The obvious answer is Pathologic. You play as one of three possible characters in a black plague-infested town in the russian steppe, trying to help people and survive.
As days go by, the situation worsens and, in order to survive, you are forced to make very hard decisions. Can you spare the food for the others? Will you rob someone of their medicines? Will you risk going to the most dangerous parts of the city, where the stench of infection permeates the air?
Making it to the end of a day is a genuine accomplishment in this game, considering all the work you have to do to stay alive, and that the game really doesn’t care if you live or die. It won’t hold your hand to make sure you get through to the end; it’s entirely possible to make it through 10 days and then back yourself into a corner where you have absolutely no hope of survival, short of loading a save from a few (in-game) days ago. Or perhaps to save yourself the agony of replaying several hours of the game, you end up in terrifying, desperate scenarios where you have to sell your only weapon for a few scraps of bread, or murder a child for the medicine he’s carrying while you’re about to die from infection. That’s true horror right there.
It’s not an easy game and it’s not a good game, even. It’s old and dated and janky, but it’s also full of charm and personality. I wouldn’t say it’s a game meant to be played, as much as it is an experience worth going through. You won’t have fun playing the game. Even if you can overlook its pain points, it’s an objectively oppressive game that will make you feel miserable from beginning to end, and increasingly so. I wouldn’t say it’s for everyone, and I don’t mean that in an elitist way. Some people simply won’t stand this much bleakness during the time they are supposedly spending to find entertainment.
From what I heard, Pathologic 2 is basically a 2019 remake of the original, so it should be prettier, less janky but still basically the same game, right?
I have heard very good things about it, but I can’t talk for myself, as I haven’t played it. My only recommendation is to stay away from the console versions of the game, as I tried it on Xbox One and it was unplayable (heard the same about the PS4 port, too). Maybe it’s better on next gen, but I wouldn’t risk it.
Two things worth mentioning:
The remake only has one character, the Haruspex. If you want to play as the Bachelor or the Changeling, you’ll need to grab the original game.
There are difficulty settings in the remake. I would leave them as default, as I think the difficulty of the game, and the conflicting decisions you’ll need to undertake because of it, is an integral part of the experience. That being said, if you really like the game and want to see it through, you can tweak the difficulty a bit, and accessibility is always a plus in my book.
Again, this is just hearsay as I haven’t played it, but from what I’ve gathered, Pathologic 2 is more a retelling than a faithful remake. Same setting and same ending, but a different road, so to speak. You could play either one and then move on to the other if you like it.
Interesting are all the points you share. I’ve never been so convinced to try a game even after being explicitly told it’ll not be fun. Give me that sweet pain.
Making a Portal mod is much different than possessing and using the original source code of a game. I don’t understand why they thought they could get away with such a high-profile title as TF.
BG3 winning the GotY was something we all could see coming I think and even though it’s not my personal pick I’m hard pressed to argue. It’s a great game, it opened up many in the mainstream to a new genre and Larian is a great company with consumer-friendly policies. It’s hard to be mad.
I’m very glad Alan Wake 2 got a couple of awards, though. Hopefully this recognition means Remedy keeps pushing the boundaries and keeps going with their crazy mixed media and weirdness. We need someone doing innovation in the AAA space.
I am a little pissed they lost out on best music to FFXVI though.
FFXVI’s soundtrack is pretty great tho, especially the tracks for the Eikon fights. NGL I would have honestly gone insane playing that game if not for the soundtrack and (less so) the combat. The story makes no fucking sense.
I’m more salty that people are saying AW2 didn’t deserve Best Game Direction, because I think it absolutely did. Alan Wake’s plot and the vision they went for would have been absolute nonsense in the hands of any other studio.
I just love what Remedy did for the music, and I’m not just talking about Poets of the Fall. Having a bunch of established artists write original music based on a bunch of story related poems written by Sam Lake was such a cool idea and makes the end-of-chapter songs land so well. But the competition was tough, for sure.
