The lack of gameplay is fine, and very much important to call out for any new players. There’s a whole genre of “you’re playing a movie” that SOMA fits nicely into
I think a masterpiece game has to offer more than just story. Additionally I think something like Firewatch does a much better job at telling a compelling story for a walking simulator. But clearly this is why “objective” masterpiece is hard to define, as nothing is really objective in these opinions.
Other games I’d consider better in the walking simulator category:
Personally I think story can make a game stand out far more than graphics or gameplay. I also disagree that the game boiled down to one question. While it was the primary focus of the narrative, the underwater laboratories and world building/history was amazing.
I don’t disagree, but my opinion is gameplay (or the interactive nature) of games is what sets them apart from other mediums so would be a deciding factor in a masterpiece game.
But I guess it largely just boils down to the fact Soma just didn’t do much for me.
I’d recommend playing SOMA again, but this time get extremely baked before you play. I’m joking (not really) but I found that game’s story so profound and interesting. It was like the most twisted unsettling environment I’ve ever seen. It had basic walking sim mechanics but being able to explore the environment and look at things up close was just really enjoyable.
Also, I Inverse Tonemapped the game from SDR to HDR, so while not the best use of HDR, the added contrast gave the game a more pleasing spooky vibe. I also ran it at 4x DLDSR so it was very sharp.
The setting was definitely interesting. However the main story was a bit too much of a one trick pony - who is the real you.
!Additionally they kinda cheat in the story telling around who lives on. It’s not random chance, each time they replicate their memories it just makes a clone. The original was never going to make it to the end.!<
Dude that’s literally the point! It throws in your face that it’s copy and paste, not cut and paste, yet your character Simon refuses to acknowledge it. Same with the survivors who killed themselves after being scanned for the ark because they wanted to achieve “continuity.” It’s explained but they just can’t accept it because it means they’re going to die.
Yeah, but my point is that it’s apparent from scene 1 when “Simon” wakes up the first time. Just cause he doesn’t get it doesn’t mean the player doesn’t have to deal with the same concept getting rehashed over and over.
There was no build up of the concept or iteration on the idea. It’s just the same arc from the first 10-15 minutes of the gameplay playing out again and again. Except they swap it up at the end to try to make it hit harder, but to me it just felt played out.
I get why people like it, but it just didn’t have the pay off for me.
I’ve been craving another experience like SOMA but unfortunately nothing even comes close. It was probably the coolest and most disturbing story I’ve ever seen. Finishing that game gave me an existential crisis for like 2 days after. It was that good.
It's good to know this thirty year old game will be ten in a couple of months. I love it, but I absolutely have never beat it because I cannot get past the fkin dummy! I have tried three times, three separate times. I gave up and just figure I can acknowledge a game is good, while being absolutely unable to beat it.
I think I’m kind of done with Supergiant regardless. In both Bastion and Transistor, it felt like they had two out of three components to their gameplay loop but were missing something to prevent it from feeling repetitive; despite short runtimes, both very much did feel repetitive. I didn’t even try Pyre, and I have little faith it would be for me. I do love roguelikes and can enjoy -lites from time to time as well, and Hades got a lot of buzz. However, I actually quite disliked worlds 3 and 4, and the level generation is among the worst I’ve seen in the genre. I get the sense that Hades is probably most responsible for people who claim they want “handcrafted levels” as opposed to procedural generation, because perhaps those people haven’t seen it done well if they’ve only ever played Hades, a game with level generation so monotonous that the voice actor will call out a room we all recognize.
To be honest, I get what you're saying here although I've played all their games. I think of the bunch I disliked Bastion the most. It felt like an empty PSX game. I liked Transistor, but the catch is that it needed to be played pretty much surrounding their pause-the-battle technique which was okay but it really kind of sucks to me whenever I have any game use this technique. I would have much rather it had been a full turn-based game. I like turn-based games though. There is some viking game that plays like a janky-table top where it's semi-turnbased and it was absolutely awful for it.
Mind you, I like Transistor due to its story. Which I think is the same reason why I liked Pyre. The setting, it was quite nice and if I could remove the mini-games from the game I would. Hades, I liked because they took characters the size of tic-tacs and turned them into three-dimensional beings. That was quite nice. They played on a lot of anime tropes. The gameplay was good, but it was a bit too challenging for me. I dropped it relatively early due to this. I pretty much sit in the same camp now. I wondered if maybe I had aged out of their target audience but I will probably never play one of their games again. It's just not my bag.
Hades was really hard for me too, and I played upwards of 100+ runs before beating [redacted], and another bunch before finally turning on God mode, where I think I got up to about 20% damage reduction before it stabilized.
At this point I want to push the story forward (I’m in the epilogue) but I’ve already played so much I need to wait more for the battling to be fun again.
I have absolutely no idea how you did it! My hands gave out. I mean I was literally hurting. I said no game should be physically hurting me if it's not DDR and I am not poorly stomping my way through the rhythm =P! So yeah, I stopped playing. That's when I decided to reach out, because I couldn't imagine I was the only one with this issue. More power to you if you stuck with it. Get that gold for the both of us =)
Damn. I remember when it came out. When I first heard about it I was in the living room playing Assassins Creed 3 and a YouTuber I was into at the time uploaded a let’s play. Time really flies
I am emulating! I’ll test multiplayer tonight if I can track down another controller. It might interest you as well to know that I’ve heard the PS3 Emulator can do online multiplayer through its Netplay. I haven’t tested that yet (I want to with a friend though)
Thank you for testing it! Are you using Xenia through a launcher (RetroDeck/Emudeck/Retroarch)? Are you on Windows or Linux? any setup recommendations or should I just put the bios files and rom and it’s ready to go?
I’m using Emudeck on Bazzite with GNOME. It’s an entirely AMD based build.
I was mostly just able to install and go. There were two issues but they’re pretty minor and easy to fix:
I had to go into the launch script for Xenia provided by Emudeck to change the proton version used though because it wasn’t compatible with the base version used. But that may have just been a me thing.
Xenia has a weird quirk with Xbox Arcade games where you need to reopen and close the emulator too. It’s an intentional feature and I’m not really sure why it does that.
But besides those two things it works flawlessly. I have almost no bugs. I added it to Steam with Steam ROM Manager included with Emudeck and will launch it through that (or I’ll launch Minecraft, and then Xenia because of issue 2). Steam Input works fine and no tearing or graphical issues whatsoever.
I just finished testing it and It worked well. I’d assume you could play the entire game that way but I didn’t test it too long (and the controller for player 1 just sat idle) because it was just me playing.
Sometimes. I’m also a college student though with a ton of free time so it’s not like I don’t have the free time to play video games. Usually though when I play a game I take a ton of screenshots to just show friends, so I already have them. The tiring part usually comes from busy days like finals or when I’m out of the house all day
Sparse gameplay, tied together with lots and lots of implied worldbuilding in a lore book that contains most of the story. The gameplay was okay when you got to it, but there was far too much written story locked up, instead of “show, don’t tell”.
Also, the game wants you to finish six tournaments before you get any sort of decent ending.
Pyre is more like a visual novel with some gameplay here and there. Now I don’t mind story heavy games but towards the end I found myself just clicking through the absolute ton of dialogue there was. Vastly preferred Bastion and Transistor which almost never interrupted the gameplay but were still able to tell amazing stories.
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Aktywne