EDIT: Forgot to say, this game never released in English but there is a fan translation patch available that should be easy enough to find if you’re interested.
There’s a growing trend in indie games for the King’s Field-likes; Lunacid, Dread Delusion, etc. I’m a huge fan and if anyone has any other good ones to recommend, please let me know! EDIT: Just found Caput Mortem which looks like it might fit the bill near enough and also features music by Ockeroid of Crow Country notably …
But for this I thought I’d return to the roots. I’ve picked at King’s Field I (JP) and II a bit before and while I enjoy them, they’re overall still very clunky and I usually get distracted. I wasn’t sure how long I’d stick with Shadow Tower Abyss, but I feel like this one I may very well see through, I’m enjoying it quite a bit so far. That’s not to say it’s not still a clunky slog, and it’s certainly not for everyone, but there is real charm there.
(Scoring system: 1-5 being bad, OK, good, great, excellent with decimals being vibe based to push it closer to one rather than the other. For example 3.2 is meant to indicate a bit better than just good, but still not great. 3.8 might indicate close to great, but missing a few aspects that prevent it)
Sound: 3.2/5, Good. Like a lot of FromSoft games, there’s not really much music aside from the occasional musical sting which provides effective ambience. The sound design is minimal as well, but there are some very good moments of creepy thrumming, droning, and distant screeching that make it an intense environment to inhabit.
Graphics: 3.5/5, Good. What’s on display is generally competent and atmospheric, each new area has its own theme which is interesting to explore, but still, I feel like they could’ve done a lot more with the PS2 graphics. It’s certainly an improvement over King’s Field '94, but exactly how much is debatable …
The monster design is pretty good, everything has this kind of alien/abyssal feel to it. The overall theming is on point. Areas of the game have simple descriptions (i.e. Blue Light Area) that give the impression the player character is a foreign explorer rather than anyone with innate knowledge of this weird world. It’s a small aspect of world-building I appreciate.
Gameplay: 3.8/5, Good. Overall control still feels dated, but much less clunky than previous entries. The player moves at a brisk enough pace, but still slowly enough that you soak in the environment and progress feels meaningful. Being an older game you can’t really rebind the controls, but there are a variety of schemes including Type 4 which allow for the expected, modern dual analog stick looking/movement.
Combat can still be a little boxy and clunky but each weapon offers a left and right slash as well as an overhead bashing and frontal thrusting attack. Each weapon also has related stats for these types of attacks and enemies will have weaknesses or possible points of dismemberment making them vulnerable to particular attacks. Unlike some of the earlier King’s Field games, connecting attacks always feels good and has satisfying feedback.
The stats system is definitely very obtuse, even if you are familiar with From’s games and I recommend consulting a guide quickly before your first time playing. Again, as is very typical in From’s fashion, there isn’t an abundance of items but what exists is very deliberate. Money consists of these single large coins which you usually only find 1 or occasionally 2 at a time. Most things will only cost a handful of coins with healing potions being 2, boxes of ammo (for your gun!) being 1(?), and weapons and armor ranging anywhere from ~4-15. You’ll also find a plethora of items scattered throughout the game so there’s no shortage.
There is a unique balancing though as in order to heal yourself from the rare healing stations you have to sacrifice items for their value, although I’m early enough in the game that a basic Hat still seems to fully heal me from low health. In order to repair durability on your items from the rare purple repairing stations, you must sacrifice health with items like magic rings requiring sometimes more health than you currently have! This creates a tense and balanced management situation that feels like you might possibly softlock yourself by eating through too many resources, but so far hasn’t proved an issue for me. As a personal aside, I’m a big fan of playing games as they were designed so I’m doing my best to only save at the rare save points and not save state my way through the game, although this is of course up to your own tastes and discretion.
But is there a poison area with forced damage, I hear you ask? Yes, you fool, YES! Why would you even doubt it? Don’t let this discourage you though as understanding the stats system and equipping proper armor allows you to minimize the damage per poison tick such that it creates urgency as a pressure point more than a pain point. Definitely sacrificed a few lives just scouting the area out, though. Game Over means reload a save.
Summary/TL;DR Shadow Tower Abyss is a very competent dungeon crawler with a unique theme and atmosphere that’s worth exploring if you’d like to see historic FromSoft (it’s 20+ years old, as an ancient gamer I can use “historic” if I want). Miyazaki gets a lot of credit for modern From games and while a lot of that is certainly due, it’s fascinating to see how many of these deliberate design concepts have always been in their DNA.
As an aside, one day I’m going to write an entire essay on what makes a Soulslike a Soulsike. I missed the boat on the original hype and only got into them during COVID lockdown in 2020. I didn’t think I’d be a fan of the grueling, “git gud” experience but I’ve come to realize that’s not what makes those games interesting. It’s one concept and some people may find it unsatisfyingly vague, but it’s not the bonfires, or the losing souls on death, or the dodge rolling. It’s the stone-cold deliberateness. A lot of the difficulty from these games arises out of that deliberateness; what items you choose to equip and how you observe and approach unique situations. The games aren’t good because they’re hard, the specific design elements that make them hard are also the things that make them good.
