UPDATE: Finished the second playthrough, this time as Edward Carnby.
I neglected to mention all the stuttering and texture pop-ins and other graphical goofiness that happened (I think) in the previous review, so let me start with that -- it was present across both runs.
Some other fun things I encountered this time around while playing as Edward:
-- Audio repeating over itself multiple times while trying to have the same conversation with someone.
-- I could no longer use hatchets because the game decided I always had a hatchet, even when I didn't, so I could only use non-hatchet weapons for melee for the rest of the game. On a similar note, the Lagniappe for the Jack-in-the-Box apparently has a limit of one for its quantity you can have, which is interesting, as it's the only Lagniappe you can grab across both runs, as far as I can tell. But I did manage to grab it approximately six times during Edward's run, despite the limitations on inventory for it.
-- Starting from Chapter 3 onward, the map markers for rooms that still had stuff to do in them were all reset back to their flags for the beginning of Chapter 2 and they stayed that way for the rest of the game. This even went as far as things that were already done once that could not possibly be repeated, like in the case of opening the Medicine Box in Lottie's room. The box acts like you can interact with it with a key you no longer have and will tell you that you still need the key, even though you already opened it and got the key item needed for another puzzle.
-- I missed some trophies and was curious about what happened with them, so I went and googled the ones I was missing and found that four of them just straight-up don't work or only work for one character and not the other.
The role swap of using the opposite character results in almost the exact same situations, with the exception of one special scenario unique to each character in Chapter 4. If you play the game once with the character you want and then just watch a playthrough of Chapter 4 with the other character, you're covered instead of spending hours repeating the exact same processes. I guess playing as the other character for a second run does get you the ability to net all the Lagniappes (I did get them all), but there's very little reason to do so, unless you want to see a couple extra scenes that are callbacks to the original game...and one or two other scenes that involved the glitched trophies I mentioned, so you don't even get to see those!
In a sense, despite only spending less than half the hours on AITD this time around, I feel like the overall experience managed to be worse because of the ridiculous repetition with minimal payoff. I'm not going to lower the rating, but what a mess this game is. And I still don't have the trophy for playing for at least eight hours, despite having approximately fourteen hours of gameplay logged because of the weird bug during the Emily run where it just didn't accrue time for about eight hours!
Original update follows below:
--------------------------------------------------
So, quick thoughts on AITD2024 in no particular order because I just took my time through this and still finished it today in roughly one sitting (I apologize for lack of useful clarifications on stuff, I'm tired):
First, combat is absolute ass. And I mean beyond ass to the assieth power of assing. This varies between the few types of enemies you encounter, but generally speaking, you just swing wildly with R1 and hope you do enough damage to ruin them quickly (usually causing stunlock) with your melee weapon. If you're shooting, uhh...pray. Sometimes you can get a headshot and an enemy just drops, sometimes you have the four-legged facehuggers that...simply don't care if you shoot them because they just don't acknowledge bullets, even though bullets should hurt them. But that's more of a bug that we'll go over shortly. Also, there's attacks of opportunity (just called "opportunity"), but I only got one prompt to do so the entire game for some reason and even when I did it, the game didn't give me a trophy. Not a big loss, but it feels like some aspects of this game were more afterthoughts than anything else.
Second, HOLY FUCK THE BUGS AND GLITCHES. Things that happened during my run:
-- The very first time I started the game, apparently the game just stopped counting playtime after 49 minutes and 36 seconds. Why? No clue. But I got the trophy for beating the game in under three hours after spending about nine hours playing the game, with a final time of exactly two hours.
-- At one point, every time I tried a door that had a lock on it, my journal would update with an extra copy of the exact same page of objectives that I got at the start of the chapter. I added like seven copies of the same page just to test this and it just kept going.
-- The four-legged facehuggers are the only creatures with QTEs involved in their actions, and they can go from QTE -> you recover from QTE -> camera angle sucks so you can't see -> QTE again. Worse still, sometimes they just simply ignore bullets you fire at them. At one point, I emptied two entire clips into a facehugger and it just kept existing, so I reloaded the game and just ran past it. Some facehuggers were just getting stuck in walls or falling into existence from places or humping walls while I shot them.
