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I thought characters being wonky kinda whimsical cartoons was a terrible choice for this game, considering its tone. Maybe it's because this flat colorful environment style is so overused that I didn't expect it to deviate from the norm so much in one specific area. It doesn't show you many people throughout the game, so at one point the guy mentions seeing a photo of another character and I got confused for a moment, because all I could see was a dumb cartoon with a huge nose and Disney eyes. Everything else is rendered with realistic proportions or only slightly exaggerated. In the end I just decided to ignore the drawings and imagine the characters as real people.
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Apr 14, 2016 16:51
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The game shows you some morbid stuff and the cartoonyness dissonated with that also, in my opinion. I don't want to dig into it since I like the game overall. Another thing I thought could've been done better, and it's also about the characters. When (spoilers, but why are you reading this anyway, play the game first) I got to the lake and the two chraracters there I thought "this is gonna be like those 2D adventure games where you chase after people but never meet them, because they wouldn't have 2D cut-out characters here if they also had proper 3D characters elsewhere." So the "ah they're gone already" moments were predictable, because in the beginning it failed to convince me there was an actual possibility of meeting a person. It's like a movie implying that something terrible can happen that they won't be able to show anyway because of age ratings. There was the helicopter guy of course, with the ridiculously detailed helicopter.
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Apr 15, 2016 09:37
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I though maybe the detail on the helicopter, it was seriously like something out of FSX, meant a return to reality or something like that. UnfurledSails posted:That brings a question: is it the creator's responsibility to think of all the meta nuances of a story? Should they go "hmm, I want to make it seem like this character is in serious danger of losing multiple limbs here, but this scene doesn't really work since the players/viewers/readers know this story is PG"? Does it have to prove that it can render 3D characters just to make sure that you believe one can exist in the game? Yeah most people wouldn't notice that, and I only did because it reminded me of some old Euro adventure games. There are some details we notice in games because someone made a fuss about them in the past, like the crate thing, but most people don't analyze games this way. Still it's something an obsessive developer would've thought of. One of the reasons The Long Dark story mode keeps getting delayed is they wanted to make the characters real in-game entities. I haven't played Stanley Parable, but this game reminded me, obviously, of Dear Esther, which came from the same wave of indie nonsense (affectionate term). It is in some ways an evolution of that, where DE had one character's constant monologue, this game has dialogue, in DE the only form of interaction was seeing something or walking somewhere, this game adds the ability to grab and throw things, DE was a linear string of maps, this game is quasi-open world. Both games are beautiful and story-driven, in this game most of the story has already happened and you are like a catalyst that causes it to resolve, Dear Esther's story was all in the past. It's like these developers are trying to find combinations of gameplay elements that aren't detrimental to storytelling, that don't make you switch from the "things are happening and I'm a part of them" mode to the "I'm solving problems based on skills I've acquired in the past" mode. The moment with the stereo in this game felt novel to me because it was so natural, it didn't feel mechanical. I think it teaches you to pick up and drop things specifically for that moment alone, and that isn't wasteful at all. Teaching the player an action so they can use it once to advance the story in some natural, meaningful, and emotionally rewarding way, that's an achievement in a story game. How many games manage to do that at all? Maybe VR will push games in this direction since everything needs to be rethought for VR, actions need to be slower and more elaborate, and natural. People say that even standing too close to someone can make you feel uncomfortable in VR.
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Apr 15, 2016 15:17
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