I think grundislav is sick of people nagging him for BJ5, and is keeping a low profile.
I finally got around to finishing 5DAS. Wow! Day 5 is really short when you know what to do.
"Bathroom lacklustre? Hideous body lying around the house? Solve two problems at once by tiling the body under the floor!" - stepurhan
I think it has a nice mix of puzzles, too. I like the system of repeating a puzzle from earlier in the game, MI2-style. Though like Kurufinwe, putting together the DeFoe-detector was a bit of a hassle first time around. In my case, it was using the machete as a stick that I found illogical.
The ritual is a really cool little puzzle. Will probably take a couple of tries for most people to get correct, but that's OK since the death sequences are fun, and the hints are fair. Though I found it somewhat disturbing that Trilby kept stepping on the Welder's remains.
In this chapter, I really, really wish Yahtzee would have done something more with the dialogue. The conversation with Simone is ridiculous once you start solving the puzzles. "Where's the body?" you ask, right after you carried it through there into the trophy room.
An enjoyable payoff to an enjoyable game... though it still bugs me how that body got under the bathroom tiles. (In the commentary, Yahtzee only comments on the improbability that John DeFoe would have been able to crawl all the way up from the cellar and to the bathroom before dying. He doesn't mention the bigger problem of how he got in under the floor.)
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Kurufinwe
A frequent risk when making games is to focus only on what you're interested in (the puzzles, some aspects of the story), and be very careless about the rest, both in terms of realism (or, rather, internal consistency) and player's enjoyment. Between the lack of food, the idol, the mysteriously buried body, the car suddenly appearing for no reason, the characters disappearing and those two puzzles consisting in having to look at / use again something you'd already tried, it's obviously a pitfall that this game hasn't avoided --- but, then again, neither have many commercial games.
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The idol didn't bother me. I think it's dealt with to some extent in the sequel, but even if it wasn't, I don't feel like I need an explanation for exactly how it fits in. Yahtzee explains in the commentary that the car must have been brought there by the ghosts of the Welders' victims (either Roderick and Matthew or the people who have died in the house since) trying to help you. The other things I agree are problems.
In my opinion, almost everything that is wrong with this game could have been fixed without too much work. What it really needed was some good feedback from playtesters, doing something very much like we just did.
In the future, it would be interesting to do something like this with a game in beta, and see if we could actually improve the final version!
