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this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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Gaming
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I played a bit more Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice ahead of the sequel in a few months. There are a few major components to the game's core loop, and the one I'm not thrilled with is its hidden object puzzles, but the rest of it is working for me.
When I've got some podcasts to get through, Palworld has proven to be a great second screen game. There are some things I'd like to see them tweak about the progression, but they're very small complaints thus far. Ultimately, this game is working for me in a way that Pokemon hasn't in about 20 years.
I thought I would take a break from Pillars of Eternity after finishing the first game, because it did become quite exhausting late in the game, but after a discussion with some friends, I ended up excited to jump right into Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, and so far, it's answering nearly all of my issues with the first game. For one, more quests can be resolved by being clever and avoiding combat, plus when the combat does happen, it's far more readable. As a blessing from the gods themselves, the quest log also lets you know if a quest is too high level for you, so you know which content is intended for your current level without checking it out early and dying to an enemy mob in a few seconds.
Ahead of Combo Breaker, I'm also back on the Skullgirls grind. My Black Dahlia mix and setplay are weak, and I'm giving my opponents too many opportunities to take their turn back, so I need to tighten that up.
I played through Hellblade recently and mostly loved it. I do however, agree that the quality of the hidden object puzzles vary a lot and there are a few too many of them. Sometimes it feels more like padding than enjoyable content.
I also wish the combat was slightly more demanding and involved. They have an amazing foundation with fantastic animations and a surprisingly robust combo system that just never actually demands you to explore its depths and nuances. The focus mechanic is also a little too powerful, which again doesn't encourage you to utilise the combo system. More enemy/boss variety and more refined enemy movements would also be preferable, but they were working on a small budget so it's understandable. It feels like they were so close to something amazing, and that makes me very hopeful for the sequel.
Yeah, I haven't seen any combo system. Following up a light with another hit is always that same jumping spin slash. If there's more depth there, the game didn't want to tell me about it. Likewise, when they had that developer direct, they said they were improving the combat system but with no description of how they were doing so; just a lot of fluff talk that was kind of about nothing. As for the puzzles, I like the ones that aren't just finding the symbols in the environment. Those puzzles can actually be reasoned out, as opposed to the symbols where plenty of things look like those shapes and they just picked one that they felt was the best fit for it, so I mostly just end up waiting for the game to inform me whether I'm hotter or colder as I get close to the magic spot.
This game also does something that I haven't seen many games do that always seemed like a natural evolution of story-driven games. The industry, operating at this level of production value, for the most part ended up going open world, even and especially for games that were better off being smaller and linear, and that's a real bummer. If you keep things small and linear, you can start loading the next scene while the current one is still playing, and then you can seamlessly cut to the next scene much like a movie would, but you get all the benefits of rendering the game in real time. This shouldn't be so rare, but the industry's obsession with being "bigger" made it rare.
Yeah the game never even hints at any combo system, though to be fair they never explain any mechanics (I guess in pursuit of immersion).
This video is not completely exhaustive, but goes through a fair amount of combos. In general, you can always interrupt a combo after the 1st, 2nd or 3rd attack with the melee button to punch/kick and follow up with a different two-attack combo. The finisher where Senua impales the enemy and pushes off with her foot can also be interrupted and extended by pressing light attack three times (which I don't think the video covers).
I didn't completely hate the find-the-symbol puzzles but they were definitely not particularly interesting. I think moments like the >!blind trial!< were where the game really shone. >!Navigating purely off of sound and controller vibration and avoiding the monsters in the dark!< is an experience that will stay with me for a while.
Completely agreed about the linear structure, I always thought it was the success of Witcher 3 that started an open-world craze, but regardless of where it came from it definitely ended up negatively impacting some games.
In general I think Ninja Theory did an amazing job at hiding the budget constraints. Another great example is the use of superimposed footage of live action instead of attempting to render characters and doing it poorly. The overall length of the game is also a part of this; they didn't attempt to stretch too far and spread too thin but instead just made something brief but with the best quality they could. The game is short, but it didn't feel too short. It felt perfectly measured for the story they were trying to tell.
Careful with the spoilers. I've only done one trial so far, and it wasn't that one.
Ah shit, sorry! I'll edit in a spoiler tag for anyone else.