I haven’t heard those comments about Game Direction but I can’t understand that at all. The direction is absolutely first class, from the tension-release work to the cinematic shots and framings to the double-exposure overlaps and the reality rewriting and dream logic of the Dark Place. It was a masterpiece in my opinion.
A lot of these games are working off of an assumed learned collective memory.
Think of movies, and their tropes. How do you understand that when a movie cuts to black for a second, and then suddenly shows a new location, that we did not just teleport? That the black cut indicates the end of a scene, and the start of a new one?
Think of how many games assume you know which button pauses, which opens the menu, which buttons move the character and which ones make you jump. Now, add another layer of controls. And another.
BG3 is also working with an assumed collective memory from DnD. Assuming you already learned about class vs race, and cantrips vs lvl spells, and turn order, etc.
It sucks when you miss large games that establish these things, but its also how art forms evolve. Games just dont yet have a way to easily re-teach them.
Yeah, if you’ve played DnD 5E I’d say you’re already well on the way to knowing how BG3 works technically. If not, it’s prolly a bit of a learning curve but the game does start soooorta slow at level 1, though 4 characters is a lot. Look up some common archetypes!
Think of how many games assume you know which button pauses, which opens the menu, which buttons move the character and which ones make you jump.
Button bindings are almost always listed in the settings menu. And many games WILL explain those controls, usually with an option to toggle them on/off.
Often, yes, but not always, and thats only become a recent trend.
And just as many games dont, or only explain where their controls differ from the cultural expectations.
It applies to mechanics too, but thats harder to talk about without actual examples in front of you, and I dont have any good contrast examples off the top of my head
I wanted to say Outer Wilds too simply to have OP join us in our search for that high of another player experiencing this game for the first time. Nothing quite like seeing the game “click” when they finally get those big plot points.
Most games were never made to be modded. The communities are hacking mods into these games, many of which were even designed to make modding harder. (Because mods compete against sequels or something? I dunno. Intellectual property is a mental illness.) It’s not terribly surprising that games that weren’t meant to be modded have confusingly inconsistent methods for loading mods. Because those mods work fundamentally differently from game to game. If a mod happens to be easy-ish to install, chances are it’s either quite a simple mod (a model/texture replacement or some such, or just something that’s not terribly hard to mod) or a lot of work has been put into making it easier.
It’s more that most games aren’t made with consideration for modding, this means you can have core gameplay elements hidden in encrypted packages and modding is limited by what you can actually get access to. Sometimes the devs/publishers will actively make mods harder though. Really depends on the game, the company, how determined people are to mod it, how long the game’s been out for, the engine and probably a bunch else that I haven’t thought of right now.
Also the timeline usually matters. Mod methods can change as game patches are released. Mods can have mod patches. Mods can be deprecated for new mods or mod methods. Mods can have other dependencies. Install order sometimes matters.
I think OP is right; mods can be messy, complicated, and a lot of work.
This really depends on the type of person you are. I find with the time pressure each in-game day that every time I launch it I get caught up in a mess of wiki pages and spreadsheets figuring out the ideal crops to plant and when, what gifts people like and when to gift them, etcetera etcetera. It became stressful and I stopped playing it after finishing most of the main objectives.
You can play it, at your rythm,
Performance isnt mandatory,
You can learn the game before going “meta”, discovering things by yourself, etc.
Do not compare yourself to others or directly going on a wiki, to start paying it…
Perfection is fun with time. Its a solo game, why you should run it for real ?
i bounced off tunic super hard. i love the puzzle aspects, the cryptic manual pages, and figuring things out, but the combat was way too brutal, even on the easier setting. the bigger white ghost enemies at the very start killed me so many times i no longer want to go back to it.
Understandable. It got pretty frustrating for me too at various points. I’m kinda bad at this kind of combat in general. Most of what motivates me to push through it in games like Dark Souls or Tunic is being interested in the world. But sometimes not even that’s enough.
I didn’t have too much trouble up until the first real boss. Thankfully there was a save point pretty close by so I just threw myself at it more times than I’d like to admit.
