@Ralizah Well said.
Subject matter, setting, and tone also play a role in personal impression. Another reason the game resonated with me was the interesting setting. You mentioned Soma, which perhaps I need to try, but I just don’t particularly like horror and scary or gruesome settings. I really should give it a try, since it sounds like a story-heavy, walking sim type of game I guess, which is right up my alley. I’m just no fan of the macabre, which is why WRoEF was a nice fit for my tastes because of the almost casual treatment of death, fear, and tragedy. Occasionally I get in a mood for something frightening though.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@Th3solution Soma is definitely a creepy game. It's from the devs who created Amnesia: The Dark Descent, after all, which practically wrote the book on independently-developed horror games at a time when the genre seemed like it was dying. With that said, it is, at heart, an interesting existentialist sci-fi story, and if the scary monsters attacking you is what's putting you off, you should know they released a "safe mode" that keeps you safe from monster attacks throughout the game.
I believe this mode has subsequently been introduced to the PS4 version of the game as well.
I thought that the horror bits added to the atmosphere, but I'm also a horror fanatic who loves scary and gruesome subject matter. It's nice that this mode exists for people who just want the story without having to hide and run for their lives.
@Ralizah@ellsworth004@RR529
Oh, and just for completeness sake. I’m on my PS4 now and under “Settings” —> “Sharing and Broadcasts” —> “SHARE button Control Type” —>
You are given two options for “Standard” which is press of the button is display menu and press and hold is take a screenshot. Vs “Easy Screenshots” where press is screenshot and press and hold is display menu. In both options the press twice mechanic is to start and stop saving a video clip.
Just wanted to clarify that.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Oh, and @Th3solution don't worry about snipping up your man-card. Just throw the thing away. Life is much too brief to spend it trying to conform to outdated social norms.
Currently Playing: Resident Evil Village: Gold Edition
@Th3solution I confirm the Ps4 version has the Safe Mode too. I think it's a good idea since it gives you the chance to find all the notes you may have missed while running away from enemies.
Wow, what a surprise this game was to me. I'd only ever heard good things about it and fancied something a bit different after The Division 2. This was totally it.
The artwork and music on this game are just fantastic. The story is intriguing but always left that little bit vague. The combat is sharp, and the platforming also solid.
I probably enjoyed this most in the first half of the game as I explored the huge map. It has a unique setup in that you can only unlock maps for each area by finding the mapmaker who will sell you an incomplete section of map which you fill in yourself. Each area is really distinctive from lush garden worlds to fungus covered caves and a giant beehive among areas. The enemies in each are really distinct and there's plenty of them (over 150 enemy types!)
The Metroidvania style does lead to some annoyances in that there can be a lot of backtracking to revisit areas you couldn't previously reach now you have a new ability. This was made worse by the fact that the fast travel stops are very spread out so you could spend quite a while getting back to places. You also have to remember where these places even are! (map markers help a lot!!)
The combat is good fun with the variety of charms you acquire giving quite a range of play styles. The bosses are well varied with some being a real challenge, particularly the optional DLC ones. The Colosseum of Fools is a good challenge with multiple waves of enemies; the Grimm Troupe DLC adds an especially tough boss in Nightmare King Grimm; and the Godseeker pantheons see you take on the games bosses back to back. The latter is what stopped me going for platinum as having to re-do entire runs has just lost any semblance of fun now.
The platforming is also neatly done and has devilish sections, particularly in the White Palace, and especially on the appropriately titled (but entirely optional) Path of Pain which has multiple checkpoints but rather harshly ends with a tough fight (which if you lose, sends you right back to the beginning).
All in all, this is a spectacular game and even more impressive that it was mostly made by just two people. I actually feel bad I only paid £5 for this but am delighted to hear a sequel is on the way.
Did you do the path of pain? That really was brutal and the fight at the end was a real naughty move.
I always seem to take my time with games but did milk this for all its worth. Nightmare King Grimm took me plenty of attempts, Trial of Fools similarly (damn the section with no floor!), and the pantheons I did do took a little time. Plus, I did stuff like delivering the delicate flower etc etc.
It is pretty amazing how much time I got out of it though!
@ThrillhoI killed him. I figured he had the right to go out in a blaze of glory instead of being forced to live on in that crapsack world. Although, from what I hear, he adjusts to not dying rather well, so my choice might not have been the best one.
