-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
- Status
Shit after greenmangaming changed their currency to south africa's yesterday, a lot of games are region blocked like all of bethesda, bought doom eternal at the beginning of this month even and now it's gone(the store page, the game is still in my library). Forspoken and cuphead too which was there on the wish list section.. wonder if they are still converting currency?
Yup, hopefully it's just because it was a Prime deal because they've given way Origin codes a few times in the past few months that were just the key.
Lol, I didn't even know they were still a thing. I thought they got axed along with the BioWare Social Network.
Beat the final boss in Lost Ruins. There's a bit of a boss rush sequence there, but since I found the almighty rocket launcher, it wasn't much of an issue.
I got the "good" ending, but since I wasn't playing on high enough difficulty, it's not the "true good" one. Feeling a tad miffed with that.
Not 100% sure what I'll play next. Need to think on that.
I got the "good" ending, but since I wasn't playing on high enough difficulty, it's not the "true good" one. Feeling a tad miffed with that.
Not 100% sure what I'll play next. Need to think on that.
View: https://twitter.com/dev1_official/status/1547446134385176577?t=hz4A68l4HZPGzdeuYGhirQ&s=19
RE2 Remake's sold 10m copies. Well deserved, what a game that is.
View: https://twitter.com/OwlcatGames/status/1547597981615943680
Wrath of the Righteous is getting the Enhanced Edition on 29th September.
So could it be that the reason why Valkyrie Elysium comes out later on Steam and not on the 29th september like on console is that the 28th is when a year will have passed since the release of Neo The World Ends With You on EGS, meaning it'll be out on Steam the same day this year?
Just to clarify, this is something different to
Different yeah.. it's made by a VR company, Survios, and from the website blurb: 'This new Aliens game will feature an original storyline, set between the Alien and Aliens films, where a battle hardened veteran has a vendetta against the Xenomorphs.'
So I'm thinking less horror horror from that description. Still, it's been too long since we had anything horror related from the franchise in the first place.
I finished Before Your Eyes last night and I felt I should write some thoughts on it, since I never see anyone talk about it (and I'm waiting for my next game to finish downloading).
- Before Your Eyes (BYE) is an indie....adventure game? Narrative game? What do we call these games now that have very minimal interaction, but attempt to tell an emotionally compelling story?
- Anyway, its main claim to fame is that it's dubbed as a game that is controlled simply by blinking. This is...half true. While you can play it with standard mouse controls, you can (and they recommend) play it by setting up your webcam wherein the game will use your eyes blinking as a substitute for a mouse click. You still have to look around with the mouse, but yeah, you can blink to click on whatever you're looking at (by using mouse look, there's no eye tracking). I have mixed feelings on this gimmick, which i'll get into later.
- As an adventure game, it's about 90 minutes front to back. There's some "choices" you can make here and there, but aside from changing a couple of meaningless plot points that are abandoned within 2 or 3 minutes to loop back into the main path, it's a strictly linear affair.
- I don't want to get into the story too much, as at 90 minutes long, it's tough not to delve too deep without getting into spoilers. The main setup is that you play a person who has just died and is being ferried to the gates of non-denominational afterlife judgement. You aren't able to speak, but the boatman can read your thoughts and he requests you to recall your life, as he'll need to be your voice when speaking to the final judge, who will ultimately determine whether you go to the good place or the bad place. The bulk of the story is played out in first person vignettes of your life from being a baby to a child and onwards. As your character can not speak, only blink to confirm certain actions, the story is told basically by listening to the people around you, what they say about you to others and how they communicate with you and to you.
- If you've played and enjoyed games like Florence or That Dragon Cancer, or to a lesser extent, What Remains of Edith Finch, you are in for a similar experience here. I will occasionally flippantly lump these games as "tragedy porn" as they romanticize otherwise painful things as the lovely parts of life. In general, these types of stories don't work for me. There tends to be a lack of maturity in this type of writing in the games space; a wallowing in maudlin plot points that can mistake tragedy for poignancy. I will say that BYE is incredibly sincere. I can feel the sincerity of the story and I have no doubt that it means a lot to the people who worked on it. I can also understand how someone can be emotionally affected by these type of stories (if you are the type of person who cried at the opening of Pixar's "Up", I would suspect that this game could touch you), but the sincerity of the writing comes across to me as someone shouting YOU ARE GOING TO FEEL THIS, while the modern-indie-folk acoustic guitar starts plucking away. You know the type.
