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Finished Cocoon. There's a lot to like. The bosses in particular are great -- each one has their own bespoke gimmick, a neat last-phase twist, and ends before it wears out its welcome). But it left me with a bit of a sour taste in my mouth when the last room pointed out which areas I missed collectibles in but wouldn't actually let me backtrack for them even though it was in a perfect place to do so. Maybe the ending is more satisfying if you find all of them, but I'll leave that to other people.
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Oct 4, 2023 04:59
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| # ¿ May 18, 2024 14:16 |
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Croteam lucked out in that the Talos Principle aesthetic is basically already "Unreal Engine tech demo". That simultaneously looks exactly like what the first game looks like in my memory (but obviously way prettier in actuality) and also exactly like every demo I've seen Epic give for Nanite and their procedural terrain system. Edit: To be clear, I think it looks great, it's just an eerily good fit for the UE5 tech. Thoom fucked around with this message at 09:01 on Oct 4, 2023 |
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Oct 4, 2023 08:32
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Mr.Radar posted:Also, if the final game is anything like the demo there will likely be shader compilation stutters as you traverse the world which is extremely unfortunate I really want to know why this keeps happening. Is there something crazy dynamic all these games with shader stutter are doing that means they couldn't just precompile their shaders at first launch (/whenever the cache is invalidated)?
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Nov 2, 2023 21:52
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I don't remember if the "keep connections" option when moving lasers was in 1, but either way it's brilliant. Also, this Kiwi robot inviting me into her shadowy cabal seems very trustworthy and I will do whatever she asks without questioning anything, because I have been assigned the curiosity and optimism traits. My only complaint so far is that I'm suffering from eyestrain of the kind that I associate with Linux font rendering 15 years ago, or the first 10 hours of Bloodborne. I tried bumping up the FOV and turning off motion blur, and I'm getting 90+ FPS with most settings cranked up, so I'm not sure what's going on. Hopefully I'll get used to it. On the subject of the recorder puzzles from 1, for anyone that did enjoy them, The Entropy Centre is basically nothing but backwards recorder puzzles wrapped in a cheeky "dollar store Portal" aesthetic.
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Nov 7, 2023 01:14
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Talos 2: I think my least favorite puzzle so far is one of the stars in East 3. The one with the picture of the statue and the X marks the spot. I immediately understood what it wanted from me, but the etching on the plaque is so distorted/washed out/inaccurate. The trees are all in different places, and it's not clear what's supposed to be ground, what's supposed to be water, what's supposed to be reflection to the point where it's not even clear if the perspective is supposed to be from a place you can actually stand or if it's a zoomed in shot from an aerial perspective, which makes the search space enormous. Especially doesn't help that the switch is on a structure that doesn't exist in the etching. It was actually the first place I looked, but I was focused on the more obscure parts of it that you wouldn't see from the road, so I missed the one face that had the switch and spent almost an hour on a wild goose chance examining everything everything that was plausibly to the right of the statue but to the left of the elevator. It felt like (The Witness spoiler) the visual version of those dickhead audio puzzles from The Witness where you're supposed to listen for a bird song while a jackhammer, a wolf, a phone, and a different but identical-sounding bird scream at you. Oh well, at least it's done with now.
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Nov 13, 2023 03:58
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You can at least set run to a toggle in the settings to alleviate some pinky strain (or play on controller and have a Steam Input layer that keeps the sprint button held down), but yes, I agree.
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Nov 14, 2023 00:00
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Talos 1 and half of 2: The goal of the Simulation was to create intelligent beings with free will, but I think they didn't completely succeed at the intelligent part. For some reason 1k can't figure out that his body fits through the holes made by drillers just fine if he'd just, y'know, bend over.
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Nov 15, 2023 02:57
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I appreciate the swapper. The core structure of most Talos Principle puzzles is leapfrogging -- using one puzzle piece to free up an earlier one to progress you, which then frees up another earlier piece, etc. The swapper allows for concise but still tricky leapfrog puzzles without enormous sprawl or a dozen different pieces, by keeping the total number of pieces in play at any given time down to 2-4.
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Nov 15, 2023 20:01
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South 3 was the last straw for me. I'm just going to look up guides for the rest of the Pandora stars and move on with my life. Activate the receiver on top of the tower? That's fine. Then find the tiny connector that it unlocks at the top of the tower that the game can't even properly render from that distance? Testing my patience. Then somehow intuit that this would unlock a hidden compartment with another connector in Puzzle 3? No. gently caress all the way off, Croteam. Your puzzle is bad and you should feel bad.