-- Essentially, everything after Chapter 3 is a mess that needed some extreme polish.
Third -- The story is...a thing?
--------------------TINY MINOR SPOILER-----------------------
It's reality, it's all in your head, it's cosmic horror, it's none of the above, it's all of the above, it can't make up its mind on who the story is actually about.
---------------------TINY MINOR SPOILER END-------------------------
Granted, this was the Emily side of the story and not the Edward half (I'll do that tomorrow over the course of the day, probably). Also, there's only two bosses in the game and one was a total joke and the other was just a pain in the ass that involved enduring frustratingly dumb stuff in order to prevail.
Fourth -- I want to go back to bugs again because there's one room in the entire game that uses a single fixed perspective the whole way where you can't rotate your camera and every time I walked through the room at a certain spot, my character would get drunk and turn right and slam into a wall. It was amazing.
Fifth -- The lore was great, actually. If you want Lovecraftian storytime, it's the one thing this game does really well. I should probably have lumped this in with the general story comments, but I do love that there's so much stuff being covered, even if how it's all handled outside of reading up on or encountering said material doesn't amount to much.
Finally -- This is nothing like an actual remake. The overlap between the original mansion and Derceto is that there's like four or five rooms in the entire game that are similar. About half of the game takes place in "other locations". There is no really neat underground. You will not get attacked by a giant worm that can one-shot you. You will not go mad from reading any books. There are two enemies that can one-shot you, but they both have their own easy sections to deal with them.
Extra Finally -- The "sneak" mechanic is either stupid or broken because some things you need to sneak past can also simply be walked past. Magical.
I can't recommend you buy this at this time of release, it's not even worth it at half off. Maybe wait until the game is 15 bucks or less if you just want to enjoy some creepy lore dumps, but the game is passable visually, sparse in regards to enemies, and combat is extraordinarily bad. But hey, at least the sound design was alright, sometimes...I just remembered that at one point, a radio kept just starting to play for one second and then would cut out again, only to repeat after another ten seconds or so. That might have been unintentionally creepy, but it's just one more bug to acknowledge.
I neglected to mention all the stuttering and texture pop-ins and other graphical goofiness that happened (I think) in the previous review, so let me start with that -- it was present across both runs.
Some other fun things I encountered this time around while playing as Edward:
-- Audio repeating over itself multiple times while trying to have the same conversation with someone.
-- I could no longer use hatchets because the game decided I always had a hatchet, even when I didn't, so I could only use non-hatchet weapons for melee for the rest of the game. On a similar note, the Lagniappe for the Jack-in-the-Box apparently has a limit of one for its quantity you can have, which is interesting, as it's the only Lagniappe you can grab across both runs, as far as I can tell. But I did manage to grab it approximately six times during Edward's run, despite the limitations on inventory for it.
-- Starting from Chapter 3 onward, the map markers for rooms that still had stuff to do in them were all reset back to their flags for the beginning of Chapter 2 and they stayed that way for the rest of the game. This even went as far as things that were already done once that could not possibly be repeated, like in the case of opening the Medicine Box in Lottie's room. The box acts like you can interact with it with a key you no longer have and will tell you that you still need the key, even though you already opened it and got the key item needed for another puzzle.
-- I missed some trophies and was curious about what happened with them, so I went and googled the ones I was missing and found that four of them just straight-up don't work or only work for one character and not the other.
The role swap of using the opposite character results in almost the exact same situations, with the exception of one special scenario unique to each character in Chapter 4. If you play the game once with the character you want and then just watch a playthrough of Chapter 4 with the other character, you're covered instead of spending hours repeating the exact same processes. I guess playing as the other character for a second run does get you the ability to net all the Lagniappes (I did get them all), but there's very little reason to do so, unless you want to see a couple extra scenes that are callbacks to the original game...and one or two other scenes that involved the glitched trophies I mentioned, so you don't even get to see those!
