Kovukono

  • 62 Posts
  • 207 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 4th, 2023

help-circle






  • I had this on my list up until it released in early access. The concept was what caught my eye, but there’s just not much there.

    There is no fail state. A customer appears, says they want something, and if you don’t have it in your inventory yet (or even if you just don’t want to sell to them), they will wait literally forever. You can’t haggle with them over price, even though you can say no to their price. They just say they’ll wait, and they will. Forever. No new customers will come.

    The game has a set amount of time slots per day to clean and discover new items, but because you don’t have any requirement to sell, customers never leave, and you have an endless supply of trinkets to work with, the time slots mean nothing.

    And the game’s gameplay of uncovering trinkets is fun at first, until you realize that you won’t get anything really different. It’s going to be the same repetitive puzzle over and over, and then scrubbing every inch of it to clean it until you finish. It could have been somewhat zen, but it takes so long for each one that it’s just frustrating.

    I know the game just came out and it’s unfinished, but it’s in a state they feel comfortable asking for money for. It’s fun for maybe the length of the demo, but I didn’t even make it to the end of that without uninstalling it. There’s just not enough in the game, and zero pressure or management.


  • I like collecting achievements, so if it’s a requirement, I usually do. The last one was Silent Hill 2, which kind of doesn’t count. You start with nothing, and the only difference is that items appear when they weren’t there on the first run. I’ve done the FromSoft Soulsborne games, but Elden Ring had so much content that I had to take a long break before going back. The ones I’ve enjoyed most though are games that have upgrade systems that you can’t complete without a ton of grinding, like Ratchet and Clank (plus NG+ has the RYNO). They just can’t be super-long. I’m probably never replaying Persona 5, just because of the time commitment.








  • Up Your Arsenal was easily my choice for best game up until A Crack In Time came out. I never played the online portion, but the story was fantastic and hilarious, there’s a ton of worlds to explore, and the weapon upgrades felt great to pursue. My issues with most of the other games is they never hit the high bars set for content that these two had, and the story never seemed to hit the same highs either, either for UYA’s humor or Crack’s emotion.

    Regardless, I think we can all agree that not getting another game for at least half a decade more really sucks.






  • KovukonotoGaming@beehaw.orgLet's discuss: Hollow Knight
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    2 months ago

    Regarding Elden Ring, I would argue it does the sense of exploration better than Hollow Knight, but only by a small degree. For every area, there’s no map at the start, and the entire map’s size is obscured since it only shows what you’ve traveled through. It gets bigger as you go, but it’s still obscured by a fog of war for areas that fit inside the map, but you don’t have a map fragment for. You can see on the map where you can obtain the fragment, but not how to get there. Most times you can just cut a straight line to it, but sometimes it’s a pain.

    All that said, the thing it does better than Hollow Knight for exploration is a limitation of Hollow Knight’s map system. It’s split into different rooms, and each room has finite entrances and exits. Because you fill out the map through exploration, you’re going to know what you have and haven’t found.

    Because Elden Ring gives you the entirety of the map, it’s both helpful and not. You can figure out (mostly) how to get from point A to point B, and you have markers for everywhere you’ve been. There’s two minor issues with that, though. It’s a 2D map for a 3D world, which means you end up with some locations not being properly shown, because they’re underneath cliffs. The second is that the map does almost nothing to show what places of interest there are. You have large buildings shown, but that excludes all the catacombs (dungeon areas) you can visit. There are areas on the map that are right there, but due to the topography you have no idea how to get there. Going by the map alone means you’re going to miss out on a solid amount of the content available.

    It’s because the map is so limiting that it feels so good. You’re able to use it to figure where places are in directional relation, but you still have to look yourself to try and uncover areas. My first run, I prided myself on uncovering everything. I searched high and low, inspected the map to make sure I went to every corner, and really made sure I knew what was out there, and it felt amazing in terms of how much content there was and how much exploration you could do. I started a second run when the DLC came out, and found an area that, somehow, I had entirely missed. It took over a hundred and forty hours of searching, really searching, to get what I thought was complete, and it still wasn’t. It was a fantastic feeling on my second run.

    Hollow Knight’s map is excellent. The gameplay is excellent, the exploration is rewarding and challenging. But the issue it has is that it only has those two dimensions to work with. Elden Ring really works to emphasize that third dimension when scouring for secrets.