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I'm a simple man. I see an inventory screen with empty spots, I see an obstacle I can't overcome. I make a note of where it is, and later on I will come back and mash my face against it with all my shiny new toys to find all the secrets I can possibly find. That's what makes a good EXPLORATION-BASED ACTION PLATFORMER ADVENTURE game! That's one reason why I highly, highly recommend Supraland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viUJ_oTqYJ0 It's a first-person "Metroidvania" inspired puzzle-heavy exploration game styled after a kid's sandbox full of toys and household objects. You play as a Red Meeple who has to save the Red Village by finding out why the Blue Meeple have sabotaged the water. You start off with a (admittedly pretty dire) Triple Jump and a Force Cube that essentially acts as one triple-jump-sized vertical lift. You'll get to whack things with a wooden sword and eventually get a gun that gets upgrades to shoot stuff. That's all pretty bog standard. What's completely different about this game is that the puzzle-solving/movement upgrades you get throughout the game turn the game world on its head multiple times. While the start of the game has you shooting little skeleton men and collecting coins, you very quickly pick up powerups that fundamentally change how you look at the environments and how you traverse them. I won't spoil any of them in here (and the trailer only shows one of them off for a brief second), but one of the first major movement upgrades you get in the game lets you return to earlier areas to completely break open the platforming you may have been struggling with before. Once you pick up one of the major color-coded new items that affect how you interact with the world, there's always a genuine moment where you have to ask yourself "...Well gently caress. How many ways can I use this on its own, and how many ways can this item interact with everything else I've picked up to really break this poo poo wide open?" There's also a ton of secrets in the game, and they actually matter quite a bit for general traversal and dealing with enemies. There's general "Laser goes pew better" powerups, but there's also a ton of secret powerups that will only come into play within other secret areas that get you even more secret unlocks, which all make moving around the world/dealing with enemies easier. And one place that the game excels is with its secrets: You can find a secret area, inside a secret area, with a third secret stashed just off to the side if you're paying attention. The solo-developer who made the original game spent a lot of time mashing his face against all the corners of the world, because if you can get someplace, there's probably at least some gold coins in a chest or two to reward your exploration, or a useful boost to one of your abilities. There's also DLC for the base game called Supraland Crash, which doesn't introduce new powerups, but expands the development team a fair bit so more people can try to iterate on the puzzles from the base game and find new/interesting ways to implement the same powerups in ways you couldn't do in the base game. A sequel was also released called Supraland: Six Inches Under which is just an improvement on both the base game and the DLC in every way, in my opinion. I'd recommend playing them in-order, since trying to return to the base game's original super-short triple jump instead of a single regular-sized jump is pretty annoying until you reacclimate to it. Between both games, + Crash DLC, I've spent about 55 hours exploring and I know I haven't gotten 100% in either yet. Probably around 85-90%, but some of the secrets are so well-hidden that they can be genuinely hard to find without using some of the unlockable radar-skills (and I'm a stubborn dumbass that wants to find it without help  "
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Oct 2, 2022 16:49
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I've been going through the top-rated Metroidvanias on Steam and started playing Ender Lilies yesterday. Made it about an hour in, loving the aesthetic of the world/enemy designs but the movement and combat are difficult to get used to. I hate the fact that the sword attack freezes you in mid-air instead of attacking while also falling, and the dodge is pretty effective but extremely goofy looking and not in a way that I find endearing. I think I'd rather just be playing as one of the spirits than an elementary schooler, but as long as the plot isn't a 20 hour vehicle to brutally murdering a kid I might pick it back up. I bought Blasphemous at about the same time, since it has a similar aesthetic (and was also on sale), and I'm immediately much more hooked. The aesthetic/premise of "what if catholic guilt was made manifest from every person as a physical being you'd see on a metal album" is  and the controls immediately clicked, to the point that I almost no-hit the intro boss except for when I got a bit too greedy and tried to sneak a three-hit combo in when I should have stuck with a 2 hit-dash out-dash in pattern like I was doing. It's not a hard boss by any means, but it looked badass and felt badass to kill.
