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General Gaming / Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« on: September 08, 2016, 01:00:13 AM »
Obduction (PC):
Okay, I'm going to have to retract some of my suppositions from the impressions thread.I thought I was 1/3 of the way through the game, but it was probably over 2/3s. The fourth world specced out by the lore and such just turned out to be a two-minute set-piece of sorts. And also, the game never actually got hard, and was significantly more simple than Myst, much less Riven. I suppose much of this is reflective of a Kickstarter budget/price tag, but I'm flabberghasted by reviews that claim this is a real mindbender of yore, almost knocking it for being too cerebral.
I should perhaps qualify the difficulty a bit: the final puzzle is a culmination of a base-4 alien numeral system transcribed obscurely on grids. This would be satisfying and tricky, but the trouble is that the game did not require you to actually figure out the notation until the last juncture, in which you're basically locked in a room. I hadn't previously bothered figuring the thing out because there's a tool in the main town that lets you punch in decimal numbers or grid arrangements, thus I assumed I could always go back and puzzle it out when the need arose. But it never did, because every panel up to the finale was solvable (and seemingly meant to be solved) by randomly noodling with it for a few seconds. Kind of bafflingly poor design, compounded by the final restricted area that wouldn't be a puzzle at all if you could go back and check the translation machine. So another really bad puzzle concept right there. If I hadn't taken certain screenshots, I would have been **** out of luck.
But I wasn't **** out of luck! A worksheet I screencapped with the in-game tool had a base-4 grid pattern transcribed on it that was a fairly high number. I plugged it into the final console, and lo and behold it got me within spitting distance of the actual node I needed to access, and two minutes of fiddling with the pattern later, I had overcome the only real challenging puzzle concept in the entire game, because it was actually stupid and they provided you with the ability to cheese it, in fact made this a completely viable, if not primary, solution path!
A pretty big disappointment overall. I assumed there would be a Riven-esque meta puzzle to tie it all together, involving a convoluted pathway through the worlds, but once you complete the initial "turn on all the trees" goal, that's it, aside from finding the entrance to the bleeder, which is not a puzzle but is total bullshit that cost me a half-hour at the very end.
Okay, I'm going to have to retract some of my suppositions from the impressions thread.I thought I was 1/3 of the way through the game, but it was probably over 2/3s. The fourth world specced out by the lore and such just turned out to be a two-minute set-piece of sorts. And also, the game never actually got hard, and was significantly more simple than Myst, much less Riven. I suppose much of this is reflective of a Kickstarter budget/price tag, but I'm flabberghasted by reviews that claim this is a real mindbender of yore, almost knocking it for being too cerebral.
I should perhaps qualify the difficulty a bit: the final puzzle is a culmination of a base-4 alien numeral system transcribed obscurely on grids. This would be satisfying and tricky, but the trouble is that the game did not require you to actually figure out the notation until the last juncture, in which you're basically locked in a room. I hadn't previously bothered figuring the thing out because there's a tool in the main town that lets you punch in decimal numbers or grid arrangements, thus I assumed I could always go back and puzzle it out when the need arose. But it never did, because every panel up to the finale was solvable (and seemingly meant to be solved) by randomly noodling with it for a few seconds. Kind of bafflingly poor design, compounded by the final restricted area that wouldn't be a puzzle at all if you could go back and check the translation machine. So another really bad puzzle concept right there. If I hadn't taken certain screenshots, I would have been **** out of luck.
But I wasn't **** out of luck! A worksheet I screencapped with the in-game tool had a base-4 grid pattern transcribed on it that was a fairly high number. I plugged it into the final console, and lo and behold it got me within spitting distance of the actual node I needed to access, and two minutes of fiddling with the pattern later, I had overcome the only real challenging puzzle concept in the entire game, because it was actually stupid and they provided you with the ability to cheese it, in fact made this a completely viable, if not primary, solution path!
A pretty big disappointment overall. I assumed there would be a Riven-esque meta puzzle to tie it all together, involving a convoluted pathway through the worlds, but once you complete the initial "turn on all the trees" goal, that's it, aside from finding the entrance to the bleeder, which is not a puzzle but is total bullshit that cost me a half-hour at the very end.