- In general, I enjoyed the presentation; the art style is pitch perfect for this type of story and budget, as the visual character abstractions do a lot with very little. The characters emote with simple facial geometry, and it sells emotion far better than probably anything but the best of the uncanny-valley riddled polygonal performances in the games industry. The voice acting is generally solid throughout but I couldn't quite shake the feeling that there were some characters that were "doing a voice" rather than that character "having a voice", if that makes any sense. Like an actor doing an accent that isn't their native one, whenever their real voice slips through, the facade is kind of broken. Occasionally the actors swing for the fences and there's some real "Theatre Kid Energy", but I can't quite tell if it's the writing or the acting or directing. Probably a combination of all of the above.
- One thing about the presentation - the characters appear to be mocapped. This isn't a crazy thought for an indie game in 2021, as there are even apps for your phone now that can give you decent mocapping results, even without a suit or studio. This definitely helps the animation, but there's a few too many places where they didn't clean up the animation, so you'll have, say, a character put their hand on their knee while getting up from sitting down, but the hand will be floating 6 inches above their knee because the game character doesn't have the same limb dimensions as the person doing the mocap. Or them holding up a piece of paper and pointing at a place on it, but their finger clips through the paper every time and you can see it come out the other side. I get it, indie studio, low budget, etc. but it puts in stark relief two things:
i. If you're going to do something, you have to go all the way with it. None of these problems would have occurred with key framed animation, so if you are going to invest in mocapping, you have to be willing to do some cleanup on the other end, and
ii. The less focus you put on player driven gameplay, the more obvious your shortcomings in other areas will be. If all your game is watching a story play out in front of you, all the little issues will become more apparent. No one cares when your bowling ball pauldrons in Dark Souls clips through your face when you swing your sword, but they definitely notice when Ellie's teeth clip through her lip when she's yelling at Joel.
- Speaking of needing to fully commit - the blinking controls. I've got two criticisms of them and one is worse than the other, but both probably affected my experience equally:
i. When I first booted up the game, I went into the calibration and was amazed at how accurate the blink tracking was. Like, right off the bat, with almost no calibration, it read my webcam properly, showed a video of my face (with proper lens distortion correction too, which was nice), and read my blinks almost 100% consistently. I didn't even have to pantomime blinking like a cartoon, i could just blink normally and it would pick it up. It caught even the subtle half blinks when my eyes would flick to different parts of the screen.
but...
...about halfway through the game, it just started randomly registering blinks every second on the second at an even pulse, no matter what I did. I re-calibrated (and the calibration would just keep firing off erroneous blinks no matter where i moved or looked or anything). I tried rebooting, re-calibrating again, unplugging, plugging back in, changing my lighting, changing my distance, you name it. Same thing. I scoured the forums, did all the dev tips and eventually got it to work by turning down the blink sensitivity so low that i had to act out "blinking" like whiteguyblinking.gif to get it to read properly and even then it only kind of did. But anything higher than lowest sensitivity would just cause a rapid series of blinks.
I can't really fault the game too bad for it, even though nothing in my environment changed, it just sort of happened. Maybe the lighting subtly shifted in my room. Maybe my webcam went on the fritz. Who knows, but this is the type of risk a developer takes with a novel control scheme and it ends up, for better or worse, becoming part of the experience. You take the good with the bad. Will it happen to you? Probably not, but who knows, and I would be dishonest if I just said that everything worked out hunky dory.
ii. Blinking as a gameplay mechanic...it's just not...great. I believe that the blinking-to-progress mechanic is fundamentally opposed to creating a simulation of the player experiencing the intended emotions the game is trying to convey. See, in the game, the vast majority of scenes play out by having a short intro sequence of mandatory story, then a metronome will appear on screen. While that metronome is on screen, if you blink it will automatically skip ahead in time to the next scene in your life. But the metronome appears, in most cases, well before the story content has finished playing out.
This means that, to experience as much of the story as possible, you are constantly concentrating on not-blinking. So when the cute girl in school is teasing you about your dumb drawings, and the more she talks, the more you're listening for cues that she actually might like you, you are also trying not to blink while your eyes dry out. While your parents in the other room are arguing about poor finances and your mom starts crossing the line verbally to your father and you are listening for clues about the subtext to the argument, you are rolling your eyes around the screen to keep them from drying out so you can experience the breadth of the dialogue without blinking.