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Nov 16, 2023 03:22
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Snake Maze posted:I don't think it unlocks a hidden compartment in puzzle 3, I think that one's always tucked away in the corner there - I found it before even noticing the receiver on the tower. That's less-bad if true, but I still don't like the design. Somewhere in the middle of North, the Pandora stars go from insultingly easy to "wander around to every puzzle with a connector and waggle it at every exposed region of the sky praying for some invisible thing to light up". The search space is just too big and the connectors are too hard to see. The only one I thought had a decent flow was South 2. If holding a connector caused distant connectors to light up, I'd probably hate them a lot less. I also found a weird bug in the dialogue system. If you're hovering over a response and middle click to check the log, you'll get locked out of that response. At first I thought the game was locking me out of some options based on my past choices and just telegraphing it poorly, but then I discovered I could select the unclickable ones by plugging in a controller.
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Nov 16, 2023 03:56
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Post South 3: Yaqut's transition from  to  to  when he has to solve a puzzle in the Megastructure was so cute.
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Nov 16, 2023 07:37
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I am very upset that ill-fitting puzzle sequences have fallen out of fashion in action adventure games and RPGs. I need something every hour or two that breaks out of the monotony of the core gameplay loop. That's why I love FF7 Remake so much -- it faithfully preserves and expands upon the tradition of ill-fitting puzzle sequences. Is the part where you make Aerith climb around on a robot crane arm scintillating gameplay? No, it is not. But it's a much needed respite from smashy smashy, talky talky, squeeze through narrow passage for 5 seconds to disguise a load time, repeat. That's also why I love the random terminals and social media posts in Talos Principle (to at least pretend that I'm being on-topic).
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Nov 17, 2023 20:29
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Is there a way to backup or transfer the save to another computer? I started on my laptop but I'd probably rather finish on my desktop. Rad game so far.
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Nov 18, 2023 03:52
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No worries, I can just start over then. I wasn't super far in yet, so I can just copy over my confirmed identities.
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Nov 18, 2023 04:23
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Finished Talos 2. I think my opinion hasn't really changed throughout the game. The regular puzzles are great -- clever without being overcomplicated or tedious, and there are only a few where you can screw up badly enough to need the reset button. Difficulty and pacing felt about right. There were definitely a few head scratchers, but I only got the achievement for taking 20+ minutes because I escaped from a puzzle without using the door and the timer apparently kept running. The star puzzles, on the other hand, were atrocious. The only one I even kind of liked was the Pandora star in South 2. All the others were either insultingly easy or pointlessly obscure pixel-hunting wall-humping nonsense straight out of the 1990's school of hostile adventure game design, and I feel absolutely no remorse about looking those ones up. If they do DLC, I hope the star puzzles are much more like Road to Gehenna. I was a bit blindsided by the ending because I had accidentally read something elsewhere on the internet that claimed to be a spoiler for the ending of TP2 but was actually just a spoiler for the ending of TP1, so I spent the back half of the game thinking that we were in another layer of simulation that was designed by Drennan to test the morality of the robots after ELOHIM tested their intelligence and free will. I thought the Theory of Everything was a (perhaps intentionally placed) bug Athena discovered in the code of the simulation. I'm still adjusting to the idea that everything was real. I don't have a strong opinion about the story overall. I enjoyed the snippets of philosophy and broadly share the authors' political viewpoint, but it wasn't anything mindblowing or revelatory. It's probably my second favorite game about (The Witness spoiler) pointing a bunch of lasers at a mountain so you can explore its insides, and definitely my second favorite game where you (Outer Wilds spoiler) discover a deep space anomaly older than the universe itself. My main disappointment is that after getting all the stars and having that huge reveal about what Athena discovered, it completely drops that plot thread, but that would be an excellent DLC/sequel hook. Thoom fucked around with this message at 08:11 on Nov 19, 2023 |
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Nov 19, 2023 08:01
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1. Hard to nudge without knowing more about what you do and don't know. 2. The anglerfish are blind, so how are they finding you? How could you avoid that? 3a. The most important hints for this are located in the Black Hole Forge. Go check around there again. 3b. The scout can be handy for testing things. 3c. Specifically, leave the scout on the teleport pad and see what happens. 4. No precision platforming is required here or anywhere else in the game. Reflect on how you've accessed other places on the Twins. More specifically, go to the High Energy Lab again and see if that gives you any ideas.
