(no subject)

[olivermoss]

* Indie games without manual saves should be illegal. They are the bane of my existence right now.

* In relates news, Oxenfree 2 is out and it's amazing but I just spent 2 hours backtracking because the auto-save didn't save everything. Also, when looking up 1 thing before heading into end-game I saw '13th check in with Nick' Who the fuck is Nick? At one point I missed an interaction because I talked to someone first and got locked out of a lot of stuff, and auto-saves means I would have needed to start over to fix it. I bet it was right then.

Not strategizing saves makes a game more immersive, but it also means I will never play the full story because after all that back tracking not going again. It's not realistic to do the full story without a guide, which is also not immersive.

Also, interacts across the whole map don't show up until after certain conversations, which I didn't expect. Playing the game 100% immersive would mean scouring the entire map repeatedly, with no fast travel.

Game is amazing and the good reviews and well earned but holy mother of fuck could it use a polish pass.

[Time passes]

So I half wrote this post and finished the game. Yeah, loved the first game but am not really into this one. Most of my enthusiasm was just based on the first one, just sort of coasting. The Steam review average is coming in as 'overwhelmingly positive', but yeah for me this was not the vibe. But I'd been looking forward to the game, got it and played it.

Comments

[mistressofmuses]

Bummer that it wasn't as good as the first one!

Big agree on the save issue. I get the "immersion" reasoning, but yeah, when an autosave means you can wind up locked out of parts of the story, or forces you to redo large portions... it's going to be hard for people to experience the whole damn game.

[olivermoss]

I feel like game devs think we have infinite time sometimes. Unless there is a really polished core gameplay loop, spending extra hours on a game is so tedious.

A lot of people seem to like it, but, just not for me. I think the storyline comes out of unprocessed lockdown trauma, and not in a 'this is me processing' way but in a 'this is me not processing' way.

[mistressofmuses]

Right? Like they think time and attention are both just infinite. Replayability is one thing... and I LOVE games that have genuinely fun options for replay! New context changing how an earlier scene hits is one of my favorite things. Gaining access to new scenes/areas/options/story branches based on previous actions is cool. But having saves bork the path you're on and force you to redo the whole. damn. thing. does not feel fresh and fun to me, lol.

Ah. That's a bit unfortunate. I feel like I've seen some stuff that both feels like processing and avoidance/refusal to process, and... welp. I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot of both intentional and unintentional lockdown/pandemic processing in various forms of art for years to come.