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Jun 28, 2023 02:40
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I just started walking around fighting stuff and realized I could easily parry a few enemies, made my way through a ruined church and my instincts said "climb" So I just fought your standard face-and-two-hands boss through some careful dodging, realized I can bat some projectiles back at her and completed one of the first main three bosses completely by accident  then discovered the elevator that goes down to a junction with another elevator that brought me back to the start.Next on my poo poo list is a valkyrie I found down and west of the starting town who killed me at the start of the game, but now i seem to hit a little harder and found the personification of the seven of swords, who gave me more health. but I also walked past a fountain that goes to a snowy landscape, so I might go explore that tomorrow. I don't think I'm doing things in the "right" order lol
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Jun 28, 2023 05:32
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Just got 100% in Metroid Dread. The Burinia shinespark is loving nuts. Had to look up some more info on some of the mechanics because I had yet to shinespark into a slope, didn't know you could essentially chain a shinespark like that. Also got the Ferenia Missile Tank+ shinespark by completely loving stupid/wild means, where I would charge the shinespark just before space jumping onto the ledge, shooting some beam blocks, doing a cross-bomb over a gap, laying one final bomb and then immediately hitting the jump button to activate the shinespark. Went and looked up a solution afterward and saw "just walljump."  Now I should be done with Metroid Dread and it's off to figure out what the next one's gonna be on my day off tomorrow.
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Jul 4, 2023 07:10
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Martman posted:I just played through Metroid Dread recently too, what a badass freakin game. I have issues with it but its strengths really stick more in my memory. I kept thinking the cutscenes would become too cringe but I ended up loving them right until the end. I thought the story was pretty good, and the ending was pretty , looking forward to the next game they put together that follows along on this particular story path. I thought the EMMIs were kind of funny in how they were implemented. You start out learning the basics with them, then you get a couple back-to-back with slightly varying abilities, then the game decides "these aren't really that fun, let's just turn those off" and lets them sit for a while so you can go explore a ton. Then it turns them back on, making the next one the absolute worst out of all of them, then the next one wasn't nearly as bad since I had all these different kinds of abilities I had picked up from exploring, and the last one they must have decided they weren't fun again and just loving 86ed it for story purposes lmao I think the final boss fight was honestly the best I've fought in a while, It started off seeming way, way too tough right up until I realized that you could parry the melee move for some huge damage. At this point, my only lasting complaint besides the EMMI stuff will be the fact that I got to fight Kraid, but no Ridley! What a tease!
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Jul 4, 2023 08:23
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lol I did the same thing, I said to myself "well if you get to make a big fuckoff explosion then so do I  oh gently caress wait what"
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Jul 4, 2023 08:41
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Fuzz posted:It was to balance the sister game, Samus Returns, where you fight Ridley at the end. I really wish they'd remaster that and just toss it on the Switch already. Aw poo poo, I never played that one. Or Metroid 2, actually. I do hope it gets a switch release because I don't have the hardware to play it and  isn't an option Afterimage seems fun so far but it also perfectly captures the feeling of walking past my roommate at 2AM who's 1 and a half seasons in to some anime I've never heard of, and they're in the middle of a plot dump episode. They sure said a lot of words all in a row that probably mean something. Oh look! Cool wolf! 
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Jul 5, 2023 14:12
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Afterimage is loving long. I popped the achievement for beating all bosses (it doesn't seem to count the extra final boss you fight against otherrenee because I haven't beat that yet) but I think I've tapped out a lot of the content. I have a very small handful of places left to find and most area completion percentages are between 85-90%. The very last powerup I found is the knockoff power from Hollow Knight, which you use to find (among other things) a pretty dang good Hollow Knight accessory.  Just gotta open a couple big doors, like in the Field of Geo by the cat. And there's an area in the northwest of the Scorch place that's got me stumped, seems like it is exit-only. I think I've got 5 quests left and I've got 10 glyphs/heals, I think I'm missing 2? I've got a week off work next week, is there another title that's this long for content?