While one could argue the player shouldn't be gamifying their blinking experience but should just go with whatever happens, it doesn't feel congruent with the game design. In a game about learning about someone's life it literally just smash cuts and moves to the next one when you blink. If they were trying not to make it gamey, why does every scene play out as a staring contest between me and the story? I don't know what they were attempting to equate between the player in real life and the character in the game. Doing a staring contest with a webcam to see more of the story in the drama playing out in front of me never pulled me into the story more or made me feel like I was the character. Becoming acutely aware of your own blinks doesn't center you emotionally in any way.
I could see one thinking "hey, a person will strain their eyes, causing them to well up, which will make them more vulnerable and more able to cry." But that's like thinking if I punch you in the face when a character finds out their dog died, you'll be more likely to cry. That's an orthogonal shortcut to a physical response, not an emotional one. In Metal Gear Solid 4, they make you jam the X button to crawl through the electrified hallway to make you feel the physical strain that Snake is feeling int he game. You feel as a player, like Snake does in the game...physically struggling to make it to the end. Forcing your eyelids open to make sure not to blink so you can see the rest of the story of your mom lamenting how her parents treated her....just isn't it.
Anyway, I don't think the game is bad. The story is clear and the emotional beats have universal appeal. There's some twists and turns and some decent characterization. If, like I said, you liked Florence or What Remains of Edith Finch, you may like this in the same way I had similar problems with those games. At worst, it'll probably still make you want to hug your mom.
- Before Your Eyes (BYE) is an indie....adventure game? Narrative game? What do we call these games now that have very minimal interaction, but attempt to tell an emotionally compelling story?
- Anyway, its main claim to fame is that it's dubbed as a game that is controlled simply by blinking. This is...half true. While you can play it with standard mouse controls, you can (and they recommend) play it by setting up your webcam wherein the game will use your eyes blinking as a substitute for a mouse click. You still have to look around with the mouse, but yeah, you can blink to click on whatever you're looking at (by using mouse look, there's no eye tracking). I have mixed feelings on this gimmick, which i'll get into later.
- As an adventure game, it's about 90 minutes front to back. There's some "choices" you can make here and there, but aside from changing a couple of meaningless plot points that are abandoned within 2 or 3 minutes to loop back into the main path, it's a strictly linear affair.
- I don't want to get into the story too much, as at 90 minutes long, it's tough not to delve too deep without getting into spoilers. The main setup is that you play a person who has just died and is being ferried to the gates of non-denominational afterlife judgement. You aren't able to speak, but the boatman can read your thoughts and he requests you to recall your life, as he'll need to be your voice when speaking to the final judge, who will ultimately determine whether you go to the good place or the bad place. The bulk of the story is played out in first person vignettes of your life from being a baby to a child and onwards. As your character can not speak, only blink to confirm certain actions, the story is told basically by listening to the people around you, what they say about you to others and how they communicate with you and to you.
- If you've played and enjoyed games like Florence or That Dragon Cancer, or to a lesser extent, What Remains of Edith Finch, you are in for a similar experience here. I will occasionally flippantly lump these games as "tragedy porn" as they romanticize otherwise painful things as the lovely parts of life. In general, these types of stories don't work for me. There tends to be a lack of maturity in this type of writing in the games space; a wallowing in maudlin plot points that can mistake tragedy for poignancy. I will say that BYE is incredibly sincere. I can feel the sincerity of the story and I have no doubt that it means a lot to the people who worked on it. I can also understand how someone can be emotionally affected by these type of stories (if you are the type of person who cried at the opening of Pixar's "Up", I would suspect that this game could touch you), but the sincerity of the writing comes across to me as someone shouting YOU ARE GOING TO FEEL THIS, while the modern-indie-folk acoustic guitar starts plucking away. You know the type.
- In general, I enjoyed the presentation; the art style is pitch perfect for this type of story and budget, as the visual character abstractions do a lot with very little. The characters emote with simple facial geometry, and it sells emotion far better than probably anything but the best of the uncanny-valley riddled polygonal performances in the games industry. The voice acting is generally solid throughout but I couldn't quite shake the feeling that there were some characters that were "doing a voice" rather than that character "having a voice", if that makes any sense. Like an actor doing an accent that isn't their native one, whenever their real voice slips through, the facade is kind of broken. Occasionally the actors swing for the fences and there's some real "Theatre Kid Energy", but I can't quite tell if it's the writing or the acting or directing. Probably a combination of all of the above.
