I saw a let's play of it by Jim Sterling, he beat it in 1,5 hours. One thing I noticed with the game was that it seemed excessively segmented and almost arcady in the way they sequenced the levels, would you agree with that Flawless?
(This post was last modified: 05-31-2014, 03:12 PM by eliasfrost.)
(05-31-2014, 08:03 PM)FlawlessHappiness Wrote: Can't say I didn't enjoy it! I really liked the story.
If it's too much for you then buy it when it's cheaper
Don't get me wrong, I'm all in for a good story. But 1.5 hour seems way too short. Even Dear Esther was longer (I think it took me 1.5-2 hours). For example the Pigs (again, story focused) at the same price takes something like 4 hours. Anyway, I guess the steam summer sale might make it look a better deal to me.
(This post was last modified: 05-31-2014, 10:11 PM by plutomaniac.)
(05-30-2014, 02:42 PM)plutomaniac Wrote: Interesting. So how short would you say it is?
Paddy what did you think?
Sorry for the late reply man!
I finished the game in 1.7 hours, according to Steam. It's probably not worth the full price, not so much because of the game's length, but because of the plethora of game-breaking bugs and physics issues it currently has. If those get fixed (and I believe a patch is coming) it might be acceptable to pay full price if you have the money to spend, but if you're weighing your options and can only afford one game for the next few weeks, I'd wait for a sale. There's a free DLC coming eventually, so the game's length might even out a little.
It's a good game, I enjoyed it a lot, but I was left feeling a little disappointed when I finished it, mitigated only slightly by its strong and satisfying ending. I think the current MetaCritic scores are about right (they're hovering between 65 and 70).
My review (there are no spoilers, I just put it in spoiler tags to make the post smaller!)
Spoiler below!
The first and last levels are excellent, but everything in between feels like a different game entirely. If you played the demo, the point at which it ends is the beginning of the mediocre part of the game. The rest of the game just doesn't seem to match up; it's way too fantastical and dreamy, completely ruining the engaging experience of familiar domesticity and violating the child-like version of reality which was so expertly crafted during the game's opening.
For example, climbing up on a chair to open the kitchen door or exploring the inside of an impossibly large closet was satisfying and coherent; climbing up on a barrel to collect a magic key in a nightmarish LSD-fantasy world feels like I'm playing a PS2 game. It was fun, don't get me wrong, but I didn't have that same sense of "wow, this is so fresh and new!" that I did at first. I think the "demo" level was a perfect corruption of the world we experienced during the opening scenes; as nightmarish as it seemed, it still felt real and plausible, if only to a child. I think they went waaaay too far with the fantasy stuff in subsequent levels. It was more akin to the level design of Clive Barker's Undying rather than a skewed childhood vision of the real world.
In a sense, the experience reminds me of the first time I played Half-Life 2. The opening levels in City 17 were amazing to me, the most engaging thing I'd ever played in a game up to that point. As soon as I got a gun and started the FPS portion of the game, all of that awesomeness seemed to have been undone and I was back to playing a standard shooter. I loved HL2, but I loved City 17 more, and it was as if there were two very different games lurking beneath the surface. I have the same issue with AtS.
The ending is excellent. The story has been derided by the gaming press, but I liked it a lot. I also liked that I didn't have to spend hours reading notes or watching cut-scenes in order to understand it, which seems to be something most games insist upon. AtS shows that you can convey a complex and meaningful story without lecturing the player, and without using a single line of text.
As far as the horror elements go, rather than outright terrifying the player the game feels more like one of those annoying "twisted fairytale" movies by Tim Burton, except it has the very real benefit of not starring Johnny Depp. Enemy encounters are indeed pretty tense, but they occur even less often than they do in Pigs.
Because the best part of the game is at the very start, it makes me wonder if the idea of playing as a toddler can only be taken so far before the fact of your being a toddler becomes inconsequential. Being a child in the later portions of this game is as perfunctory and needless as being a mage in Call of Duty. You don't feel like a mage when you're lobbing grenades in CoD, and you don't feel like a child when you're crawling through most of Among the Sleep's weird levels. You have the romper suit, the teddy bear and the child-like voice, but nothing would change if you removed all of those childhood signifiers - except in the opening levels and the ending.
(06-01-2014, 04:34 PM)plutomaniac Wrote: Are you sure it's not 163.4? Ha-ha, how do you score it?
Ahhh, it's my secret uncrackable review scoring system!
Nah, I'd give it about 70/100
(06-02-2014, 08:18 AM)Robby Wrote: The ending is quite the plot-twist. To be honest, even I didn't expect it to turn out the way it did. Not spoiling anything lolz.
Same here, the ending was really strong. Did you do what I did, and...
Search
Member List
IRC
Help
![[Image: indiedb_88x31.png]](http://media.indiedb.com/images/global/indiedb_88x31.png)
![[Image: o8JPTkt.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/o8JPTkt.jpg)
Frictional Games |
Forum |
Privacy Policy |
Dev Blog |
Dev Wiki |
Support |