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Jul 10, 2023 16:39
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I think I've still got that one in my library, I remember putting it down but not why I did. I'll probably end up playing that a little bit this week/weekend
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Jul 10, 2023 19:55
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Owl Inspector posted:I looked it up online when I was done with everything else and didn’t see any way to open that door, nor the fire one in the unmapped area you can only reach using the boatman. they felt like unused chekov’s guns to me. Well son of a bitch! Thanks for saying that. What about the weird platform above the final boss arena? E: NEVERMIND! lmao. Here I was wondering "drat I wish there was more to this game, it's so huge and I love the movement/weapons, oh well time to go beat the final final boss" and uhhhhhhhhhh there's a whole New Game+ with a different loving main character! E2: ultrachrist posted:The only other MV I can remember playing recently that was as along as Afterimage is Souldiers. I checked it out, looks like it got mixed reviews at first release but since then they've patched the game and recent reviews say it's more stable/worth the time, and at 40% off I can't say it'd be a waste of time to give it a try. Thanks! bawk fucked around with this message at 06:19 on Jul 11, 2023 |
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Jul 10, 2023 20:57
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Spermanent Record posted:Is Afterimage closer to Hollow Knight (love) or Bloodstained (hate)? I'd love to sink my teeth into a really long HK style game. It's sorta in between? It's full of stupid bullshit, I finished the game last night through all 9 endings and understood very little despite actively paying attention to all the notes, weapon descriptions, and cutscenes. That being said, it maintains the checkpoint/souls mechanic from Hollow Knight (which took it from Souls) but it uses the XP you've gained since last level up. It never feels important to collect unless you're just trying the same boss over and over. Importantly, this means enemies stay dead until you rest at a checkpoint, so clearing screens while looking for secrets does actually make it easier. There's several different weapon types but you're probably gonna end up using dual blades, because they appear to have the highest/fastest DPS by a landslide, with the worst range. Range does not matter because if you're close enough to get hit when using dual blades, you're close enough to get hit when using the greatsword. The movement is great, you start with very little options, but by the end you can literally scrape every wall and ceiling when looking for secrets. It's not as good as HK for fluid movement, it feels a little janky, but it's still very fun to get a new ability and solve some difficult platforming challenge. There's a bunch of stats to stare cross-eyed at if you want to min-max a magic build, or create a build based around a specific weapon/accessory with a unique ability (there's quite a few that do) but you can also beat the game without cracking level 80 and stacking attack-up accessories to damage race the final boss And, personally, once you beat the first final boss (you fight a blue person, then a red person) you can put the game down. "New Game+" isn't a NG+ where you get to do the same game over again in a different order with all the abilities, it just tries to poorly add more story to the game with a different character, in a non-exploration-based 10 Chapter side story. The bosses you unlock to fight through NG+ are solidly mid compared to the pretty tough final blue/red boss fight I mentioned earlier, and the new area has palette swapped enemies with no unique weapons or items to find. If HK is an A/A+, Afterimage is a solid B/B+. I should try Bloodstained again, I have bounced off it twice now because of the enemy respawns going pretty quick and the controls feeling clunky.
