Are we glorifying punishment?
I'm not talking about the game's difficulty perse. The game has accessibility options and a ton of modifiers (this is a really good thing imo) problem is, there's stuff about this game's core design that the modifiers don't affect whatsoever, hence, these types of... archaic and obnoxious game design choices persist, despite the settings.
For starters, the game is extremely stingy with its bone currency system, this is the souls of this game, so you use this to level up and buy stuff. Problem is, the game gives you very little of this at the start, and it continues to do so as you progress, die two times without being able to retrieve your bones and they're gone.
There's also annoying contradicting design choices, like the developers chose to have a huge town for you to explore but to also add a character that can stumble on you and pick pocket a ton of your bones, only to then run away. It was fun the first time, not so much the other three times it happened as I was trying to figure out where to go next.
This also is a problem with the game, the game is very poor at conveying where to go next, you're supposed to restore some generators, but the only real reference you have as to their location is a fountain at the center of town surrounded by empty turned off bulbs. Head towards each of those directions and you'll constantly find blocked pathways, enemies that can kill you in a couple of hits, and generally, stuff that dissuades you from exploring.
So what is it? You want me to explore, but you also want me to get lost for hours till end?
When I finally found where to go, I was met with some enemies that took enormous amounts of damage, even with my damage being upgraded to level two (this is after two hours of playing btw).
Then the game locks you into rooms where it throws enemies at you with strange patterns and the screen shakes like crazy because everything is falling around you...
It just seems messy, like a game where they tried to cram a lot of things but didn't really wondered how to make them work altogether. I think the title was quite fun at the beginning, but it quickly grew tedious when I didn't know where to go next, and when exploration kept punishing me in all of the ways, assist settings enabled or not.
I do think is telling that a game as punishing as this is getting so much praise though, the same thing happened with Silksong as well. I just think that more and more developers and reviewers seem to equate quality, with punishment, and this translates not only in the act of hitting a game over screen in-game, but also in the core design of the game, how the levels are presented, how the puzzles are introduced, everything in this game has that same essence from Silksong where it feels deliberately designed to punish you, to frustrate you, and to annoy you.
Now, maybe you're into that. I personally have other stuff to do, I play games for fun, not to read guides, not to devote my life to them, they're a hobby and an enjoyable thing for me, but not something to devote my existence to, right?
This is one of those games that just wants you to give yourself to it with all your time, and patience.
No thank you.
27 gamers found this review helpful