I didn't. I did almost none of the DLC content. For some reason, I had a difficult time locating it. I'm definitely planning on replaying it some day and completing all of the DLC content, though.
I didn't quite complete the Colosseum of Fools. Once I completed the Trial of the Conqueror, I had what I wanted from it (the last piece of Pale Ore).
Even in this sort of incomplete state, though, I got over 30 hours out of it.
You're absolutely right that one of the best aspects of the game is the visual design. It's simply stunning looking. A good reminder that you can create something beautiful without pouring a ton of money into it, and that being a small indie dev is no excuse for your game looking bad.
Currently Playing: Resident Evil Village: Gold Edition
Gravity Rush Remastered. Beat it on Friday. Can't believe it took me so long to try it (or finish it. Bought it in December, started it in March, finished it in May.).
Story: A girl wakes up in a place known as Heksville without her memory. Because of that, she simply goes by Kat. Without any real time to ponder anything, she has to defend Heksville from a threat dubbed "the Nevi" using her ability tomanipulate Gravity around her. The story mostly deals with Kat saving Heksville from the Nevi while slowly getting pieces of a bigger picture.
The story is alright for a game like this. I found myself entertained by it, and it felt like there was a bit of setting up for more, which I'm hoping gets solved in Gravity Rush 2.
Kat herself was a fun enough main character, but I thought the rest of the cast was great, especially with how she reacted to them: Syd, the bumbling cop, Aki, the expensive fortune teller, and I would gladly buy more games with Raven in them.
Gameplay: Gravity Rush is a (Thankfully smaller) open world game with, as you might guess from the title, is all about mud. Gravity is how you traverse, fight, and carry stuff. You'd think a game that focuses on freely manipulating gravity would be a disasterpiece to control, but aside from some niggles in combat, it's done pretty well after some time playing.
Kat is capable of flying around and moving up walls and buildings thanks to her powers. You use R1 to activate it, and you basically shoot her body by aiming to your target and pressing R1 again. If she hits a surface, she sticks to it. She also has a slide move that enables faster ground movement, which can also be used on buildings. I didn't use this very often outside of challenges though. There's also a stasis field that Kat uses to pick up objects and people. This is also a combat technique, as you can shoot the objects at the Nevi.
This is a good time to talk about Kat's combat abilities. On the ground she has melee attacks, but most of the fighting will likely be airborne, where she can gravity kick enemies (imagine Bruce Lee getting shot like a cannonball) and has three special attacks to use as you progress in the story. Air combat felt a shade iffy in this game to me. I mostly relied on the Gravity Kick, which depending on how mobile the enemies are, is about 80% accurate. It auto locks on the enemy, but it can easily miss if they move a bit or have a small enough weak point. Personally, I gutted it out for most of the game, making my shots count, but near the end it was a bit frustrating to miss kicks and projectiles, since you fight a lot of Nevi by that point.
As for total content, there isn't a whole lot, but I wasn't bothered by it. Aside from the main missions, there's 3 side stories with two missions apiece (In the original Vita game these were DLC), each having an outfit to go with it. There's plenty of challenges to test your powers, and there's one side quest where you need to find someone 16 times.
Sparkles and noises: The graphics definitely look like a PS3 era game, but they're not bad. Heksville and it's districts are pretty colorful and rendered in a nice cel shaded look. The game's presentation as a whole resembles a comic book. One of my favorite things here is that far off buildings are simply rendered as lines and slowly pop in more as you approach. It takes a usually ugly reminder of system limitations and makes it look a bit more eye pleasing.
The soundtrack has a more grand feel to it than I would expect, like it feels it was meant for a bigger game than this, but I appreciate it anyway. It sounds calming when you explore, and epic when you fight.
If you're willing to adjust to the control, Gravity Rush is a fun adventure on PS4. It's lighter feel definitely makes a good time for a calm day.
"We don't get to choose how we start in this life. Real 'greatness' is what you do with the hand you're dealt." -Victor Sullivan "Building the future and keeping the past alive are one and the same thing." -Solid Snake
@Ralizah yeah, the location of most of the DLC is pretty obtuse. The game likes hiding stuff behind fake walls but some of these were in places I would never have found without a guide. Watching videos of the path of pain brings me out in cold sweats now. And it’s all for a two second cutscene!