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Jul 11, 2023 15:55
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While stats do appear in Afterimage, and you can spend Skill Points (which you find in the world or eating food, not leveling up) to increase stats, movement matters way more. I fought more than one boss who had a red skull next to their name (to let you know you're underleveled compared to this enemy/boss) and just dodged around all their attacks and killed them anyway. Besides the skill points, I think all stats come from finding better equipment, and you can ignore most other numbers besides Main Attack+ and Defense+ when picking what to use. Stats are there if you like stats, but barely matter if you don't, and the red skull is a recent thing for players to recognize if they're off the main path. That way you can tell if you should come back later, in case it seems too hard. I would dodge most stuff when exploring normally, and a few times check the Bestiary stats on a monster I killed to see if I was underleveled by a lot, or just a little, before walking through an area again. If you make it past them, you might find armor or weapons that boost your defense to the point that levels don't mean anything
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Jul 11, 2023 19:32
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Atoramos posted:This feels like an odd critique, given Blasphemous features one of the more unique exploration options. Blew my mind realizing every pit was a new path This was a huge one, holy poo poo that ruled Blasphemous is cool because you don't better navigate the world, the world reveals the secret paths to you
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Jul 11, 2023 19:53
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virtualboyCOLOR posted:Blasphemous is best when it isn’t trying too hard to be dark souls. The lore and “penitent one” talk comes across as juvenile. I think some of the lore is pretty cool in Blasphemous. One of the bosses is an archbishop who was tasked with "solving" the dreamworld they find themselves in, and realizes he is in way over his head. As Archbishop of Mother of Mothers, he resigns himself to dying and keeping the secret of his ignorance, only for his congregation to exhume his remains and disturbing his rest so they can adorn him in all of his fineries and literally prop him up for all of his afterlife, too.
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Jul 11, 2023 21:15
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virtualboyCOLOR posted:Eh. Everyone is entitled to their opinion but things like this just have me rolling my eyes and mashing skip. It reads like something a teenager would find cool. Blasphemous tells you all of that through an item description after killing him, and another item or note you find in the world. If you don't like stories then 
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Jul 11, 2023 21:44
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No Dignity posted:Ori is one I'll never understand, like if Thomas Kinkaid made an adaption of a Ghibli film, just really pandering schmaltz not even on the level of a Disney film, but people go crazy for it Right up until the end of Will of the Wisps, where it decides to pivot to "and then everybody had a happy ending, except you specifically, Ori, because you're catdog Jesus now" which is the most tonal whiplash I've ever had playing one of these. Blind Forest tugged my heartstrings and made me tear up at the start, I'm easy to get misty-eyed over stuff like BF does, but WotW had what feels like a joke ending/bad ending that you'd normally only see for not collecting everything in a collectathon or something
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Jul 11, 2023 21:58
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Martman posted:rofl at all the wrong and bad opinions some people don't need narrative motivation, all they need is a list that says "doodads 0/96 thingies 0/18 thingamajigs 0/5" and the ability to walk right I personally like poring over weapon descriptions until my third eye opens and I finally understand what a long-dead civilization calls breakfast E: and imo only interacting with story, ever, through speculating over cryptic notes (and never wanting to see dialogue expositing the story) is basically just practice for the bulletin board covered in pushpins and string that a terrified junior detective is gonna find one day bawk fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Jul 11, 2023 |
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Jul 11, 2023 22:25
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Tortolia posted:It’s not apparent at first but eventually you realize The Miracle isn’t a big mystery or plot device - it’s just the background setting. For as fancy as it sounds it’s as pertinent to the proceedings as someone complaining that it’s gonna storm soon because their knee aches - it just is. Yeah, I liked that part about Blasphemous as well. For all the hubbub about the Miracle and when/how/why it happened, the game is ultimately a cosmic horror story. The answer to all those questions is "none of that matters. this is all there is, now."
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Jul 11, 2023 23:04
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Death Stranding has more cutscene in the beginning of any mission than Blasphemous does at all. The spoken dialogue might fill a pocket catechism. It's lean as hell.
