Posted on: November 4, 2012
Azilut
Verified ownerGames: 1767 Reviews: 1
A game worth playing, but it has issues...
First off, let me get this out of the way: I liked La Mulana. I liked it a lot. I've told my friends to buy it. It's definitely one of the most impressive indie efforts I've ever played, with a massive world, great art, excellent soundtrack, some truly great boss battles, and intensely enjoyable action/platforming gameplay. I even got into the story, for crying out loud. But oh boy, this game has issues. Some games are designed for people who like a challenge, and I respect that. But La Mulana was designed for people who like to be /punished/ - people who like to go through brutal ordeals just so that they can brag about having survived them. If that's you, then you can stop reading right now and go buy the game. But I figure the rest of you could do with a bit of advance warning. The issue is not so much with the gameplay - while the bosses are definitely challenging, most of them are quite manageable once you figure out their patterns, and I only once got "stuck" on a boss for any length of time. No, where La Mulana gets absolutely silly is with the /puzzles/. Some of La Mulana's puzzles are merely "very hard". You will encounter hundreds of stone tablets, murals, funny little background designs, etc, and they are nearly always a clue to something - but often you won't encounter that "something" until you're six hours further and three levels deeper into the game. This basically leaves you with only three options: 1) write down /everything/ you see - every scrap of text, the location of every oddly-coloured brick, /everything/; 2) be prepared to waste a lot of time running around trying to find things again; or 3) use a walkthrough. If you don't mind spending hours scribbling endless notes, then maybe option 1 won't bother you, but personally I find that more appropriate to a point-and-click adventure than to what is ostensibly an action game. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that La Mulana gives you a lot of freedom to explore areas that you might not be properly equipped for, so it often won't be clear to you whether you're failing to solve a puzzle because you haven't thought about it enough, or whether it's because you just don't have the item you need yet. But on top of the "very hard" puzzles, La Mulana also has a number of puzzles that are just downright unfair. For example, there is one particular boss in the game who will open up several previously inaccessible areas once defeated. However, as far as I can tell, nothing in the game /tells/ you that these areas are now opened up, and there's no logical reason why defeating that particular boss would open them, and several of them are tucked away in fairly hard-to-reach corners of the game that you have no reason to go back to. So you pretty much have to just keep making special trips to what were previously dead ends, just to /see/ if anything's changed yet. And that, ultimately, is why I'm docking two stars from this otherwise very impressive game - it too frequently discards logic and simply demands pointless busy work in order to progress. If you honestly miss the days when you had to try to attack Every. Single. Brick. in the game, just in case it turned out to be a secret passage, then this game will fill your heart with nostalgic joy. But if, like me, you think that some of those conventions were discarded for good reason (because they reward a tolerance for repetitive boredom rather than reasoning skills or reflexes), well... La Mulana is still a great game, and I'm still recommending it, but with the caution that you should know what you're getting yourself into.
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