Nightmare King Grimm is a real challenge for the Grimm Troupe DLC But, again, I have no idea how you’d think to trigger it without knowing how to do so.
Level of completion: Achieved the best ending and defeated all bosses (including the optional final boss) on Furi difficulty. There are other modes, such as an unlockable difficulty, speedrun mode, etc., but I didn't bother very much with those.
What is it?: A cool indie boss rush. You play as a mysterious man fighting his way out of an incredibly elaborate space prison that is guarded by nine warriors who have dedicated their lives to keeping you from escaping.
Things I liked:
For an indie title, the presentation is pretty genuinely stunning. You can tell it's not a big budget effort, but the art design is fantastic, and the character models are quite easy on the eyes.
The music, similarly, is quite impressive, with a number of contributions from exciting new synthwave musicians, including Waveshaper and Carpenter Brut.
There's a good deal of spoken dialogue in this game, and it's uniformly well-delivered and interestingly written.
The real dish on what's actually happening in the game isn't handed to you on a platter, and you're able to gradually read between the lines, so to speak, and figure out what's going on as the game progresses. The story itself is quite interesting, even if it does have some presentation issues.
Controls are razor-tight in this game. They'd have to be.
The battles in this game are simple enough mechanically, but also exhilarating due to the split-second timing required throughout. You'll learn to expertly switch between twin-stick shooting, melee sword combat, and dashing to evade enemy moves or sneak around them for a devastating surprise attack. And you'll really have to memorize enemy tells and become comfortable with your moveset, because defeat comes upon you like lightning in this game.
Despite the high skill level of the gameplay, it never felt unfair. You learn the rules early, and its up to you to twist them to your advantage to reign supreme. You'll learn early on about the value of baiting enemy attacks, for example.
Reloading to the beginning of a battle from the start menu is almost instantaneous, which is good, because, unless you're really, really skilled, you'll be doing this a lot.
This game also takes inspiration from bullet hell shooters, and every boss' final phase usually involves a sequence where you're desperately having to weave between countless enemy bullets or lasers to survive.
Things I disliked:
While the story and worldbuilding itself is interesting, the way the story is presented in... underwhelming. I didn't mind the gradual drip of information related to what was going on as you progressed through the game, but the ending is incredibly anti-climactic. The real final boss is even hidden behind an optional ending. What particularly hurts about that is that the penultimate boss (the last mandatory boss encounter, though) is, far and away, the easiest one in the game. While I often struggled mightily to best a lot of the warriors in this game, and even died a number of times against the tutorial boss, I didn't die once against the final required boss encounter in this game. I do think there are thematic reasons for this, as she's very much presented as an amateur and a weakling, but it doesn't take away from the sense of disappointment I felt upon beating her.
Despite the interesting characters on display here, the one that accompanies you the most never gets a proper character arc, which is unfortunate, because it seemed like the game had been hinting at him playing a much larger role in the story than he ended up adopting.
The Furier difficulty option that unlocks after you complete the game once. Granted, I don't object to its existence, but the game is already reasonably difficult on the normal difficulty, and, when I tried beating the TUTORIAL BOSS on this higher difficulty level to see see what it was like (I've S-ranked a few of Cuphead's bosses on Expert difficulty and figured it couldn't be any worse than that), I discovered that he was almost more difficult to beat than the late-game bosses on the normal difficulty level. So... I won't be torturing myself like that.
The dash in this game only executes when you release the button, instead of when you first press it. I get why this is (like attacks, you can charge up your dashes, which is a necessary skill to master if you're going to dodge some utterly brutal attacks in this game), but it doesn't make it less annoying when the dash command always feels like it has the tiniest delay to it.
For some reason, when you beat a boss and are walking to the next one, the game transitions to fixed camera angles, like in a Resident Evil game. Aesthetically, this is fine, but fixed camera angles without tank controls kind of suck, and sometimes they're positioned in such a way that it's difficult to tell if I'm going the right way or heading back where I came from.
Conclusion: A superior effort all-around that is hampered by a small number of issues related to the narrative presentation and character development. Really impressed with Furi and am eager to play the developer's upcoming RPG now.
@ellsworth004 I play a fair number of independently developed games. More often than not, I find that a lot of bigger budget games from major Western studios just don't resonate with me.
Currently Playing: Resident Evil Village: Gold Edition
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