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Jul 11, 2023 23:16
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i completely disagree with your statements, we disagree on fundamental parts of what makes good video games, story is important for things outside of snippets of text, *add to cart* *check out* *install* and furthermore,
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Jul 12, 2023 00:10
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galagazombie posted:The moment I realized Axiom Verge 2 had replaced the shooty shooty with the stabby stabby my mood on it soured and never recovered. It’s not that I don’t love me some melee Metroivania, it’s just that they make up such an overwhelming majority of what’s available that taking one of the few gun based ones and making me swing a pickaxe all game was just a massive waste. It also didn’t help the game was just plain not as good as the first. Having just finished AV1 when I started AV2, I completely agree to a point. It felt much worse to have a lovely axe/boomerang and little movement. I ended up really enjoying AV2 a lot more because of the mobility. AV1 starts you with the gun and some basic mobility, and by the end you're moving at a pretty good clip, but if AV goes from a 3/10 to a 7/10 on the movement scale, AV2 feels like it goes from a 1.5-2/10 to a 9/10. 10 being, like, Screw Attack/Space Jump/Speed Boost or literal flight. It's one reason I appreciated Afterimage, because it gives you the basic jump/double/triple and a dash, but you can also attack in midair after any of those to horizontally extend your jump. Jump -> double jump -> attack -> triple jump -> attack -> dash -> attack can get you clear across entire maps. Toward the end, you can get the ability to do a vertical charge jump, but it doesn't actually require you to be standing on the ground, so you can infinitely jump/fall in midair and go anywhere you like. Some of the platforms you are intended to reach with this upgrade can be found earlier just by using the extended horizontal jumps instead (although some are still impossible)
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Jul 13, 2023 19:11
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Souldiers started off by giving me a few slimes, barely explaining the combat mechanics, and then having a Rogue character make fun of me for not understanding the combat mechanics fully after dying to a mini iboss. I have half a mind to delete my save and restart the game and go kick that thing's rear end now that I have a better grasp on the controls and timing.
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Jul 13, 2023 23:34
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If you're designing a metroidvania, and you give the player a ranged attack that goes 5 meters, and you place them into a hallway full of enemies that are strategically placed 6 meters away from wherever the player can be, and those enemies can attack with infinite range, and you do all of this because you're thinking "the player's going to feel so empowered when they come back to this hallway when the ranged attack reaches 7 meters instead" then congrats! You designed a bad hallway, but instead of by accident, you did it on purpose! Souldiers is getting really loving annoying with that
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Jul 14, 2023 02:05
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galagazombie posted:To be fair Hollow Knight did straight up lift Dark Souls bloodstain mechanic and the game suffers for it. I died in a shitload of stupid ways of a shitload of stupid stuff and I don't think I spent more than 15 seconds smacking the shade to get my stuff back. HK only suffers from the comparison, the mechanic is sound but the second somebody compares it to a soulslike then expectations get set up in a stupid way. I actually like the Bloodstain mechanic in metroidvanias, provided that you can see where you died without needing to reach exactly that point again or without really needing to recover it. HK was basically mandatory since it limits your spells and heals, Blasphemous is similar since regrets limit your magic bar. Afterimage just takes any XP you collected before hitting your next level, which I cared about exactly twice (and only because leveling up is a free heal) so I ignored it the whole game. Knowing where you died, seeing it on a map, and even exactly where in a room when approaching it, helps orient things and can serve as a checkpoint when trying to get through a tough area. "Never been past this point before, but now I've got my Bloodstain, and I have 3 more health potions than last time, lets see how far we can get  "
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Jul 16, 2023 16:26
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Morpheus posted:Conversely, I hate the bloodstain mechanic, specifically in metroidvanias. So many times I've made my way to some corner in HK only to die and think "Well, I don't want to go back there" but I know that now I either have the choice of exploring elsewhere and enjoying it or making my way back to a place I don't want to go just so I don't waste a bunch of money. You also have the third choice of giving the NPC in Dirtmouth a rancid egg so he can just bring the shade there instead. That way if you're just exploring in the rear end-end of nowhere, die to a spike, and don't particularly feel like going all the way there, you can still recover all that geo. Blapshemous similarly has these statues that let you pay currency to undo a Regret, so if you died stupidly in a pit someplace you can choose to pay a small chunk of cash to get your mana bar back.
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Jul 16, 2023 18:14
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I think it should still be a toggle option for people who don't like it, though. I rarely play any of these games on Hard or higher because I don't find it fun, so I think it'd be cool if you could just have an option for the bloodstain mechanic in accessibility. Instead of being all-or-nothing, you could have a couple toggles like "shade on death y/n" "geo tied to shade y/n" "mana tied to shade y/n" and mix-and-match.