The game throws big bosses at you at a time when you won’t have range weapons, and expects you to dodge these big sweeping attacks that would be more appropriate fighting with ranged weapons. And by the time you get a ranged weapon, it’s too late, and they’ve raised the stakes again for future bosses to the point that having a ranged weapon isn’t even an advantage.
I was forced to reduce the difficulty just for the bosses. All of the other enemies were mostly fine.
Try playing Environmental Station Alpha. Super cutesy robot, absolutely unfair difficulty for a Metroidvania. Which is a shame, because there’s an interesting story and gameplay buried in that difficulty, and I love Metroidvanias.
I’ve slowly acclimated to Soulslikes since Tunic, and a common theme is that they make you think you need to be pressing more buttons, when they’re often teaching specialized bits of patience. In Tunic’s case, a lot of people expend their stamina too quickly.
I thought the reward for the puzzles was not good enough, either. When you play Outer Wilds, you figure things out, unlock a wonderful story, and learn tricks for other puzzles. When you play Tunic, you (eventually) figure things out and get a bad ending for a game that barely reveals anything, story-wise.
I also thought that requiring a web app or a bunch of paperwork to figure out the language was far too inconvenient for a game made in the 21st century. They borrowed the wrong lessons from Fez.
hey i learned to read the language in fez fluently. this is more like they took the wrong lesson from double fines Hack’n’Slash, where the glyphs are absolutely everywhere and look so much alike that the easiest way to decipher them is to replace the font.
I just finished playing tunic (good ending). A friend and I were playing it at the same time. If I didn’t have that friendly competition I would have dropped it so many times. There is way too much manual work in this game that you often times aren’t playing a video game anymore.
At the end of it all I didn’t feel a sense of accomplishment just relief that I’m done with the game. Only to find out after doing the secret puzzle is just more meta puzzles outside the game.
Outer Wilds on the other hand is fantastic and not having to use a pencil and paper to advance in the game is A+.
I'd honestly love to see them try a different take on Diablo. It won't happen since Blizzard is all about live service games these days, but I'd love to see a single-player, traditional RPG version of Diablo. Imagine if Larian got the rights to make a Diablo game.
Exactly this is why current copyright rules are BS. Having multiple studios with pressure from competitors results in better games (and less micro transactions shit to sqeeze franchises to death)
… I’m imaging the natural extreme conclusion to this. There are 16 sequels to masseffect and you need to research which games you need to play before you play the newest one. This also leads to conflicting cannon and infighting
Like the F.E.A.R. games. There are four sequels but not all are in the same timeline. At least with Drakengard, the sequels in the different timeline have completely different names.
I would still prefer the extreme outcome over what we have today.
And I think the community will know and happily share which line to take and if you want sell in the franchise, you got to look out that the community is happy with what you create, which includes plot holes / inconsistencies.
The big corporations just want you to believe that franchises dies if other studios can use it, when it only is about earnings the last penny out of a franchise with the least effort possible. They happily save on production cost and invest a lot in lawsuits (or similar) to maintain their monopoly position.
I mean, that kind of stuff already exists today with the current copyright laws. I remember as a kid reading all sorts of X-Men books and wondering why the characters in the cartoon were so different. Did Han shoot first in Star Wars?
I played the Ratchet and Clank (2016) game this year that’s like… Kind of a re-make ish of the first game? Except the story is quite a bit different, there’s new characters added and some old ones removed. Half the old levels are gone and there’s a couple of new ones added. Mechanically it’s a completely different game. And yet that’s even from the same studio.
thats not really what happens tho before disney was the big evil king of intellectual property and they were running around adapting other works their stuff was stand alone despite being based on existing stories or being adaptations of existing stories. When superman became more or less public domain we didnt see this happen despite his popularity people just did their own unique adaptation/retelling of the story rather than a mess of sequels. What i think would actually happen is that people would retell masseeffects story with their own takes on it and make new stories in that universe or with the original characters (tho im sure it would happen idk why they are all so fucking bland).
And even if there were unofficial sequels the original studio can always slap a “from the original creators of” label to theirs so people obsessed with the official telling of fictional stories know what to obsess over.
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