I remember when Hades came out and my buddy was saying it was going to be GOTY over Cyberpunk 2077 and all of us just laughed at him. I think he was on the right side of history
The short answer is something people can play on a phone. Console ownership is not so prolific that you can assume people will have them, or that they will know how to use them properly. To that point the jackbox games are great for this
You’re citing examples from the 6th, 4th, and 18th centuries and arguably the last one isn’t even about intellectual property
Even ignoring the blatant “what aboutism” if your justification for why it’s ok to steal video game ideas is because some Byzantians were mean to you 1400 years ago just know that nobody is going to take you seriously
Technically speaking Far Cry 5 meets this definition. At the beginning of the game the big bad guy arrests you and says to wait while he brings you the person you’re trying to save. If you sit there for 10 minutes doing nothing he returns with the person and lets both of you go. Most people just start murdering instead
Dead Rising 2: Off the Record did have a sandbox mode and in my opinion was the most fun game in the series. The original had an infinite time mode but you had to get the true ending I believe to unlock it
Look man, as someone who thought Switch 2 mouse controls were a gimmick and has sunk 17 hours into Civ VII, I don’t feel confident enough to tell all these people that they are wrong. If I had been in college and was told people could get scholarships for NASCAR Soccer I would have laughed in your face. Being that cocky is asking to be wrong
First and foremost it’s bold to put this out before Drag x Drive releases which is just weird enough to become its own thing. Second, even the owner Epic doesn’t even seem to know what to do with Rocket League because they seem to be trying to make it part of Fortnite. Thirdly, esports are everywhere, sorry not all of them look like legacy sports but that’s not a problem for people playing the games
spoilerI’m aware of the electromagnet. I think it’s ridiculous you need to find a compass, a battery, and a workshop in order to make it work. By the time you have all those are you really going to run around the house to hoover up items? If you want it on another run is that what you’re waste a coat check slot on? Also, it doesn’t collect gems or dice, which is stupid. That’s something you should just get permanently at a certain point
I found it to be a beautifully frustrating experience. There clearly are a ton of layers and puzzles can help you solve other puzzles. I appreciate the effort it took to make it, but it doesn’t feel like it respects the effort it takes to play it. Here’s some of my frustrations:
At a certain point you should get a magic vacuum upgrade to pick up all common items in rooms. Hunting for gems and coins in rooms on my 25th day sucks and adds nothing
I should be able to move at least three times faster. Fuck, navigating the house is slow
It really sucks that the first time you “solve” the primary puzzle you actually can’t progress until you solve a separate other puzzle that is dependent on finding one room and then another, and that is not clearly indicated at all
While footsteps eventually become trivial it’s an annoying resource when you don’t have full control over the layout of the house. So you can build a maze through no fault of your own and then you don’t get the steps to explore them
Eventually there’s a special room you can pick every run. Why do you make me actually traverse to that room? It burns useless steps and again, is slow as fuck
Additionally, the only “permanent” room you can place (to my knowledge) you can get way too early. So if you put that in a crappy spot you just kinda fuck yourself for the rest of the game
Sometimes you will think you have solved a puzzle but need to assemble the rooms to implement the solution. So you can: spam runs and rooms to get lucky and find it, do normal runs and just hope you find it, try to manipulate RNG to maximize the chance of solving that puzzle. None of those are fun when you have a couple of solutions to try and you spend multiple in game days manufacturing that opportunity
The items are kind of crazy. There is a puzzle that requires you to assemble three items in a specific room, then discover a separate other room, then get to that room to use that item. There’s like 15+ items in the game, how are you ever supposed to organically put that together? Also finding a metal detector in my first 5 days made me paranoid that every room was hiding keys and coins on the floor even when I didn’t have it
Some of the puzzles are so obtuse and have so many layers that if you ever happen to solve one that you suddenly think all puzzles could be that crazy. I solved the chess puzzle before the periodic table puzzle and was building this wildly complicated solution to that puzzle when it was actually really simple
Despite my gripes I do think it’s a good game with incredible puzzles and a very unique design. I just think it doesn’t account for people actually playing it. I would bet there’s a really intriguing story under this but eventually I got so hung up on performing solutions I had already discovered I couldn’t be bothered to also discover the plot. I did read a summary after that helped contextualize things. Honestly what I’m looking forward to is when someone else takes these mechanics and refines it into a really cool rogue-like
The Final Fantasy pixel remasters are all old school turn based RPGs that can be played one handed on the steam deck. Certainly not all 50 games but UFO 50 has a bunch of games made for a non-existent console that are all pretty simple and I would bet a lot of them can be played one handed. Both Crypt of the Necrodancer and Cadence of Hyrule are rhythm dungeon delver games that probably work one handed too, technically so would the new game Rift of the Necrodancer but that requires more skill than I have
Oh, and for the RPG fan Disco Elysium is almost certainly up his alley and perfect for one handed play
Thus my quotes around “dead”. I’m well aware people still play it, it’s just an old design and if there are two Final Fantasy MMOs that someone could play, don’t you think almost everyone would suggest the one in active development, with a significantly larger playerbase, and the one that has had a much better critical reception? Seems obvious to me