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Jul 16, 2023 18:47
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Fuzz posted:The only objectively bad design is mandatory knock back on hit which you can't recover from in any way coupled with instant death pits. Souldier's Fire Temple is full of floating/roaming fireball enemies that are invulnerable 90% of the time and if you get stuck between two of them, they will juggle you until your health bar finally empties or you manage to get a dash in that doesn't take you directly into another one of the fireballs. Getting wombo combo'd by a couple of those things after just beating their stupid-rear end instakill "escape sequence" through a rising lava level really made me question if I wanted to beat the game. Then I reached the poison swamp level. So anyway today I'm starting Dave the Diver
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Jul 17, 2023 16:58
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Owl Inspector posted:I actually liked the poison swamp, wasn’t a fan of a lot of the game’s soundtrack but I liked the vibes of that one Sup fellow wizard  Wizard is super fun because I spend most of the game dashing past enemies and exploding them afterward, and wearing any and all stuff to help facilitate that. I haven't looked up what the other classes played like in case there was replay value. Scout is the ranger right? I almost picked Scout just because I like bows. I might still beat Souldiers, but putting fire area/swamp area right next to each other took the wind outta my sails. I thought the music has been pretty good so far, except for the Great Pyramid, where the track itself is good but the flute (pungi?) synth they've chosen just sounds like a Nokia phone lol
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Jul 17, 2023 17:40
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virtualboyCOLOR posted:The map system fails at the most fundamental level of being a map. It is so radically different from the expectation / norm in ways that are worse that it fails at the most basic level to be the thing it is called.  the map that clearly marks out hazards/benches/hot springs/npcs/stagway stations/trams, labels sub areas within each main area and fills in clear symbols to represent landmarks around the world, shows how everything interconnects, and has pins for you to mark your own locations on the map, "fails at the most fundamental level of being a map... it is a map system as much a hotdog is a sandwich. if that is a philosophy you subscribe to, that's fine" e: meanwhile, I've seen a couple different people say "the map in Ender Lilies is good" and have been looking at this poo poo for a little over an hour now 
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Jul 17, 2023 18:59
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Morpheus posted:I mean in this game's defense, is there any other info you need to know here? It lacks the specific terrain layouts of the HK map but it tells you everything you need to know, including the best feature which is if you're missing anything. It's basically giving me the opposite information that I want to know this early in the game I like HK's map because I can glance at almost any shape and know exactly what room it is, which makes the world feel very connected and memorable. Keeping track of the paths just out-of-reach and where obstacles come up is left to the player, and when you come back to handle those things, you can take the pins off the map. EL's map shows me the collectibles and side paths to come back to, but every room being a box means nothing to me. I've got no clue which box is which as far as room size, features, enemies, etc. I'd rather have an actual map of the landscape than a series of checkboxes in map form
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Jul 17, 2023 19:47
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Yeah there's zero problems with momentum/weight in Hollow Knight. When doing the White Palace/Path of Pain I was using the charm that slowly regens health, so I spent time inbetween attempts clicking the stick back and forth/dashing as close to the ground as possible/trying to consistently hit the same spot when tapping A during a walljump, and everything about it is fine-tuned to a ridiculous degree. I still think there's problems with some of the precision that Path of Pain asks you to do toward the end, and there's genuinely problems with the walljumping and pogoing mechanics, but movement everywhere else besides those very specific sections felt very fluid and exact. You move laterally for as long as you hold the stick. You stay in the air as long as you press the jump button. You're constantly moving through the world at a brisk pace between dashes, pogos, and other movement mechanics. All of that can be sped up with charms that improve your mobility for one charm slot each, in case the game's still too slow for you. Hollow Knight has plenty of faults, but you're playing bizarro world Hollow Knight if the movement is "incredibly slow and floaty"
