Blog: "Finding videogame's true voice"

[hollowleviathan]

I'm confused, Xiphirx, because it felt fairly similar to Penumbra and Amnesia to me, right down to the dip in variety/plot pacing in the middle.

[xiphirx]

Well... I'll explain the clunky part.

It felt clunky mainly because of the game's mechanics. I for one thought that they strove for too much realism.

Taking a break every minute or so to warm up is not a mechanic, its a chore. I want to progress further, but I need to stop and wait to warm up? Sure, thats realistic but what do you want in a game? You want the enjoyments of a real experience, minus the annoyances.

I didn't get far enough to the combat, but the melee combat looked a bit like Bioshock's. I felt that it was a good intention to have first person melee combat, but It doesn't quite work out... You see, when you have first person combat, you dont have much control of your shots per se... and you quickly become bored of your character repeating the same motion, and spamming the left mouse button. This does not generate fun gameplay at all. If melee is to be done in the first person perspective, it must be done the way Frictional has made it. Frictional's system allows you to have much more control of your maneuvers, making it a much more enjoyable gameplay element.

The guns in the game also suffer from "too realistic". In some of the videos I watched out of curiousity, I found that a gun required you to shoot, reload, shoot, reload just like a musketeer (my memory on this is a little fuzzy). This is a dual edged sword. In the pro side of things, it makes you more cautious, and more immersed. In the con side of things, it makes you frustrated. The pros outweigh the cons, but I felt that the whole reloading after one shot was very clunky. I would have at least made it two shots... :/

The story was quite confusing, just like Penumbra. The difference was that I could not get things cleared up in the amount I played like in Penumbra.


I also felt that saving the various people you find was more of a chore. They should have had greater meaning attached to them rather to just cross a broken catwalk.

Please don't go flame happy on this reply, I honestly didn't get far into the game because I was so bored playing it. Games like Penumbra and Amnesia pulled me in more and more D:

[hollowleviathan]

You can perform 4 different attacks per melee item depending on which direction you're holding when you click, and if I recall, they each had different swing and reach, meaning you were missing out on a lot of combat nuance.

There are a few guns that require you to reload often, mostly the flare gun (which, I recall, did have 2 shorts per reload) and pistol, but I don't remember any one shot clips. The main arms are rifles with 10-50 length clips. I found that I did not need to replenish my heat that often, and it returned fairly rapidly, making it a short and trivial affair.

I felt that rescuing the lives of the hapless and stalwart sailors was as much a reward as unlocking the path to progress. I wasn't there to shoot up the place, but discover it's secrets and redeem it's crew.

I hope I'm not flaming you, just providing my disparate take on your complaints. Obviously it's to taste, but I'm sad you couldn't enjoy a game I thought was really quite good.

[xiphirx]

I might end up finishing it.. but It just isn't so inviting to play for me :/