Occult Crime Police is a fantastic free offering for those looking for a bit more Ace Attorney. It mostly follows the gameplay of Ace Attorney games, in which you investigate murder scenes involving strange, paranormal phenomena, and then discover contradictions in people’s witness accounts to uncover the culprit. It’s a bit easy, but maintains some great humor and charming animation production value.
It can be hard to encourage people to only do this for the obscure - and can sometimes lead to moments of “Witcher 3 / Factorio Unknown Indie Darling” moments. The dream is for threads like this to not contribute to successes that are already basically “lightning in a bottle”, but focus attention where developers haven’t seen so much of it.
I’d really like to see another time-based drama similar to The Last Express. It had a lot of time-based events where you could run into particular passengers of the train in the hallways, and gained a strong sense of physical “presence” as people pushed past you in the halls using detailed rotoscope animations.
The Invisible Hours comes close - it’s non-interactive, basically letting you play as a ghost cameraman watching the mystery.
I own Deception 4 on PS4, didn’t know what the original was like. I think there’s a lot of cartoony appeal in luring people into elaborate multi-stage death traps, but it’s tricky to garner appeal out of more than just a lot of animation work for each variety of trap.
The indie scene has focused on a lot of SNES/NES-style retro franchises, but I’d definitely like to see a return to PS2 aesthetic, especially now that we can render those scenes at 60fps.
I recently played Psuedoregalia, and it was a lot of fun.
It’s basically impossible to increase the price tag on a game like that, and if you go free, the design pivots to a lot of abusive monetization systems. People run into that at the 10th hour of any free game.
It might be failing for a lot of reasons - I don’t think that one is necessarily their mistake though.
True - I think I meant to refer to it more as a generational issue; many people haven’t upgraded to either current-gen console yet because they don’t technically need them. PS5 might have few exclusives, but Xbox has basically none. (Many of their heavy-hitters like Sea of Thieves still run on Xbox One)
I’m aware that the PS5 is low on “exclusives”. A big part of the reason I got it was for simple things like being able to run old PS4 games at higher framerates.
We’re past the diminishing returns on visuals for games; not to say games can’t look ugly, but with a decent art direction, the capabilities of current consoles are more than enough. That’s why Nintendo was still able to sell Tears of the Kingdom for $60.
The funny thing is, I feel like it’s not so hard to navigate Steam for particular problems that consumers would like a solution to, but Valve has been ignoring or considers beyond them. For some people, those individual problems form the root of their buying decision. You’d have to beat them at something before you beat them at everything.
Yeah, I distinctly remember rage-quitting Heat Signature. There’s an indie fascination with putting deeper, more complicated consequences on failure that just does NOT work out when players are still trying to understand how the game even works.
I mean, besides FFXIV’s famous layout, I think it’s not so unreasonable to attach a keyboard to a console for things like chat or the game interface. A few Xbox games even do just that.
Of course, no game can require a keyboard plugged in to play. But given the age of Guitar Hero attachments, a few extras make sense.
But there HAVE been other games based around time loops that manage to avoid that frustration, for instance by letting you manually restart the loop yourself in a quick way, or giving other starting points.
Famous examples include Majora’s Mask, The Sexy Brutale, and others. I understand Outer Wilds tries to hold the trappings of its story around the loop being more sci-fi than magic/fantasy in nature, but that’s still a goal of the writers to wrap the rules of the world around mechanics that are fun to play.
I can even think of many games that gave themselves minor plotholes and odd exceptions to the “world rules” just so that the player could get through it more conveniently.
I don’t know if I can agree - there’s enough friction just in being able to explore the world from workings like that, I don’t blame them for changing it. At best it can feel cheap. There’s still plenty of ways to apply vulnerability of the unseen.
Whether or not it’s a failure, it’s a waste of time. Imagine if a relaxed open world game constantly interrupted you with cutscenes of your character falling over, slowly waking up, and trudging back to where they fell.