I have no idea what people were expecting to be honest. Hollow Knight was already known for being an extremely difficult game with punishing anti-fun elements like runbacks and corpse runs. Which game had everyone played that got them so hyped for Silksong?
There’s a reason I stayed away from HK, and I will be staying away from Silksong too. Game looks great but I won’t be able to beat it and I won’t have any fun failing to do so.
Well, I was merely speaking in general, I didn’t actually buy Silksong! 😅 The combination of being prohibitively difficult and having tons of tricky platforming (I hate platforming) means I’m just doing like with Hollow Knight and staying away to save myself the frustration.
I’ll take a look at it, but like I said above I don’t let myself play FM anymore and this sounds equally dangerous. Do you need a PES install to play or is it fully standalone?
To each their own, but when I played through Blasphemous just recently it felt like the game had tons of design elements intended to either piss you off or deliberately waste your time or both.
An upside of SI tending to have very minor year-on-year upgrades between FM editions is that most people don’t buy it every year. It’s common to buy every two or three years, unless a momentous change is implemented. The sortitoutsi.net site has squad updates among its mods that let you play older games for longer.
Not that I want to be encouraging you to take it up, the game is literally like crack and I don’t let myself play it anymore.
The 2D sidescroller base that’s at the foundation of Metroidvanias is quite a bit older than that, though, so I think it’s fair to call it an older genre. Even though it is fairly evergreen.
Admittedly it’s been a while since I played D:OS2, but I enjoyed that combat system quite a lot. No random success chance felt good, the action economy was more interesting and the skills had more freedom and interesting effects because they didn’t have to stick to existing 5E material. Magic/physical armor was an interesting strategic factor to play around and combat mostly felt good - although yes, it did frequently and infamously devolve into elemental surface spam.
Writing wise it’s all still in the patented Larian tone, which is sometimes funny but frequently unserious and sort of Marvel-esque for better or worse. I didn’t mind it as much in DOS2, but I was quite a few years younger when I played it. The romance sucked in that game too but at least one positive is I don’t remember every companion throwing themselves at you in a pathetic display of wish fulfillment protagonist-sexuality writing like they do in BG3.
Ironically much like BG3, the third act of E33 is a mess. There is a ton of important side content with character moments and lore, particularly relating to Clea but also the whole Maelle relationship quest. But the pacing is completely off, it’s all presented as optional and it just feels very rushed. A “Definitive Edition” type patch or DLC that retools and restructures Act 3 would do E33 a world of good.
Clair Obscur does technically have an NG+, though I’d say it’s less of a focus than in Souls games. There is, however, quite a bit of foreshadowing and pieces of the story that you won’t understand on your first playthrough but that hits different the second time through. I personally opted to consume it by watching others play after I completed my own first playthrough, but I’d say there is grounds enough for a second playthrough if that’s important to you.