Adventure Gamers - Forums

noknowncure - 18 April 2014 08:19 PM

To be fair, Malachi’s cold, unpleasant, arrogance is expanded on and made part of the story. It’s there for a reason.

Really? I just assumed he was in pain because of the way he’s always popping aspirins.

Zifnab - 18 April 2014 08:27 PM

There’s a reason Malachi acts like he does, which I wish had been fleshed out just a little more (they mention some kind of trauma in his childhood)

There’s an ecomic in the main menu that sets up that backstory.

zane - 18 April 2014 08:25 PM

yeah.. and as pointed out by the review here, that reason is kind of absurdly funny.

If it’s that ecomic that you’re referring to, then yes, it’s rather silly - the whole event is dealt with in such a sudden way, to characters we’re not invested in that it takes on an absurd comic tone.

I was referring more to the later idea that Due to the Moebius theory, Malachi needs Walker and is humanised by him.

Zifnab - 18 April 2014 08:27 PM

There’s a reason Malachi acts like he does, which I wish had been fleshed out just a little more (they mention some kind of trauma in his childhood)

its in the ecomic. The reason is: his mom was eaten by a lion.

I bought the game on the day of release and now I’ve finished it. And whatever your feelings about the deduction mechanics, the gameworld, the background, the writing, or the chemistry or lack thereof between the leads…

...I dare anyone to say that they really loved that cave maze. How many problems does it have?

1) The re-used backgrounds are tedious, redundant, and ugly.

2) It fails to advance the story, save for Malachi’s epiphany - about which I’ll have more to say later.

[spoiler]3) If you take a certain path early on, you can leave a rope behind and be forced to backtrack against the recommendations of the surprisingly unhelpful constellation arrows. Why not put the rope in a location that the player MUST visit on the way to the pillars, rather than one they MIGHT visit? Was it to pad out an already excruciating segment?[/spoiler]

4) When it comes time to tear down the pillars, the guards who have ostensibly been chasing you will wait politely until you move on before they shoot. If you backtrack, there is no sign of them. The tension is deflated to the limpness of a discarded sandwich bag.

[spoiler]5) The cave overstays its welcome by a factor of about five. Budget considerations may have limited what could be drawn, but when one can’t make a segment attractive or compelling, making it long only makes the problem worse.[/spoiler]

6) Because the characters “have to stay quiet,” the opportunity to characterize Helene or David further vanishes in the wind.

7) On my machine, the spacebar and button hotkeys to display labels stopped working around here. This made the cave EXTRA FUN to navigate, since I was constantly (and justly) paranoid about missing some needed item.

8 ) The appearance of the water caused a bizarre slowdown on my machine as well. This naturally made the final segments even more delightful.

9) What on earth does “intuiting a full cave layout” have to do with the abilities of a Savant? Could he have solved the big riddle in GK3 that way if Grace had handed him a map? If so, what’s the point of puzzles at all? It’s an absolute Deus Ex Machina.

Every point above has a solution that COULD have been implemented, perhaps with effort and difficulty (like all worthwhile things in game-making), but wasn’t. For example:

1) Add noticeable features, besides the constellations, to differentiate scenes. Use fewer scenes.

2 + 6) Write actual dialogue. Is it unrealistic to have people talk while being chased? No more unrealistic than it is to have them backtrack, and entertaining banter justifies itself.

Also, give the cave SOME KIND of symbolic or historic resonance. Anything to make it “not just a maze.”

3) Move the rope to a screen that is on a bottleneck on the way to the wooden pillars. Even better, put it in the same screen. Is that contrived? No more than the rest of the game.

4) As the player approaches the scene with the wooden pillars, intensify the pursuit. Do NOT let the player backtrack. Make sure the player either has the rope already or can get it. Maybe Walker had to climb a ledge, who knows? In the pillar screen, let us hear the guards approach. At that point, Walker can tear down the pillars or die. More tension, less meandering.

5) Malachi’s wanderings could be fruitfully cut and replaced by a cutscene, time-jump, or nothing at all. It’s not as if he USES anything he learned to escape afterwards, save the stunning knowledge that the way he got in is too small to escape through.

7 + 8 ) Bugs happen. But if the rest of the maze segment had been tolerable, these would not have jumped out as badly. As it stands, were none of the backers willing to beta-test? Or were their complaints ignored? Perhaps this chapter was put off to last?

[spoiler]9) Why, exactly, does Malachi need to use crazy psychic historical memory radar to solve this? Wouldn’t it be a more fitting climax if he did his usual trick of crazy implausible deductive logic? For example, once he started going into his fugue, couldn’t Malachi have started seeing subtle cues like:[/spoiler]

* “The limestone of this entrance is more worn. This must be…”
a) An escape tunnel
b) A dead end
c) An inlet from the ocean

* “More gravel on the floor here. Must be…”
a) Sediment deposits. The water changed course here.
b) Remnants of mining. This way goes down.
c) Debris from above. There’s a crack to the surface here.
And so on!

