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 You might have had those dreams;  lost, somewhere that isn't quite the world.  Larger than life,  or maybe smaller.  NaissanceE leads you through one. Reminds me a bit of Myst, and a great deal of Kairo; that one's a bit contentious here, I'm given to understand, but it was a search for a similar experience that lead me here. The game is all exploration, no explanation, and the few puzzles offer essentially the only insight towards who or what created this space we find ourselves in. It's an unsettling setting, but one that compels you forward without needing to say a word. Unsettling, but it never really dips into shock horror; existential dread is the order of the day. I'd like to take you on a trip, into it; it's made quite an impression on me, and I think it deserves to be seen. Updates (lol if u thought i could maintain this  )           If there's anything I should improve about formatting or presentation, or anything you'd like to see more or differently, please let me know. This is my first attempt at basically every aspect of this, and I'd like to be doing it right. ArcMage fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Mar 20, 2015 |
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Nov 21, 2014 21:30
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Christ, this game is dark. Might be my screen, but I can't see much at all. This is probably intentional, but I cannot say it makes for the best watch.
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Nov 21, 2014 23:47
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I really like the atmosphere, environmental design, and puzzles in this game. However, the symbolism and theme-ing is so blunt that it's frankly kind of insulting. Hint: Naissance means birth.
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Nov 22, 2014 00:00
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Oh, it's definitely ~*Art*~, the devs aren't shy about that. They do spare us any explicit statements of theme, though, which is better than many do. The darkness, too, is some of their insultingly-blunt theme work, I suppose. I'll see what can be done for it, but it really is extremely intentional. I don't think they're one of the crews who explicitly demand that you play with the lights off and headphones, but I did all the same. You're right that you all shouldn't have to, though.
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Nov 22, 2014 00:25
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One word I would describe what I've seen in the LP is "incongruous". The game is going for immersive physicality of movement, and at the same time I'm pretty sure you don't have a body, nor do you have hands to climb onto stuff, and push things with your whole body. Alse re: darkness, it seems like if you up the brightness the lights are going to get blinding, so I'm skeptical that anything can really be done about it.
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Nov 22, 2014 06:21
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supermikhail posted:One word I would describe what I've seen in the LP is "incongruous". The game is going for immersive physicality of movement, and at the same time I'm pretty sure you don't have a body, nor do you have hands to climb onto stuff, and push things with your whole body. I get the impression that they were very interested in conveying embodiment, only without actually rendering a body. Having played a few comparable games where they did try, it was actually a pretty severe detriment to immersion, the games having been put out by studios who can't shell out fat stacks for mo-cap. 'Incongruous' is going to be a good word for this game, though. Let's hold that thought. WRT darkness, yeah, I poked at contrast adjustments a bit, but it's just dark where it's dark. The eternal blackness doesn't hold forever, at least.
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Nov 22, 2014 09:29
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I really wanted to pick this game up because I love these sort of puzzle/atmospheric walking simulator kind of deals, but when I read about the checkpoints and platforming I decided to give it a pass. It looks drat interesting, but the platforming looks like it totally ruins what the devs were going for (I saw your sandcastle video. gently caress those jumps). Shame, I was hoping another game like Ether One and Dream.
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Nov 22, 2014 09:47
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It's very easy for your subtitles to get lost in the glare. You may want to choose a colour or shade that shows up on both white and black, if you don't want to adjust it based on the background of the moment.
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Nov 22, 2014 10:13
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It makes me think of House of Leaves, as filtered through Gilliam's Brazil. Beautiful and unsettling.
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Nov 22, 2014 21:05
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I really liked some large portions of this game, and loathed others in an alternating fashion. Nevertheless they build some really awesome surreal environments to go get swept up in and I love it. I liked Kairo too and would love more games along those lines. Ghostwoods posted:It makes me think of House of Leaves, as filtered through Gilliam's Brazil. Beautiful and unsettling. This is pretty perfect.
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Nov 22, 2014 21:10
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ArcMage posted:Oh, it's definitely ~*Art*~, the devs aren't shy about that. They do spare us any explicit statements of theme, though, which is better than many do. Everyone's welcome to their own opinions, but to me, those screenshots say "We were too cheap to hire a texture artist."