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Dec 23, 2023 05:23
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The Outer Wilds ship is a puzzle where the solution is "remember high school physics". Basics of flight mechanics: 1. You need to spend as much time slowing down as you did speeding up because there's no friction in space and inertia is a property of matter. A good rule of thumb is that if your relative velocity is greater than 1/10th of your remaining distance (e.g. if you're 10km away and going more than 1km/sec), start slowing down. 2. If you lock on to a thing, the HUD will tell you what adjustments you need to make to align your trajectory. If there's an arrow pointing left, accelerate right until it goes away. If there's an arrow pointing up, accelerate downward until it goes away. Your trajectory is now aligned and you can just focus on accelerating and decelerating in a straight line towards your target. The ship's autopilot will be more than happy to demonstrate this process for you but doesn't care if there's anything else in the way like, say, the Sun. Slate sends their condolences. 3. The match velocity button is your friend; apply it liberally. If you're having trouble with a zero-G maneuver, match velocity, point at your target, thrust briefly, then coast. If you're not locked on to anything, match velocity will assume you meant to match with whatever is close by because it's cool like that.
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Jan 8, 2024 04:40
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In Chants of Senaar, I just got to the Exile section of the tower. I've restored all available (non-Exile) links and fully translated the devotee/warrior/alchemist languages.. I'm missing 4 confirmed words from the bard language which I'm pretty sure I know the definitions of but haven't found a page to let me fill them in. Do I need to go back and explore or will that page be forthcoming?
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Feb 1, 2024 04:11
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Thanks! Finished the game in pretty short order after that. I liked the concept and a lot of the early execution of the game, but it definitely ran out of steam near the end. You could tell they'd needed a 5th language for their story, but by the time they got to it they'd run out of clever gameplay ideas for language teaching so they just reverted to a few rosetta stones that basically hand you the entire language. I think my two main disappointments stem from misplaced expectations more than any fault of the game itself. I'd heard a lot of people compare the game to Outer Wilds, so I was expecting slightly more coherent world building than the bard culture running a play on repeat whose script is just the directions through their super secret cave maze that they don't want anyone going through. It was also a bit too generous with word confirmations. Would have been nice to have a bit more time to jump at the shadows of my own potential misunderstandings, and I was kind of hoping for a twist where a word you thought meant one thing actually meant something completely different, but that's kind of precluded by how quickly word meanings are confirmed. Edit: The little twist at the end was pretty good, too.
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Feb 1, 2024 07:21
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I definitely slept on Void Stranger too long. After a few hundred relatively straightforward Sokoban puzzles, I just fell down the rabbit hole, and it's more like a rabbit chasm. On floor 226 I got stuck on the actual puzzle and never managed to solve it, but discovered I could get down to the status bar and gently caress with things there, so I swapped my locust count with the last two digits of the floor number, going back to floor 202 with 26 locusts, found a locust, and used a statue to get forward to floor 227. A few floors later, I got my first ending, and 25 floors into playthrough 2 I discovered that in addition to Baba is You, I'm also apparently playing --Ys II----- because I can now talk to every obstacle. What even is this game. Edit: Also starting to think I might need to put down the Steam Deck and switch to my PC because the amount of notes I feel like I need to take at this point is more than I want to handwrite.
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Mar 29, 2024 23:26
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Some Strange Flea posted:I know there's something else to this, I just don't know if I want to be moving these fuckin' boxes around any more. You're very close to the cool stuff, you're just missing one important thing. Hint 1: The mural patterns aren't meant to be entered into the brand screen. Hint 2: Can you think of any rooms with layouts similar to the patterns? Hint 3: The first of these should be pretty obvious. (Explicitly: It's B023) Hint 4: Once you make it match the pattern, now what? Hint 5: Take a leap of faith. It also sounds like maybe you accidentally got a weird ending. As far as I know, there's no mechanic that punishes you for repeatedly dying in VOID mode, and the ending of the first playthrough is really clearly signposted as an ending and not a punishment for failure.
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Apr 2, 2024 22:23
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Swilo posted:This is something that was added later on in a patch so maybe you never encountered it. It's an out if you want to exit a VOID run instead of having to play through to an ending, triggered by dying repeatedly on a single floor. If you mash any button while becoming a rock you can back out and continue where you fell, but it's not a very obvious thing. Oh, weird. I feel like I should have triggered that at some point but maybe the deaths need to be in very rapid succession?. Also seems unnecessary, since you can accomplish the same thing in different, much less possible-to-do-by-accident way.
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Apr 2, 2024 23:26
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| # ¿ May 18, 2024 14:16 |
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Animal Well had me from the moment they wrote "Dense atmospheric puzzle box world" in the Steam description. Anybody who uses the word "puzzle box" when describing their game world is my friend.
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May 8, 2024 18:20
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