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Jul 18, 2023 02:34
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I've been misled by not reading steam store pages, Dave the Diver is not a metroidvania, it is in fact a fishing-themed roguelite collectathon. It is not bad, it's very very good, but I definitely thought I'd be doing more exploration and problem-solving. Every new feature you get includes a forced tutorial where you cannot stray from the step-by-step instructions on how to use it, and you cannot progress at all through the linear chapter-based story until you reach certain checkpoints based on what day it is. That being said, you get to capture some of the wildest/scariest abominations living deep on the ocean floor and have Bacho feed it to some rando that'll snap a selfie with it and post it on Cooksta with a caption like "can't believe I'm eating jellyfish 🤮🥵😱 but this sushi place makes it taste amazing! 😍😩😭" for 4 likes the jellyfish in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8fs_uqLANA So to get back to Metroidvanias, I started up Aeterna Noctis today to give it a try. I started playing a ton of Metroidvanias earlier this year by beating Hollow Knight first, since I'd never played it before and Silksong seems like it'll be coming out some time soon. Out of all the games I've played/beaten since then (Axiom Verge 1 & 2, Ori 1 & 2, Blasphemous, Metroid: Dread, SteamWorld Dig 2, Transiruby, Afterimage, Souldiers) Aeterna Noctis is the only one that feels almost the same as playing Hollow Knight again. The very first thing's it's teaching me are "you can jump higher by holding A or shorthop by barely tapping it, your movement lets you turn and stop on a dime (both in the air or on the ground), you can down-attack in midair to pogo off both enemies and certain obstacles" poo poo, I thought for a moment that attacking the enemies felt familiar, so I planted my feet on the ground and started attacking a slime to see if it also gives you the minor bits of knockback when your sword connects with an enemy (something I hadn't noticed in other games until Hollow Knight) and sure enough! I hit a slime 3 times and ended up a few pixels back every time I hit them with my sword. HK's jump is way higher if you hold it down the entire time, but the similarities are striking. Which: also not bad! Very very good! I'm excited to try this out, I wanted something that can properly scratch the HK itch
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Jul 20, 2023 19:51
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Owl Inspector posted:Aeterna noctis definitely has some really precise controls and earns the right to have platforming as hard as it does. but I didn’t regret playing on the difficulty with easier room layouts, because it’s a metroidvania and I don’t want to have to do egregiously hard platforming every single time I backtrack for secrets. I actually picked the "Noctis" difficulty on this one, despite never liking to play on Hard Mode most of the time, because I figured if I'm in for a penny I may as well be in for a pound. It looks like it's pretty nice, too, every time I pause I've got the Difficulty option right there in front of me Fatty posted:If this thing doesn't chase its prey to explode at them I'll be sorely disappointed. lol you fuckin nailed it, if you see one of these things vs. one of the regular comb jellyfish, these are the ones that'll literally fire themselves up and chase you down to explode on you.
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Jul 20, 2023 20:42
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My one complaint so far is the dash, you can't input a direction and dash that way, you have to first face that direction and then dash. It's just going to take some getting used to, it means I can't dash out mid-combo, I have to turn then dash. Makes combat seem a little more mindful since you can't instantly dodge a wind-up, you have to anticipate it
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Jul 20, 2023 21:59
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So far this is the only game I've played lately that's been crash-prone. I've had it hard-crash once (wasn't too bad, was just leaving one of the thrones by the cemetary) and just now, after using the pogo ability to make a jump I shouldn't have made yet, got softlocked on a loading screen between zones. 
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Jul 21, 2023 00:03
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It's been much better after I had steam verify integrity and all that! I also beat a boss early enough that the game gave me a cheevo for it, so that was neat. Is there any point to these Time Trials? I've done two so far, and I'm never gonna get Diamond until I've studied game tape. It doesn't seem like there's rewards unless I'm missing something, just a global leaderboard to brag on?