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Nov 22, 2014 21:37
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Gynovore posted:Everyone's welcome to their own opinions, but to me, those screenshots say "We were too cheap to hire a texture artist." Ah just wait, the first area isn't really indicative of how the art style develops. They do some pretty cool stuff with form, shaders and light alone. And some stuff will have very distinct texturing to set it apart
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Nov 22, 2014 21:41
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Gynovore posted:Everyone's welcome to their own opinions, but to me, those screenshots say "We were too cheap to hire a texture artist." Having pretty much just now compared this to Kairo and Master Reboot, my own opinion favors the textureless presentation. A bit like a poorly-realized body model, Kairo's rather unfortunate texturing pulled me out of the game quite a lot, and immersion is a huge part of these games' appeal to me. What you get textures on in NaissanceE are the moving parts; you saw a bit of it with the vanishing stonework, and you'll see a bit more in the next segment. That seems to be part of their ~*artistic vision*~, too. I come off like I have a stake in this, somehow, but I do find the whole thesis to be pretty pretentious. Meanwhile, see if these subs work any better for you guys? There was really nothing to be done about the darkness in this video; the next should be more amenable to levels adjustment, but this is still a dark time for NaissanceE.
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Nov 23, 2014 06:15
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ArcMage posted:Meanwhile, see if these subs work any better for you guys? Yes, much. I can now read what you're saying when it's very bright!
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Nov 23, 2014 06:25
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I love the light and shadow play going on in the game's visual style. Combined with the soundtrack, the whole thing feels very lonely, and very claustrophobic. I know for a fact nothing is going to jump out at you, but crawling around in the dark is unnerving, and going into the light is like being naked somehow, exposed to whatever weird things haunt this big empty maze. It's a neat effect, and they set it up well with the intro scene, showing you running, and showing off some vague monster-entity. It's creepy. It's so lonely, but you're never quite alone.
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Nov 23, 2014 08:35
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So.  Here we are. Still haven't hired a texture artist, but their environment modeller is working double time to compensate, I think. This is where the dream begins.  You want to point like a bird dog, maybe, all 'Kowloon Walled City', but that skyline suggests that it's roofed, as well. No escape. No signposts or landmarks; the scenery would like us to know that this place is infinite, we are tiny, and we don't matter. 'Going down' will suffice for a puzzle, for the moment. Unless we like skydiving, our path is off along the right-hand wall of the shaft, down some stairs we can jump to, and after we fall off some broken pipes or something. Again, no signs or guard rails; this place isn't for us, and we're just creeping around it the best we can.   We steal our way into the people spaces, finally. Or, well, into doors and onto walkways so we're not crawling around on window ledges anymore. The place is still blank and lifeless, but maybe we're used to that. It didn't strike me as too odd, until I walked into the bar.  For one, I didn't actually come across this place last time I'd played through; it's obviously a bar, possibly even a strip joint, but modeled at about Duke3D level of detail. As though it's trying to look familiar to us, but really not doing a great job yet. We'll pass through a similarly unconvincing strip mall, and then it makes a slightly better effort.  Charming though it is, we're probably not ready to move in, so we'll continue going down. There's plenty of down to go. Marking maybe the halfway point of our trip, we meet this chapter's first platform section.  These segments are both pretty harmless, so far as this game goes, but they're still floaty platforming in an FPS interface. I only cut out ...maybe four or five deaths, through here. There are far finer bullshits ahead. ArcMage fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Jan 14, 2015 |
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Nov 28, 2014 08:31
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So this arcology is being eaten by cubic caterpillars? Or are those supposed to be some sort of construction entity?
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Nov 28, 2014 09:21
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Lucy needs a flashlight. And some sticky shoes.
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Nov 28, 2014 09:32
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Man. The first half of that video was really unsettling, even oddly terrifying in places. Pretty platforming is pretty, but it's the sections in between that are really impressing me.