- One thing about the presentation - the characters appear to be mocapped. This isn't a crazy thought for an indie game in 2021, as there are even apps for your phone now that can give you decent mocapping results, even without a suit or studio. This definitely helps the animation, but there's a few too many places where they didn't clean up the animation, so you'll have, say, a character put their hand on their knee while getting up from sitting down, but the hand will be floating 6 inches above their knee because the game character doesn't have the same limb dimensions as the person doing the mocap. Or them holding up a piece of paper and pointing at a place on it, but their finger clips through the paper every time and you can see it come out the other side. I get it, indie studio, low budget, etc. but it puts in stark relief two things:
i. If you're going to do something, you have to go all the way with it. None of these problems would have occurred with key framed animation, so if you are going to invest in mocapping, you have to be willing to do some cleanup on the other end, and
ii. The less focus you put on player driven gameplay, the more obvious your shortcomings in other areas will be. If all your game is watching a story play out in front of you, all the little issues will become more apparent. No one cares when your bowling ball pauldrons in Dark Souls clips through your face when you swing your sword, but they definitely notice when Ellie's teeth clip through her lip when she's yelling at Joel.
- Speaking of needing to fully commit - the blinking controls. I've got two criticisms of them and one is worse than the other, but both probably affected my experience equally:
i. When I first booted up the game, I went into the calibration and was amazed at how accurate the blink tracking was. Like, right off the bat, with almost no calibration, it read my webcam properly, showed a video of my face (with proper lens distortion correction too, which was nice), and read my blinks almost 100% consistently. I didn't even have to pantomime blinking like a cartoon, i could just blink normally and it would pick it up. It caught even the subtle half blinks when my eyes would flick to different parts of the screen.
but...
...about halfway through the game, it just started randomly registering blinks every second on the second at an even pulse, no matter what I did. I re-calibrated (and the calibration would just keep firing off erroneous blinks no matter where i moved or looked or anything). I tried rebooting, re-calibrating again, unplugging, plugging back in, changing my lighting, changing my distance, you name it. Same thing. I scoured the forums, did all the dev tips and eventually got it to work by turning down the blink sensitivity so low that i had to act out "blinking" like whiteguyblinking.gif to get it to read properly and even then it only kind of did. But anything higher than lowest sensitivity would just cause a rapid series of blinks.
I can't really fault the game too bad for it, even though nothing in my environment changed, it just sort of happened. Maybe the lighting subtly shifted in my room. Maybe my webcam went on the fritz. Who knows, but this is the type of risk a developer takes with a novel control scheme and it ends up, for better or worse, becoming part of the experience. You take the good with the bad. Will it happen to you? Probably not, but who knows, and I would be dishonest if I just said that everything worked out hunky dory.
ii. Blinking as a gameplay mechanic...it's just not...great. I believe that the blinking-to-progress mechanic is fundamentally opposed to creating a simulation of the player experiencing the intended emotions the game is trying to convey. See, in the game, the vast majority of scenes play out by having a short intro sequence of mandatory story, then a metronome will appear on screen. While that metronome is on screen, if you blink it will automatically skip ahead in time to the next scene in your life. But the metronome appears, in most cases, well before the story content has finished playing out.
This means that, to experience as much of the story as possible, you are constantly concentrating on not-blinking. So when the cute girl in school is teasing you about your dumb drawings, and the more she talks, the more you're listening for cues that she actually might like you, you are also trying not to blink while your eyes dry out. While your parents in the other room are arguing about poor finances and your mom starts crossing the line verbally to your father and you are listening for clues about the subtext to the argument, you are rolling your eyes around the screen to keep them from drying out so you can experience the breadth of the dialogue without blinking.
While one could argue the player shouldn't be gamifying their blinking experience but should just go with whatever happens, it doesn't feel congruent with the game design. In a game about learning about someone's life it literally just smash cuts and moves to the next one when you blink. If they were trying not to make it gamey, why does every scene play out as a staring contest between me and the story? I don't know what they were attempting to equate between the player in real life and the character in the game. Doing a staring contest with a webcam to see more of the story in the drama playing out in front of me never pulled me into the story more or made me feel like I was the character. Becoming acutely aware of your own blinks doesn't center you emotionally in any way.
