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Re: Outer Wilds

#2
TL;DR: why are you reading? go play it!

well, it's fully released and a hella fun.

the groundhog-day theme wrapped around whats a cross between a walking simulator and a point-and-click adventure (with some light piloting of your spaceship) works really well.

fly from planet to planet, explore ruins (which may or may not cruble around you while you explore them), solve puzzles which are mostly about finding the way, read notes of the builders of the ruins, piece together what happened and break the groundhog's day loop after going through every nook and cranny trying to figure stuff out only to find that you could have finished during the first run if you'd known what to do :D

the puzzles are perception and exploration based, and some arent solvable with data from the same planet.
(one needs two additional planets to be visited with a lot of other puzzles in the way)

back when i first heard about it i thought i'd get annoyed by the mumblemumble minute time limit per "run"
but as most things can be reached without further prequisites (besides knowing dae way) it really doesnt matter :D (and i often killed myself way before it, so doubly irrelevant)
(it was also fun sitting there with my watch, resetting the timer on restart because the game itself doesnt tell you)

the groundhog day theme opens up some really fun perception games with time critical stuff because its reset anyway for each run
luckily theres one thing that's persistent: the data map with the discovered information snippets (which includes a waypoint system)
so you don't have to relearn stuff between runs (or do have to, theres an interface switch)
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Re: Outer Wilds

#3
It looks lovely. Strongly reminds me of the Myst series.

Edit: On looking into it a little further, it appears that despite having explicitly promised their crowdfunding backers a steam release + linux version, they switched their game to be an Epic Games Store exclusive. I find it hard to be on board with that. It would be one thing if there were simply technical difficulties, but this smells fraudulent. I can't see any other reason they would do it other than being greedy devs.
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Re: Outer Wilds

#4
Super-conflicted.

On the one hand, Cornflakes, I sort of feel like some of your notes might have been aimed in my general direction. :D I certainly like the sound of perception and exploration being valued. But I'm still persuaded that timers and exploration undercut each other's effectiveness and that no attempt to blend them should be made by any game designer whose name is not Will Wright. That said, you seem to be making a case that for this game, the penalties imposed by a repeated "game over" are relatively light. So that's a point in this one's favor.

On the other hand, publisher exclusive (and to a publisher other than the one backers were promised). I have a hard time rewarding that.

(On the gripping hand, developers need to post written descriptions of their game's features that can be read in a few seconds and not depend on videos that force people to sit through them and their ads.)

I personally think I'm going to have to wait and see on this one. But, as usual, if others enjoy it, I'm glad for them.
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Re: Outer Wilds

#5
Flatfingers wrote:
Sun Jun 09, 2019 11:30 pm
On the one hand, Cornflakes, I sort of feel like some of your notes might have been aimed in my general direction. :D I certainly like the sound of perception and exploration being valued. But I'm still persuaded that timers and exploration undercut each other's effectiveness and that no attempt to blend them should be made by any game designer whose name is not Will Wright. That said, you seem to be making a case that for this game, the penalties imposed by a repeated "game over" are relatively light. So that's a point in this one's favor.
well, in this case the timer aspect is simply another dimension in the state space to explore.
theres a lot of things you can only do early in a cycle, like some caves getting filled up by sand on ember twin and thus becoming impassable.
or some parts of brittle hollow breaking away and opening passages.

which perfectly meshes with the cyclical nature because you can observe it and plan around that.

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