I'm struggling with this question, because these days I almost do that backwards. I will get a game and ask "what's the device I'd like to use for this"?
I mean, I've been playing a fair amount of Monster Train 2. I have no interest in sitting at a desk for that, or to put it up on a massive screen. Been playing a bunch of Tetris the Grand Master, which is not a great fit for a heavy handheld. Donkey Kong Bananza? Mostly TV, felt off on the handheld screen.
I think when you go back to emulation there's a bunch of games that are deceptively better on the go. That was the Switch's original party tirck, right? Hey, turns out Mario 64's short star runs are a great fit for sitting on the toilet. Who knew? Random JRPG being played one-handed on a tiny Android device? Surprisingly decent.
But at this point software is just this weird blob, I just pick a controller/device combo that fits for each game.
Woo, time to see how many gooners are actually on lemmy.
The modern “video game essay” format came out of people on the Something Awful forums who were REALLY into Silent Hill. It was Japanese style horror in a Western setting with a lot of fairly heavy themes and implications so it was the perfect confluence of weebing out and “it is dark so it is deep” level discourse. And what started as people writing thousands of word arguments for what the shovel being at an 80 degree angle in that shed meant became people making 60 minute youtubes on what it meant that Heather ALSO saw the titty nurses and how it represents her repressed lesbian urges. And 3 hour videos about Pyramid Head that would make even Freud roll his eyes.
And… basically all of the later Silent Hill games REALLY sucked. The Room has its defenders but pretty much everything after that is universally panned and with good reason. Up until last year-ish with the remake of 2.
Which was a different kind of shitstorm. Because now you had all these essayists who were The Keepers Of Silent Hill lore (one of the most famous ones wrote her master’s thesis on SH2 I want to say?) seeing the greatest of the games being remade. And by fucking Bloober team? Pretty much every essayist had keyed in that Bloober have some very questionable themes in some of their games. Uhm… trigger warnings but
spoilerBloober at least used to really like the trope of “The only way to stop this great evil infecting you is to kill yourself and it with you” and “They were a victim of abuse and should be pitied even as they perpetuated the cycle”. That are both, fairly unarguably, shitty mindsets but are also horror tropes going back literally centuries
So it was the mix of “This is MY game and MY story and how dare they change it” combined with “Also they picked the bogeymen that I hated on so hard last year that I could buy a car”.
And then… Bloober kind of made a masterpiece? Like, most of their changes are fairly loved/appreciated and everyone but the most hardcore of the SH2 Video Essayists loved it.
But now we have Silent Hill f that very much DOES feel like a cash in and a way to make a Fatal Frame but with a more marketable IP. But also… Fatal Frame fucked hard?
Either way? The most important thing ever is to never stop saying that Silent Hill (the town) is really smokey because it was built on top of a coal mine that caught fire and has been smouldering for decades. That is some real Silent Hill fan lore that not many people know but is really cool to share.
Nah. Modern day gooners are all based on how Arsenal fans just can’t stop touching themselves. Like, if you ever go to a game there is an entire section dedicated towards group edging.
In all seriousness, I have no idea what the actual origins of “gooning==masturbation” is. But the word “goon” mostly just is a synonym for thug or henchman. So a lot of groups used it because they are the bogeymen and blah blah blah.
The original Silent Hill games were created by an internal group within Konami called Team Silent. This team was formed by underperforming Konami staff to work on a Resident Evil competitor that Konami higher-ups wanted to underperform and give them a chance to fire said underperforming staff. Instead, they struck gold with SH1.
Team Silent suddenly had a level of fame to themselves, but they were still Konami’s red-headed stepchild. 2-4 were similarly successful, with 2 being the high point of the series.
After SH3, key staff started to depart from Konami. By the time the 5th game, Homecoming, came out, much of the original team had been replaced with those more aligned with Konami bigwigs that wanted to turn the series into a moneymaker instead of the quiet success it was built as.
An example of this is the Silent Hill HD Collection for PS3 and X360. The ‘remaster’ of SH2 and 3 was anything but. They had to make these remasters with incomplete codebases, no original staff to question, even some of the original voice acting was missing because Konami straight-up deleted the original source code.
There are those that say that SH never recovered from the gutting of Team Silent, and they tend to get louder with each entry into the series. Sometimes they have valid points, but not always.
To add to this, Team Silent members started leaving after SH3 came out primarily because when SH2 released, it wasn’t that well received compared to SH1 (this is mostly to do with the Japanese audience complaining online at the time that SH2 was not a sequel or continuation to SH1). As a result, Konami started forcing Team Silent to make changes to SH3 that Konami executives thought would make it sell and review better in Japan than SH2. In other words, Konami was taking away Team Silent’s autonomy within Konami to develop what they wanted.
