered from an expanded scope Okay yeah that sounds much more appealing than Amnesia 2 looked. Not that 2 looked like a bad game or anything, just not what I wanted from Frictional in particular.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2023 22:31
|
|
|
IShallRiseAgain posted:It was developed by The Chinese Room and not by Frictional, who was just the publisher. sorry, by "2" I meant "Rebirth", I was just following on what Oxxidation called it and didn't realize it had a subtitle too. I pretty much knew Machine for Pigs wouldn't do it for me because basically nothing Chinese Room produces really does it for me.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2023 22:46
|
|
|
TheWorldsaStage posted:SH2 remake lookin' good Bloober doesn't have the stones to be this intentionally kick-rear end
|
|
#
¿
Dec 29, 2023 21:07
|
|
|
Morpheus posted:Everyone should know by now that reviews, and review scores, are bad and useless. They're good for pointing out if a game has some critical flaws, is half-finished, or made by chuds or something, but that's pretty much it. Yeah setting aside review score inflation over the years and some outlets having incentive to not score any given game badly, humans are just dogshit at scoring things in a granular way with any kind of meaning. Anything more than a 5/10 may as well be a 10/10 for all the actual meaning it carries.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2024 16:07
|
|
|
The Quarry alone is worth $17 imo. I haven't played it yet but I assume The Bunker prob is too based on the general praise I've seen for it
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2024 00:25
|
|
|
what is with all the pool-related horror games? is pool core an actual thing? am I being trolled by the horror game internet? I mean, I guess it's not that big a leap from the other millennial-centric horror flavors that seem to go in waves (dead malls, boring night jobs turning into horror games, suburban house exploration horror, liminal everything) but this one strikes me as more tongue-in-cheek than the rest, for some reason
|
|
#
¿
Apr 29, 2024 16:27
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 11:25 |
|
|
Captain Hygiene posted:I was very confused by this at first, I was imagining things like a haunted eight ball, or ghosts jumping up behind you while you're trying to line up a shot. ngl I would love more games that look like basic unassuming games like pool (billiards) or various simulators but are secretly horror games, but that's the sort of thing that I'm sure would get spoiled immediately these days and kind of ruin the experience. I just have nostalgia from an early internet era where there were all kinds of urban legends of "haunted" video games or "hacked" cartridges and would love a game that simulates that experience in a cool way but I have no idea how you pull that off in an age where horror games are probably mostly marketed through YT & Twitch, much less the difficulty of marketing a game like that in the first place. I'm not sure how you'd even target the intended audience with a secret horror game, lol MockingQuantum fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Apr 29, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Apr 29, 2024 17:23
|
|