I could see one thinking "hey, a person will strain their eyes, causing them to well up, which will make them more vulnerable and more able to cry." But that's like thinking if I punch you in the face when a character finds out their dog died, you'll be more likely to cry. That's an orthogonal shortcut to a physical response, not an emotional one. In Metal Gear Solid 4, they make you jam the X button to crawl through the electrified hallway to make you feel the physical strain that Snake is feeling int he game. You feel as a player, like Snake does in the game...physically struggling to make it to the end. Forcing your eyelids open to make sure not to blink so you can see the rest of the story of your mom lamenting how her parents treated her....just isn't it.
Anyway, I don't think the game is bad. The story is clear and the emotional beats have universal appeal. There's some twists and turns and some decent characterization. If, like I said, you liked Florence or What Remains of Edith Finch, you may like this in the same way I had similar problems with those games. At worst, it'll probably still make you want to hug your mom.
Last edited:
Nope. Probably gonna go back for it if I decide that I hate myself enough. As far as I could tell, there wasn't really a reward for doing it?
The music while climbing out of that pit in The Abyss was incredible though.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0pUCSKVMX8
Last edited:
nice write up, I do think the eye blinking is kinda iffy and using a mouse click as an alternative is very recommended to get the full story contentI finished Before Your Eyes last night and I felt I should write some thoughts on it, since I never see anyone talk about it (and I'm waiting for my next game to finish downloading).
- Before Your Eyes (BYE) is an indie....adventure game? Narrative game? What do we call these games now that have very minimal interaction, but attempt to tell an emotionally compelling story?
- Anyway, its main claim to fame is that it's dubbed as a game that is controlled simply by blinking. This is...half true. While you can play it with standard mouse controls, you can (and they recommend) play it by setting up your webcam wherein the game will use your eyes blinking as a substitute for a mouse click. You still have to look around with the mouse, but yeah, you can blink to click on whatever you're looking at (by using mouse look, there's no eye tracking). I have mixed feelings on this gimmick, which i'll get into later.
- As an adventure game, it's about 90 minutes front to back. There's some "choices" you can make here and there, but aside from changing a couple of meaningless plot points that are abandoned within 2 or 3 minutes to loop back into the main path, it's a strictly linear affair.
- I don't want to get into the story too much, as at 90 minutes long, it's tough not to delve too deep without getting into spoilers. The main setup is that you play a person who has just died and is being ferried to the gates of non-denominational afterlife judgement. You aren't able to speak, but the boatman can read your thoughts and he requests you to recall your life, as he'll need to be your voice when speaking to the final judge, who will ultimately determine whether you go to the good place or the bad place. The bulk of the story is played out in first person vignettes of your life from being a baby to a child and onwards. As your character can not speak, only blink to confirm certain actions, the story is told basically by listening to the people around you, what they say about you to others and how they communicate with you and to you.
- If you've played and enjoyed games like Florence or That Dragon Cancer, or to a lesser extent, What Remains of Edith Finch, you are in for a similar experience here. I will occasionally flippantly lump these games as "tragedy porn" as they romanticize otherwise painful things as the lovely parts of life. In general, these types of stories don't work for me. There tends to be a lack of maturity in this type of writing in the games space; a wallowing in maudlin plot points that can mistake tragedy for poignancy. I will say that BYE is incredibly sincere. I can feel the sincerity of the story and I have no doubt that it means a lot to the people who worked on it. I can also understand how someone can be emotionally affected by these type of stories (if you are the type of person who cried at the opening of Pixar's "Up", I would suspect that this game could touch you), but the sincerity of the writing comes across to me as someone shouting YOU ARE GOING TO FEEL THIS, while the modern-indie-folk acoustic guitar starts plucking away. You know the type.
- In general, I enjoyed the presentation; the art style is pitch perfect for this type of story and budget, as the visual character abstractions do a lot with very little. The characters emote with simple facial geometry, and it sells emotion far better than probably anything but the best of the uncanny-valley riddled polygonal performances in the games industry. The voice acting is generally solid throughout but I couldn't quite shake the feeling that there were some characters that were "doing a voice" rather than that character "having a voice", if that makes any sense. Like an actor doing an accent that isn't their native one, whenever their real voice slips through, the facade is kind of broken. Occasionally the actors swing for the fences and there's some real "Theatre Kid Energy", but I can't quite tell if it's the writing or the acting or directing. Probably a combination of all of the above.
