This game stresses me out

[firefyte]

#12268

It might be me being old, but I’m feeling quite stressed in parts of this game, I don’t remember feeling this when I played UAKM and Overseer.

Maybe I shouldn’t have chosen ‘gamer mode’?

I hope this doesn’t reflect other people’s playthrough.

[Tijn]

#12269

I’ve yet to start, but choosing “gamer mode” sounds like it might be a bad idea haha

I’m hoping to get around checking this out in the coming days, and when I do I’ll definitely go for the lighter “entertainment mode” first, that seems a lot more doable for a first-time player like me.

[Pix]

#12270

It’s quite a relaxing game in my eyes with a few actiony bits I guess. One of the features in gamer mode from what I recall is getting more points for solving some of the puzzles quickly. Is that the stressful part? There is no penalty for taking forever other than points here so there isn’t a real rush. You can also swap to the easier mode at any time but can’t swap back again. Hints are disabled in gamer mode but you can of course save your game, get your hint then reload again.

Gamer mode has a handful of extra bits – off the top of my head I can only remember them near the end of the game where there are some extra rooms in the final section.

[firefyte]

#12275

I think it must be related to spikes while playing in dosbox (max cycles dosbox staging), as I noticed timed puzzles running out of time before the time is up, and movement might spike and feels unreliable (using o.g. controls), especially on the final stretch where you have a movement-critical puzzle.

[Dreamkid]

#12283

I think I read gamer mode includes some extra content or locations or something although the manual sort of recommended it only for “experienced players” or those who have already played through entertainment mode.

[Xanarki]

#12288

Yeah, as already hinted at, Gamer Mode does increase the difficulty via the inability to get hints in-game and certain puzzles being timed (whereas in the normal mode they’re not timed at all or they have a more generous time limit). The tradeoff is that there’s extra puzzles tossed into the game, although it’s not a lot.

I’m uncertain if any of the extra locales/puzzles are hugely relevant to the story, though. The “normal” mode already contains plenty of locations and endings, at least.

So all in all, Pandora Directive did pretty decent in the replayability dept. Although tbh I’m not sure if I have the resilience to re-play it through that 2nd mode lol.