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Nov 28, 2014 15:21
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Jesus Christ. Video games don't normally scare me, but that last video was a nightmare -- probably because I'm afraid of heights, but still, this is some freaky poo poo. I gasped out loud at the concept of playing this on the Oculus Rift. The vibe I'm getting from the indoor chunks of this section is "a place nominally built for humans, but by something utterly alien that can only imitate architecture elements and approximate the ideas of human spaces." Pristine, sterile reproductions of commercial spaces, the empty barracks, hallways and stairwells that lead nowhere... the only place that looks like somewhere a person might actually live is the weird low-grav room, and I kind of assume that's an Easter egg based on someone's actual apartment. (The Totoro was a little immersion-breaking, but thankfully the rest of that room was strange and uncomfortable enough to make up for it.)
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Nov 29, 2014 11:34
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I'm really undecided as to how much influence Lucy herself is meant to have on the nature of her nightmare; stuffed animals are certainly an accessible concept, though. The world only gets less welcoming from here, I'm afraid. Whatever built the place seems to have blown its load early in terms of comprehensible human settings. You'll be hearing it a lot, but this really isn't a place that anyone is supposed to be, it seems. Those slugs, like the irrationality of the place bleeding through, like it can't contain itself. A room where they seem to have gotten physics wrong, or that little dimensionally handicapped closet in the middle there. It's only willing, or it's only able, to come so close to reality. Yeah, all of that. The devs did well at implying that we have no business in this place, and that any paths forward we found were pure coincidence. The piston section sort of stood out, in a bad way, I think, as an explicitly game-y construct. The slugs are audacious enough that they don't need to explain themselves, but the pistons are just comprehensible enough that you wonder what they're supposed to be doing, and they're the only other moving thing you've encountered. Nah, I'll be real, I just really don't like that section. A little deeper into the place we're going to see some actual puzzles, which present a nice change. They're all pretty simple, which I think is alright since the game has so much else to hold your attention.
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Nov 30, 2014 00:28
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So Going Down is probably one of my favorite areas in this whole game. The time-slowed apartment struck me as almost an easter egg for how it felt tucked away, and there's at least a few other odd and unsettling spaces you may have missed like the doorway somewhere in the residential area that, other than a floor, opens up into an infinite black void. I was legitimately creeped out by it and couldn't stand wandering too far in, for fear of losing the door out. Game shines when it's not making you do stupid jumping trials. The slugs I felt were fine but the pistons were kind of obnoxious. But then we haven't seen how obnoxious the jump challenges can get yet.
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Nov 30, 2014 03:19
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Ooohh... Pretty game. Reminds me of 'The cat lady'. Interesting idea, ruined by jump <scares/puzzles>.
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Nov 30, 2014 07:14
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Yeah, the pistons are really the most obviously game-y part of this level, and that's probably the weak point. It'd help if their pattern and motion weren't so archetypically Jumping Puzzle... but if they weren't, I imagine that jumping puzzle would also be a lot harder, and it already looks amazingly frustrating.
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Nov 30, 2014 08:20
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Oh cool, this game is on sale through Steam for the next two days! It looks cool. I don't think I'd even mind the platforming parts.
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Nov 30, 2014 17:35
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Spookyelectric posted:Oh cool, this game is on sale through Steam for the next two days! I can absolutely recommend it at 8$. I paid full retail and was slightly annoyed the first time through, but I think that I have extracted 20$ worth of entertainment from it, overall.
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Nov 30, 2014 21:31
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Just a touch more platforming, and then we're back into urban nightmare territory.  Having come all that way down, we find that we're nowhere near the bottom. We're in a bit of a gap at the moment, though.  So it's window ledges and cornices and a bunch of other stuff we're not meant to be climbing on.  The place seems to have noticed we've got nowhere to go, though, and it at least pretends to give us a way down. Not very hard, mind you.    A bit of scenery, for someone to enjoy. I've seen worse.  We've got no business walking on this. At all. But it helps us along, just the same.  And, sort of as an afterthought, we meet our other puzzle mechanic for the chapter. Poor things. I mentioned before, but the city really does seem infinite, and when we escape it, it's not because we found the end, it's because we found a hole in the backdrop. We're fighting this place, even if it hasn't noticed. ArcMage fucked around with this message at 06:35 on Dec 6, 2014 |
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Dec 6, 2014 06:30
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I am getting such big Tsusomu Nihei vibe from this game. Lost in MegaCity.
