Reply To: First impressions
I’m still undecided as to what my opinion of these types of games are, with their evil puzzles and lots of ways to screw yourself over.
In some ways I’m reminded of a lot of old action games on console and arcade from the era.
You weren’t supposed to beat them on your first run, you were supposed to keep trying them over and over, finding new secrets and items along the way and getting a little further each time.
The main thing that bothers me is consistency and signalling. It’s when the game makes a point of teaching you the logic of its mechanics, then randomly expects you to discard that for a single case.
I’m sure there’s more examples, but the one that comes to my mind is after you crash land. I instinctively type “look around” on every new screen, but in this case you won’t see the survival kit unless you type “look at pod”.
There’s not even any puzzle justification for this. It just arbitrarily changes the rules for a single case.
That’s the main thing that bothers me – when you actually had the solution to a puzzle, but the game makes you feel like you’re on completely the wrong track just because you didn’t do some pointless thing exactly right.
Playing over and over again wouldn’t bother me so much if they did that better.