- One thing about the presentation - the characters appear to be mocapped. This isn't a crazy thought for an indie game in 2021, as there are even apps for your phone now that can give you decent mocapping results, even without a suit or studio. This definitely helps the animation, but there's a few too many places where they didn't clean up the animation, so you'll have, say, a character put their hand on their knee while getting up from sitting down, but the hand will be floating 6 inches above their knee because the game character doesn't have the same limb dimensions as the person doing the mocap. Or them holding up a piece of paper and pointing at a place on it, but their finger clips through the paper every time and you can see it come out the other side. I get it, indie studio, low budget, etc. but it puts in stark relief two things:
i. If you're going to do something, you have to go all the way with it. None of these problems would have occurred with key framed animation, so if you are going to invest in mocapping, you have to be willing to do some cleanup on the other end, and
ii. The less focus you put on player driven gameplay, the more obvious your shortcomings in other areas will be. If all your game is watching a story play out in front of you, all the little issues will become more apparent. No one cares when your bowling ball pauldrons in Dark Souls clips through your face when you swing your sword, but they definitely notice when Ellie's teeth clip through her lip when she's yelling at Joel.
- Speaking of needing to fully commit - the blinking controls. I've got two criticisms of them and one is worse than the other, but both probably affected my experience equally:
i. When I first booted up the game, I went into the calibration and was amazed at how accurate the blink tracking was. Like, right off the bat, with almost no calibration, it read my webcam properly, showed a video of my face (with proper lens distortion correction too, which was nice), and read my blinks almost 100% consistently. I didn't even have to pantomime blinking like a cartoon, i could just blink normally and it would pick it up. It caught even the subtle half blinks when my eyes would flick to different parts of the screen.
but...
...about halfway through the game, it just started randomly registering blinks every second on the second at an even pulse, no matter what I did. I re-calibrated (and the calibration would just keep firing off erroneous blinks no matter where i moved or looked or anything). I tried rebooting, re-calibrating again, unplugging, plugging back in, changing my lighting, changing my distance, you name it. Same thing. I scoured the forums, did all the dev tips and eventually got it to work by turning down the blink sensitivity so low that i had to act out "blinking" like whiteguyblinking.gif to get it to read properly and even then it only kind of did. But anything higher than lowest sensitivity would just cause a rapid series of blinks.
I can't really fault the game too bad for it, even though nothing in my environment changed, it just sort of happened. Maybe the lighting subtly shifted in my room. Maybe my webcam went on the fritz. Who knows, but this is the type of risk a developer takes with a novel control scheme and it ends up, for better or worse, becoming part of the experience. You take the good with the bad. Will it happen to you? Probably not, but who knows, and I would be dishonest if I just said that everything worked out hunky dory.
ii. Blinking as a gameplay mechanic...it's just not...great. I believe that the blinking-to-progress mechanic is fundamentally opposed to creating a simulation of the player experiencing the intended emotions the game is trying to convey. See, in the game, the vast majority of scenes play out by having a short intro sequence of mandatory story, then a metronome will appear on screen. While that metronome is on screen, if you blink it will automatically skip ahead in time to the next scene in your life. But the metronome appears, in most cases, well before the story content has finished playing out.
This means that, to experience as much of the story as possible, you are constantly concentrating on not-blinking. So when the cute girl in school is teasing you about your dumb drawings, and the more she talks, the more you're listening for cues that she actually might like you, you are also trying not to blink while your eyes dry out. While your parents in the other room are arguing about poor finances and your mom starts crossing the line verbally to your father and you are listening for clues about the subtext to the argument, you are rolling your eyes around the screen to keep them from drying out so you can experience the breadth of the dialogue without blinking.
While one could argue the player shouldn't be gamifying their blinking experience but should just go with whatever happens, it doesn't feel congruent with the game design. In a game about learning about someone's life it literally just smash cuts and moves to the next one when you blink. If they were trying not to make it gamey, why does every scene play out as a staring contest between me and the story? I don't know what they were attempting to equate between the player in real life and the character in the game. Doing a staring contest with a webcam to see more of the story in the drama playing out in front of me never pulled me into the story more or made me feel like I was the character. Becoming acutely aware of your own blinks doesn't center you emotionally in any way.