Silent Hill 3 was the beginning of the downfall of the series because it was the first game in which the original developer’s vision for the game was edited by Konami executives. This would sadly become a recurring theme for every Silent Hill game released thereafter. Silent Hill 3 was never supposed to feature the cult from Silent Hill 1. Heather was not supposed to be Cheryl. The hospital was not supposed to be reused from SH2, and was only done so because the developers were running out of time.
What’s worse, except for Akira Yamaoka, the original series composer, Homecoming did not have any original Team Silent staff working on it because it was outsourced to an external, Western development studio. Not one member of Team Silent was credited in the game except for Akira Yamaoka, they weren’t even mentioned in the “Special Thanks” portion of Homecoming’s credits.
I’m sure the fact that Ghibli movies and BotW are best-in-class examples of their respective mediums has absolutely nothing to do with anything.
Looking forward to the metric shittons of open world ghibli knock-off garbage being currently greenlit by frothing execs hoping they have at last found the blueprints to the dopamine machine.
Decided to check out VOID/BREAKER, a roguelite FPS, which just released into Early Access. The trailer makes it look like some crazy, super fast-paced, effects filled shooter, where you constantly destroy your environment, and maybe it gets to that point, but so far in my <10 runs, 6h, with the game, it’s been pretty basic.
Each run you choose a single weapon, so far I’ve unlocked a pistol (default), automatic rifle and shotgun, and then you’ll find different upgrades and abilities that you slot into your weapon to modify it.
The main thing of this game is the grappling hook. You can either grapple objects in the environment to throw at enemies, like explosives. Or you can grapple to specific points in each arena to fly around, but so far, for me, that hasn’t been as fun as it should be.
Then the destructible buildings, although they are really basic (mainly just boxes) and take a surprisingly long time to bring down, and even then it’s mainly in parts, not the whole thing. Unless you find some upgrades, your grenades (and the aforementioned explosives) will be the main way to destroy stuff, so you’ll have to constantly wait for the short cooldown to throw the next grenade or look for more objects in the arena.
I’ll give it some more time, because I can see the potential, but I haven’t really found anything like the “deep gun modding” or “deadly synergies” the Steam store page is talking about. 90% of the time it’s been stuff like your bullets fly faster, and your grenade deals more damage.
Mmm, nie. W angielskim przecinki oddzielają od siebie podrzędnie złożone części zdania - po prostu Anglicy mają inną ich definicję i co innego za nie uznają.
Unfortunately I haven’t been able to play much because there’s a spot in what I would call chapter 2 where the game kept crashing and dying. I tried so many things to make it work and nothing came of it.
Finally , last ditch effort, went through the process of upgrading from Mint 21.2 to Mint 22. And now it seems to be working! Yahoo!
Buuuut now I’m going somewhere this weekend and I won’t be able to play, lol. C’est la vie
Same here, but the performances are abysmal on the Deck (15-20 fps on low), and crashes on every map changes. I’m gonna wait next week to see if it goes better with the first few fixes, and then I’ll chose if I refund it or not.
I’m not even gay, but the first time I played Life is Strange (the first one) and when the option to…
Massive Life is Strange 1 SpoilersSpoilers ahead…
Be Warned…
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the option for Max to kiss Chloe showed up, I immediatly went for the kiss (well… the first time was a dare and that was barely even a kiss) Their relationship is just so sweet. I chose to sacrifice Arcadia Bay cuz fuck the dumb corrupt town. Max&Chloe is the canon ending to me. (The butterfly killed Arcadia Bay, #notmax’sfault)
It’s not “trying to convince”, it’s a joke. A bit of a tasteless one that should stay in egg_irl, but still a joke. And it sounds nothing like LLM output.
Hi, I spent a few years unpacking those feelings to figure out that I like crossdressing more than I like being the gender opposite my birth. One of the things that made it more confusing in the beginning was the slew of internet comments I would read reinforcing that any gender nonconforming activity was a sure sign I was trans.
If you know the person irl and they consistently show signs of being trans I think it’s good to ask probing questions that may lead them there, but I don’t think it’s right to tell them who they are. Better for them to figure it out themselves. On the internet you definitely don’t know the person beyond a single post, or a few posts coming from their online persona (not their personal self). This means you have even less right to tell them who they are.
Especially with the TM I took your initial comment as a joke, which I don’t find super funny anymore personally but can give a half smile and single roll of the eyes. Your edit about people unpacking their feelings implies to me that you were saying it in earnest though, which is where I start to have a problem for the reasons above. Just in case you want some insight on why you may be downvoted so much.
Yeah, no. You don’t have to try to make everything into more than it is. I’d be perfectly fine being trans. No hard feelings. I’m not though, but I sometimes play female characters because I prefer looking at them. It’s not more than that.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne