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Enjoyed the game and the LP so far, but count me as one of the people who thinks the way it represents "healing" like that is really not helpful. Silver bullets, or thinking that once you have a breakthrough you're mostly done, or that after a breakthrough your progress accelerates, none of these things help with keeping the progress going. This sort of thing isn't healed, it's treated continuously with a good deal of constant effort. The effort doesn't lessen, you just become more used to doing it. But especially after having some success, the important thing is to keep going just as much and not become complacent. However if you try to combine that with a story arc it's a recipe for a frustrating story, so I'm not surprised they did it like this.
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Apr 17, 2018 08:30
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Reveilled posted:I don't know, there's more than one kind of depression. I agree that for a lot of people dealing with it is a constant struggle, and overcoming it doesn't get any easier as time goes on, but that's not true for everyone who suffers. Yeah, I basically agree with what you're saying. I just don't feel like it communicated the continued effort in any way. It still seems like the silver bullet, "I'm healed!", resolution, even if with a couple false starts added in. I know plenty of people who think that's exactly how it works, and that after some number of breakthroughs, that's it, you're cured. And as far as I'm aware, that's never the case. One of the most important things is being vigilant and putting in however much effort you need to pull yourself out before you go sink back below the surface, for pretty much the rest of your life. It feels easier, the longer you do it, but that doesn't mean you can't do it again if you get complacent. And more importantly, if it does happen (and it might), you need to be able to recognise it and push through to get yourself back up again. Being told (by yourself or others) "you're cured now so it's OK" just makes this more likely to happen and compounds the issue when it goes wrong. The sort of ideas that I could see having to be represented in an accurate version would be more false starts, more false breakthroughs, or mis-steps where despite the resolution there's a lull where the situation goes back to the start. And the struggle (even if different or smaller) to rise back up and regain control. Something like: Seeing Mad and Bad working better together, but then suddenly having an argument and nearly ripping apart, then needing to have another struggle to re-establish communication. Or just seeing the monsters come back and some semblance of aggression between the two, until Mad has another event/interaction/realisation and stops it from getting worse. Those are the things people don't talk about, and don't really want to think about in real life (even during their own treatment). Because most ways to describe it sound like it's a knife's edge, even if instead it's the same mountain peak you climbed that you might fall off from, but... you've still got the set of tools you've built up the first time to try and climb it. You sharpen your grappling hooks/whatever and force/will yourself to get back climbing. I do realise though that it's really drat difficult to represent that and still have a good story/game, so this is no fault of the game at all. It's more a fault of how we perceive well-told stories (in specific arcs) and how we perceive illness.
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Apr 18, 2018 13:45
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Stepping off from the symbolism/depression chat for a second, while I really enjoyed the level design in all the previous levels this one I didn't really like. Before, I got a sense of the flow of each screen, and the number of things to keep track of was sometimes large, but never too much. Most of this entire stage was basically full of objects/mechanics everywhere, and it felt way too difficult to even keep track of vaguely what paths are available to you. I think it's all the moving fireballs/ice things. I assume this is because it's meant to be an end-game stage, but it felt like a challenge post-end-game stage to me. If I were playing, I'm fairly sure I would've stopped after a little bit of trying at this point (whereas I didn't feel this way about the rest of the stages).
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Apr 20, 2018 23:22
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Oh, I stand corrected. I assumed post-game was B-sides, and this was just like an epilogue before you go into the post-game. I guess I can see it feeling way better when you've mastered the core game then, so you know exactly what to pay attention to at every point.
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Apr 21, 2018 00:04
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