This would turn those earlier segments where Malachi identified minerals into subtle foreshadowing of his knowledge of geology and weathering patterns. All plausible things for him to know!

Once this began, it would be fair game to intersperse it with “psychic intuition” of escaping prisoners taking a certain exit now and then, consistent with prior scenes. There could even be the Deus Ex Machina in the end, as long as the focus up to that point remained on entertaining gameplay.

Neil Gaiman once wrote that if someone says there’s a problem with your work, but they can’t put their finger on it, they’re usually right. But if they give you an exact list of what’s wrong and how to fix it, they’re always wrong. By this rule, everything I said above is wrong!

But I dare anyone to tell me HOW.

Constructive criticism needn’t follow up every negative critique with a compliment. It must simply suggest a positive way forward. Even if one or two of the suggestions I listed were impractical, vague, or inane, can anyone honestly say that NONE of them would have improved the game and been within the reach of the design team’s budget and time?

“It IS quite boring and tedious.”

... at the climax of the game?

A long, boring, tedious maze in the final chapter is deadening. It takes the point where the story should be escalating the tension, when pulses should be pounding (think of the wolf chase in the cellar in GK2, the showdown at the Hounfour in GK1), and quietly smothers it with a pillow. If it had happened earlier in the game, it would be less of a disaster, but still pretty bad.

(Regarding Legend of Kyrandia. When I was a kid, it was one of the first adventure games I bought the hintbook for. I expected that the altar puzzle and the cave maze had some sort of clever answer, some trick I’d failed to see! Then it turned out the answer was long, tedious trial and error. There was no logic to the altar puzzle, save “wander around and gather gems in your limited inventory at random, then savescum until it’s over,” and the maze could only be solved by mapping and brute force. This taught me an important rule of the world: let the buyer beware! The hintbook, like the game, was an absolute waste of money.)

Those puzzles in The Legend of Kyrandia do not respect the player’s time and thinking, and neither does the last chapter of Moebius. When the best defense that can be made of this maze is that it is not as bad as that awful, awful fireberry cave, then something has gone badly wrong at a critical juncture.

Compare these caves to the Daedalus Club sequences of Gray Matter, which were also tedious to navigate… but man, were they fun to look at and mess around with!

—-

It IS quite boring and tedious. But for me it doesn’t differ from those adventure games where you have to run back and force through lots of empty non-interactive screens that allow you to look, but not to touch.

It differs in being uglier, but not much else. It is “look but don’t touch” with nothing worth looking at.

This is extra-baffling because the game was already long enough, and didn’t need padding at all. If anything, Moebius could have benefited from tighter focus on a few well-researched locations, rather than a whirlwind tour through a Venice that consists of one bridge and a shop and bedroom, a Washington DC consisting of an office and apartment, etc.

Lest I be accused of being entirely negative, I should note that there were some genuinely good moments and puzzles sprinkled throughout the game, and I was willing to suspend my disbelief and get on board with the Moebius theory, which is no sillier than vampires or werewolves and more fun, in my eyes. But this last chapter was just disappointing.

Doom - 19 April 2014 06:04 AM

The final part where Malachi solves a dynamic puzzle and then navigates through the flooded maze is pretty much the climax.

i dont remember that part. Are you referring to: when you click on floating pictures until youre right, or when you follow a mini map to an icon.

Hmmmm was it possible to die with water rising? To be honest i didnt notice.. because it was so easy to just follow that mini map.

DaveyB - 18 April 2014 02:43 AM

nomadsoul - 17 April 2014 09:16 PM

Maybe i am more honest , i had choice to not even mention it.

More honest than who? The people on here who clearly HAVE played the game and so can give their considered feedback on it? I don’t think so…

nomadsoul - 17 April 2014 09:16 PM

Have better game like BS5 to spend my time with

Surprising then that you constantly waste your time writing on here about a game which you haven’t even played.

nomadsoul - 17 April 2014 09:16 PM

Nahh you are wrong, gamespot, rps, neogaf, metacritic are all lies,trolling and
vocal minority who didnt play the game.

.
As are USgamer (90%), Game Over Online (82%), Game Revolution (4/5), IncGamers (7/10), Digitally Downloaded (3/5 - though I don’t get the score considering how positive the review is!) etc etc. Amazing how you only ever mention the negative reviews and never the positive ones…one would almost think it was intentional lol. If it’s so cut & dried how poor Moebius is, it’s surprising that there are a number of reviews out there who, whilst acknowledging some flaws (and some specifically commenting on the budget constraints), find Moebius praiseworthy overall.

I’ve never heard of those sites, outside of game revolution, whereas RPS is well known, and imo, very trustworthy.  Certain sources hold more weight than others.

There’s an odd defensiveness and an implication that, unless something’s the absolute worst example of a particular issue, it’s not worth mentioning, which is setting the bar very low for the genre.