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Jul 21, 2023 02:10
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Aeterna Noctis does not gently caress around  I thought it was funny when, on the way through the cemetery, there were spear traps similar to the Path of Pain in Hollow Knight. There's even a section that has spears almost exactly like one of the gently caress-you hallways in White Palace. Last night I beat an underground worm boss, did the entire platforming section after it, and I think that might actually be harder than White Palace. It involves some precise jumps/walljumps/firing arrows on fast minecarts. Luckily this game is a lot more forgiving and checkpoints are frequent, you respawn at the infinitely more common purple streetlamps instead of at the Thrones (this game's benches) You also don't unlock all new abilities immediately, you find keys that unlock doors back at a central location which hold powers for you. So when you find one in a dungeon, you have to go back for it. I beat the Forge boss last night, and got another boss achievement for killing a boss without getting X upgrade, because I collected the key and promptly loving forgot about it lol  Another point in its favor is that the upgrades you warp back to collect will make an area easier, but they aren't necessary. The rest of the Forge was easy and the boss wasn't too bad once you got the patterns down, and you can take advantage of some moments you'd normally be dodging between boss phases to deal extra damage/move around better with pogos bawk fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Jul 21, 2023 |
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Jul 21, 2023 17:18
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virtualboyCOLOR posted:- Bosses are easy but hard to tell you are beating them. There's essentially no indication you are beating the boss until the boss flat out says "you win". This happened with every boss I fought. Dunno if you've missed their posts but somebody mentioned the damage numbers as you hit the enemies change color depending on how much health they have. White is full health, orange is halfway, red is nearly dead. It helped me gauge a couple bosses that were kicking my rear end to see if I was even getting close, and if I could get them to orange then I knew I could beat them with some more practice.
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Jul 22, 2023 04:02
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virtualboyCOLOR posted:Maybe it was the amount of particles but I never paid attention to the numbers. I know there were "phases" because the arenas would sometime change, but the bosses themselves felt very static to me. Not sure how to describe it. Just one minute I'm following the patterns and then it felt like the game just went "ok thats enough, you can move on now" I just beat the West Wall boss (same as the East Wall boss) and I don't think you're wrong about this, I think bosses might be locked into a pattern before finally dying. I had this boss on red health, and not just-newly-red, it had been red for a few scythe hits. It finally did the attack where it stays on the bottom of the screen, so I tried to damage-rush it and even with over 50% crit rate with the ability that does an additional hit on crit, it wouldn't die and I got killed by one of the shadow projectiles. Two attempts later, I hit it far fewer times (and not with the scythe, even) during the pattern where its on the side wall, and after the pattern finished, it finally played the death cutscene. I think if a boss has an attack that doesn't end until X number of times through its attack patterns, it might not die until its back at "resting" position or something
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Jul 22, 2023 16:43
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I'm getting really over the inconsistent healing in AN, though. Same thing existing in Hollow Knight was also a pain in the rear end. If you're going to make your game difficult, I'm cool with that, but if your healing options are "you can only heal with these extremely limited health potions or fill up this meter by hitting enemies" then you can gently caress right off. Afterimage did this better, because you could go stock up on an infinite number of health potions, but you were limited on how many kinds/how many individual potions you could take with you, as well as the regular guaranteed heals after a checkpoint. That game took it to an extreme where you could have 13 free heals + four d-pad directions to fill with different types of health potions, but AN and HK have the seesaw balanced on the completely other end. Aeterna Noctis copied HK's heal wholesale, warts and all, and it's absolutely one of the worst mechanics from HK in hindsight. If I want to go into a boss fight (this Beholder in the Dream Palace is kicking my rear end) then give me my loving heals. I shouldn't have to go on a smoke break to let my heal meter recharge before attempting a boss again. I am consistently one hit away from killing it, and dying on the very last phase, because the last bouncy ball section goes on for an eternity and the patterns they bounce around in are brutal to the point of being unfair. I've tried moving around, sticking to every corner, using the invincibility shield the game gives you, this boss is just Chip Damage: The Fight and eight health pips doesn't seem like enough! e:i just lost a perfect run because I went hitless into the last phase, got juggled by the bouncy balls, made it out the other side with a couple health pips left, and this motherfucker insta-teleports away and restarts the damage phase. On second thought, if you're going to make a bonus boss this bullshit, put a loving checkpoint next to it.
bawk fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Jul 22, 2023 |
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Jul 22, 2023 17:45
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