Hollow Knight

Lately it seems, lots of fantastic games are coming out one after another. I wanted to dig into a game this weekend and it was a tough choice. I had 5 or 6 great indie and remaster titles I was weighing as options, most coming out for 15 - 20 bucks. I chose Hollow Knight - it was my "must play" out of the bunch. Unfortunately, after installing and getting the popcorn going, my girlfriend and I settled in to a new game, only to watch freezes and strange bugs ruin the experience. Every time I attack anything, there's a second of freezing. When I go into a new room, even in the same area, the loading times are atrocious, and nothing but a black screen for 7 or so seconds. These two small bugs make the entire, beautiful, sprawling game unplayable. Also, I'm without a game this weekend because I blew my money on this gorgeous and unplayable game. Find a forum where people have the same problem, and all the responses are "I'm not having any issues with that..." etc. I don't have the time or inclination to research patches and contact support and do re installs for hours. I gave it an hour of work but.... yeah, look, I get into games to ESCAPE tedious bureaucracy like that. This is a wider criticism, but I think the games industry has problems with mob mentality. I've played many games made with Unity, and they all have issues with feeling SOLID. And yet, criticism of Unity are always accompanied by the same old mobs of Unity snobs defending it for.... reasons. No room for a mixed opinion with ideologues. Many modern 3D games feel.....soft. And despite years of higher fidelity, a sphere made of polygons is still just weird looking. There's this weird delay in everything - responsiveness and robustness has given way to overblown particle effects, cheap looking paper walls, and shiny wet rain effects. In the days of Mario World, I felt a visceral, immediate response when I pressed that jump key, satisfying as playing a note on a piano. There wasn't a single issue with performance drops or stuttering frames. This is the most important thing to me in games, a feeling of perfect connection to the game world. I actually think it's at the foundation of what a game is - a set of rules that reward or punish you for your actions, without randomness. Something about our overwrought, 3D-obsessed, particle effects obsessed ethos has created games and a community which has lost it's way. Ultimately I'm just saddened that I can't enjoy this masterpiece.

I don’t get all the hype. This game is okay-ish, but its controls aren’t great (and you might have to use antimicro to play with your gamepad too), the music and graphics are depressing, there is a lot of grind (enemies repop and you have to kill them again and again to earn money to buy stuff), and having to go back to your fantom after you die from a far-away checkpoint (sometimes not even knowing where to go because you don’t have the map) is extremely tedious. Also you have no idea where you need to go next so there is a lot of going back and forth doing the same things repetitively. There isn’t even any story. I enjoyed it for a while but I had to follow walkthroughs a few times and the grind and far-away checkpoints killed it for me. I stopped playing after a few hours.

Unfortunately crashes directly at start on Ubuntu. Was able to start it with opengl as suggested in the forum, but performance suffers too much when running like that.

The most overrated platform game of all time

The game is gray, boring and slow. Nothing pleases the eye. If you like grayscale and insects then probably you'll like this game. The actual gameplay is to wander through dark and depressing locations with occasional enemies/npcs. I expected "Ori" like experience. But it is a different game.