I could see one thinking "hey, a person will strain their eyes, causing them to well up, which will make them more vulnerable and more able to cry." But that's like thinking if I punch you in the face when a character finds out their dog died, you'll be more likely to cry. That's an orthogonal shortcut to a physical response, not an emotional one. In Metal Gear Solid 4, they make you jam the X button to crawl through the electrified hallway to make you feel the physical strain that Snake is feeling int he game. You feel as a player, like Snake does in the game...physically struggling to make it to the end. Forcing your eyelids open to make sure not to blink so you can see the rest of the story of your mom lamenting how her parents treated her....just isn't it.
Anyway, I don't think the game is bad. The story is clear and the emotional beats have universal appeal. There's some twists and turns and some decent characterization. If, like I said, you liked Florence or What Remains of Edith Finch, you may like this in the same way I had similar problems with those games. At worst, it'll probably still make you want to hug your mom.
Played some more Underdog Detective. The chapters go very fast, I feel like there might be only an hour left in this game. The mystery deepens and honestly I love this, even if I don't like that you need to pay for DLC to complete the actual game. The new character Wu Yue is fantastic but I hope this doesn't mean Xiao Ling gets sidelined.
KINGDOM HEARTS HD 1.5+2.5 ReMIX is on sale in the Epic Game Store (Canada only?) for a "reasonable" $38.99. Finally bite the bullet now or still hold out hope it's coming to Steam soon?
Damn, that's disappointing to hear. From what I recall, it means the publisher never had a 'placeholder' price for the game in ZAR, so it automatically gets delisted until they update the price. The same thing happened with steam back in 2015, and some of the publishers reallllyy dragged their feet. (It took Ubisoft a ridiculous 4-5 years to get R6: Siege listed).
It's over, PC is dead
View: https://twitter.com/GIBiz/status/1547878171877339137?t=IxbqEOLFC-j2fBykxx_6kA&s=19
View: https://twitter.com/GIBiz/status/1547878171877339137?t=IxbqEOLFC-j2fBykxx_6kA&s=19
I don't know if it's just an error on gg.deals or GMG putting the store page up too early but I just now had a price alert for Spider-Man, which is gone now but gg.deals still has the price up for GMG. It could be that they are finally open up pre-orders today and possibly give more infos such as system specs etc.
It's always worth holding out hope for a Steam release, but given the one year mark came and went, and there no notable milestones coming up.. If you want to play them now, EGS might be the only option.
As I've failed to make up my mind, I am now playing Death's Gambit: Afterlife.
If they do open pre-orders make sure to use the 20% off coupon.
A little cut scene that adds some extra context to the story, but nothing to obsess over if you don't enjoy the challenge of it for the sake of doing it.
Also good. I don't think it's as good as Hollow Knight, but really enjoyed it. Been meaning to do another run of it with all the new stuff since I played it before it's big changing patch/version as well as the newer dlc stuff.[/cross][/cross]
Okay, gotcha. Not sure if I'm a big enough fan of the platforming in this game to put up with that. Thx for the info though
Yes, it's more for the joy of the action itself then any actual reward. It is a very hard segment, but hey, at least it's not locking the final ending behind the hardest thing to do in the game...
I've had a bad experience with HK, stareting out, beating 2 bosses (including Hornet), accumulating like 2 K Geo, and then losing it by dying on a corpse run over a tar pit platform. At which point I beat another boss in a different direction and discovered 2 shops, but had no Geo anymore.Saying no to Hollow Knight?
So this soured me on HK somewhat, and I've been reluctant to get back into it and give it another shot. I will eventually, but there's other metroidvanias that also intrigue me.
Frogun will be coming to GOG.
Frogun
Become the best explorer in the land in this cute, charming retro themed adventure!www.gog.com
FROGUN HYPE
Well it's not a zero chance, but given they removed Metal Gear Solid 2 from GOG last November due to licenses expiring, but haven't brought it back yet... I have my doubts they'll be bringing the series to PC/Steam any time soon.
Thanks for the response. I didn't know about this.
I will now wait for the pre-orders of Spiderman to open. 😣 (Pls a bundle with Morales...)
They really should just dump the ROMs for Silent Hill 2 and 3 on GOG at this point. They're floating out there on abandonware sites, and Konami is just skipping free money.
- Status