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Dec 6, 2014 10:06
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This really isn't a game anyone could play for fun. The puzzles seem almost entirely unnecessary because the real core of the game is the atmosphere and artistry. I'm really enjoying your sub commentary btw. I think it's the right amount of input to let us infer the rest.
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Dec 6, 2014 19:10
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I was curious if and how you were gonna' showcase the stairwell trap. Does it really open after a while? I had no idea, that actually warms me back up to the devs a little bit since it struck me as kind of rough design at the time. That said I love this whole area, and it's really hard to showcase it all. When you first got down on the dark roof I seem to remember there being a whole other lit structure off to the right, I don't remember if it was a dead end or another path. There's also multiple ways down to the floating block bridge, the elevator you mentioned can be ridden down from the top, standing on it is what triggers it. As for the jump drops hurting you a bit, I got the feeling like we were an ant being handled by a benevolent but somewhat clumsy giant. Like an ancient automated safety administration system with a scarce amount of energy with which to make you a path.
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Dec 6, 2014 23:23
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The Protagonist posted:I was curious if and how you were gonna' showcase the stairwell trap. Does it really open after a while? I had no idea, that actually warms me back up to the devs a little bit since it struck me as kind of rough design at the time. I actually only heard tell of it opening again well after I'd recorded that. There are a lot of things I'm only now hearing of, after I've recorded. It's sort of wonderful.
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Dec 7, 2014 03:53
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I feel kind of sorry for the photophobic monoliths. They just sound so distressed.
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Dec 15, 2014 07:22
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Of all the amazing lp's I'm following atm, this is the one I'm most eagerly looking forward to. I think the mystery of the world has hooked me too well.
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Dec 15, 2014 14:09
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So I have some... suspicions... as to why your next update may be a bit delayed and let me just say I can't blame you in the slightest. I unabashedly cheated my way through this next level for reasons that will become apparent. Actually back when I played it, prior to a patch, it was literally unbeatable on my hardware.
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Dec 18, 2014 05:30
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ViggyNash posted:Of all the amazing lp's I'm following atm, this is the one I'm most eagerly looking forward to. I think the mystery of the world has hooked me too well. The Protagonist posted:So I have some... suspicions... as to why your next update may be a bit delayed and let me just say I can't blame you in the slightest. I unabashedly cheated my way through this next level for reasons that will become apparent. I'll go with those suspicions, I think, but really it's the next chapter on that's gonna have me slammed, I think. edit: I think. As a shameful peace offering, I can at least give you the next video. Proper effortpost to follow, though I will actually put it to the thread afterwards whether the screenshots are doing anything for you. ArcMage fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Jan 14, 2015 |
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Dec 21, 2014 13:27
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There was a ladder in the first room that led down. Was it a dead end with nothing to see? You can see the top of it at 1:09 on the right side of the screen.
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Dec 21, 2014 18:17
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Man, that right hand path is such an rear end in a top hat. I'm a little disappointed that all of that buildup led to pipe crawling and bad platforming puzzles.
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Dec 21, 2014 20:22
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Well, all that build-up is going to lead to bad platforming, that's just how it is in here. I find Breath Compression interesting more for the direct interaction you're now having with the place; actually you, Lucy, personally, turning the lights back on and starting the air conditioning, or whatever it is she's doing. Other than that, yeah, it's a series of tubes. There's a puzzle in the second half, though, that you just looked at in the end there, and some actually engaging platforming, with some actual sense of urgency. It's still bullshit, of course. e: There are a lot of ladders that don't lead much of anywhere, and I'm already losing patience with my own playing a little, so I probably won't be climbing all of them, unless you all want me to. A couple of them just in this area, I think, are there in case you somehow manage to fall down a place and survive; the devs seem to try pretty hard not to let you trap yourself under, ah, normal circumstances. ArcMage fucked around with this message at 06:25 on Dec 22, 2014 |
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Dec 22, 2014 06:22
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I don't mind if you skip them, but I would be thankful if you acknowledged them the least intrusive method I can think of would be a subtitle that points it out as another dead end, or words to that effect.
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Dec 22, 2014 06:41
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On the one hand, the game's entire draw is basically poking around dark corners to see what's what, but on the other, a lot of 'what' is 'dark corners'.
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Dec 22, 2014 14:41
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