Adventure Gamers - Forums

aaroncarney - 27 April 2015 07:35 PM

Overall thoughts are pretty good. My only gripe… why did act two take a year and a half to complete? The majority of the game is old locations? lol

Old or not, most of those locations have been completely redrawn, which is just as much work as drawing new locations.

tomimt - 28 April 2015 02:23 AM

Big yay from me. I’d say it did end up as the best KS funded adventure game and one of the best I’ve played in years.

I have to agree. It’s absolutely worthy of Tim Schafer’s LucasArts legacy. Puzzles start off easy, but not hopelessly easy and get a lot more complicated. By the end you’ll be making notes and charts Myst-style. It’s got a nice curve to it.

Also, for anyone that hasn’t bought the game yet, the mobile versions are damn near perfect and less than half the price. The textures are a little smaller and more compressed, but you can barely notice except in certain close up shots, so playing on iPad or Android might be the way to go. The Dropbox save support even means you can go back and forth seamlessly if you really want.

I’m done with the game. I’m having a hard time forming a clear opinion of it right now, because my experience was tainted by the utter awfulness of the finale (more on that below). Overall, the game has a lot of charm, it’s beautiful, and, after all the whining about Act 1, it can’t be disputed that it has lots of proper adventure puzzles.

I didn’t mind the recycled locations. It seemed obvious that that was going to happen after the end of Act 1, so I was neither surprised nor bothered by it. I actually enjoyed revisiting those places in different circumstances.

I generally liked the puzzles, though I didn’t love them. They’re typical Schafer, and I’ve never liked his puzzle-design style (I don’t want to bore anyone by dissecting what I don’t like about it). But I knew that going in, so that was OK. For a Schafer game, I was mostly pleasantly surprised by the puzzles.

One thing did bother me a lot, though: the game requiring the player to pass information from one half of the story to the other, without any in-universe justification for it. That was lazy. It’s as bad and gamey as requiring the player to die to get some essential piece of information—which I thought Ron Gilbert had justly eliminated a quarter of a century ago. It certainly didn’t increase difficulty, because it’s always obvious when you’re supposed to use a piece of info with the other character, it just felt weird that there was absolutely no justification for it. That didn’t decrease my enjoyment of the game, but it shouldn’t have been there (or it should have been done differently).

Now, that final sequence. Ugh. That was mindbogglingly awful. I get what Schafer was trying to do thematically (symmetry between the two halves of the story, the kids knowing better than the grown-ups…). However, he clearly couldn’t find a clear way for things to happen that way in the story, so he just said fuck it and decided to have every character act in the most nonsensical (and obnoxious) way imaginable so that he could get the events he wanted. Add a very tedious and repetitive puzzle chain on top of that (which makes about as much sense as everyone’s behaviour) and you have one of the worst AG sequences in recent memory—and one that’s definitely marring my overall impression of the game.

I guess when I replay it, knowing what to expect at the end, I’ll be able to enjoy it more (and I was certainly feeling much more positive about it yesterday while playing it than I am now). But for the moment I have mixed feelings about it.

Oh well. The documentary alone was well worth the price of admission anyway.

Kurufinwe - 29 April 2015 02:10 PM

One thing did bother me a lot, though: the game requiring the player to pass information from one half of the story to the other, without any in-universe justification for it. That was lazy. It’s as bad and gamey as requiring the player to die to get some essential piece of information—which I thought Ron Gilbert had justly eliminated a quarter of a century ago. It certainly didn’t increase difficulty, because it’s always obvious when you’re supposed to use a piece of info with the other character, it just felt weird that there was absolutely no justification for it. That didn’t decrease my enjoyment of the game, but it shouldn’t have been there (or it should have been done differently).

Interesting… I thought this was pretty clever, esp. since I sort of accidentally played the first Act all as Shay and then all as Vella, and these puzzles in Act 2 keep you from doing that. Normally a “how are they supposed to know that?” moment in a story would really bug me, so I’m not sure why I was fine with it here. Maybe because this world has already been set up as one where usual logic doesn’t apply?

Kurufinwe - 29 April 2015 02:10 PM

Now, that final sequence. Ugh. That was mindbogglingly awful.

The thing that bothered me most about it was Alex turning the electricity back off, since we don’t see him do it. If not for that I would have gotten the puzzle on the first or second try.

fov - 29 April 2015 03:31 PM

Kurufinwe - 29 April 2015 02:10 PM

Now, that final sequence. Ugh. That was mindbogglingly awful.

The thing that bothered me most about it was Alex turning the electricity back off, since we don’t see him do it. If not for that I would have gotten the puzzle on the first or second try.

Honestly, the whole sequence makes no sense to me. What were Shay and Vella even trying to accomplish? [spoiler]Their ships are getting shot at, and so their big plan is to… blow them up? Couldn’t they just sit down and wait for it to happen anyway? And what does it achieve? Everyone gets off the ships, which they could have done earlier, and then that’s it.[/spoiler] Even in hindsight, I don’t understand what the puzzle was about.

Not that it prevented me from knowing exactly what I was trying to do. I’d spent the entirety of Act 2 wondering why they still had those remotes with them, so I immediately knew what the game wanted me to do. I just don’t understand why.

And don’t get me started on Alex and Hope turning all hysterical and obstructing you at every turn. What was that about? What were they trying to achieve?? That whole sequence made no sense to me, and annoyed me a lot. (And on top of that I thought some of the puzzles were improperly clued.)

iv played a few hours of act 2 now… and so far this is a biiig improvement over act 1 (which i still liked).
Very happy so far

There are some issues with the ending. I thought the objectives were clear enough, but story-wise it was lacking.

The big reveal with the Lorunan was disappointingly vague. They need something that outsiders have and it has to be selected by someone who knows, and they have to kill them to get it… but… why, exactly? It’s like Tim just hadn’t figured that part out yet, and it’s almost better not to address it at all than to half-ass it. It reminds me a bit of the film A Boy and His Dog, where the Topekans had become infertile and need to kidnap outsiders to impregnate their women. But instead they never really explain it.

Also, Vella never rescued the maidens, who all apparently burned to death and no one really cares.

None of this bothers me enough to say it isn’t one of the best adventure games in years, though. At its core this is a silly, fun comedic adventure and trying to pick apart the plot too much is beside the point.

It went downhill plot-wise, coming up with clichè human-harvest and silly character roles’ revelations, but I am one of the few that wasn’t impressed at all by the events, comedy, characters or dialogues in part I either.
Nevertheless, I loved act II. The puzzles felt like they finally hit the right balance difficulty-wise and I was amazed how I was able to connect much more to the world, even if it stayed mostly the same, thanks to the much more indepth exploration; Vella even managed to grow on me (can’t say the same for Shay though).
I expecially loved those puzzles that required to gain informations from the other world, the final puzzle resolution in particular felt really neat.
I did expect that someone would have complained about the all-knowing player (even if I fail to understand why similar complaints don’t come up with DOTT), but I much prefer to have some leeway for lateral thoughts, instead of obsessively caring for the world being consistent.