In a sense, despite only spending less than half the hours on AITD this time around, I feel like the overall experience managed to be worse because of the ridiculous repetition with minimal payoff. I'm not going to lower the rating, but what a mess this game is. And I still don't have the trophy for playing for at least eight hours, despite having approximately fourteen hours of gameplay logged because of the weird bug during the Emily run where it just didn't accrue time for about eight hours!
Original update follows below:
--------------------------------------------------
So, quick thoughts on AITD2024 in no particular order because I just took my time through this and still finished it today in roughly one sitting (I apologize for lack of useful clarifications on stuff, I'm tired):
First, combat is absolute ass. And I mean beyond ass to the assieth power of assing. This varies between the few types of enemies you encounter, but generally speaking, you just swing wildly with R1 and hope you do enough damage to ruin them quickly (usually causing stunlock) with your melee weapon. If you're shooting, uhh...pray. Sometimes you can get a headshot and an enemy just drops, sometimes you have the four-legged facehuggers that...simply don't care if you shoot them because they just don't acknowledge bullets, even though bullets should hurt them. But that's more of a bug that we'll go over shortly. Also, there's attacks of opportunity (just called "opportunity"), but I only got one prompt to do so the entire game for some reason and even when I did it, the game didn't give me a trophy. Not a big loss, but it feels like some aspects of this game were more afterthoughts than anything else.
Second, HOLY FUCK THE BUGS AND GLITCHES. Things that happened during my run:
-- The very first time I started the game, apparently the game just stopped counting playtime after 49 minutes and 36 seconds. Why? No clue. But I got the trophy for beating the game in under three hours after spending about nine hours playing the game, with a final time of exactly two hours.
-- At one point, every time I tried a door that had a lock on it, my journal would update with an extra copy of the exact same page of objectives that I got at the start of the chapter. I added like seven copies of the same page just to test this and it just kept going.
-- The four-legged facehuggers are the only creatures with QTEs involved in their actions, and they can go from QTE -> you recover from QTE -> camera angle sucks so you can't see -> QTE again. Worse still, sometimes they just simply ignore bullets you fire at them. At one point, I emptied two entire clips into a facehugger and it just kept existing, so I reloaded the game and just ran past it. Some facehuggers were just getting stuck in walls or falling into existence from places or humping walls while I shot them.
-- Essentially, everything after Chapter 3 is a mess that needed some extreme polish.
Third -- The story is...a thing?
--------------------TINY MINOR SPOILER-----------------------
It's reality, it's all in your head, it's cosmic horror, it's none of the above, it's all of the above, it can't make up its mind on who the story is actually about.
---------------------TINY MINOR SPOILER END-------------------------
Granted, this was the Emily side of the story and not the Edward half (I'll do that tomorrow over the course of the day, probably). Also, there's only two bosses in the game and one was a total joke and the other was just a pain in the ass that involved enduring frustratingly dumb stuff in order to prevail.
Fourth -- I want to go back to bugs again because there's one room in the entire game that uses a single fixed perspective the whole way where you can't rotate your camera and every time I walked through the room at a certain spot, my character would get drunk and turn right and slam into a wall. It was amazing.
Fifth -- The lore was great, actually. If you want Lovecraftian storytime, it's the one thing this game does really well. I should probably have lumped this in with the general story comments, but I do love that there's so much stuff being covered, even if how it's all handled outside of reading up on or encountering said material doesn't amount to much.
Finally -- This is nothing like an actual remake. The overlap between the original mansion and Derceto is that there's like four or five rooms in the entire game that are similar. About half of the game takes place in "other locations". There is no really neat underground. You will not get attacked by a giant worm that can one-shot you. You will not go mad from reading any books. There are two enemies that can one-shot you, but they both have their own easy sections to deal with them.
Extra Finally -- The "sneak" mechanic is either stupid or broken because some things you need to sneak past can also simply be walked past. Magical.
I can't recommend you buy this at this time of release, it's not even worth it at half off. Maybe wait until the game is 15 bucks or less if you just want to enjoy some creepy lore dumps, but the game is passable visually, sparse in regards to enemies, and combat is extraordinarily bad. But hey, at least the sound design was alright, sometimes...I just remembered that at one point, a radio kept just starting to play for one second and then would cut out again, only to repeat after another ten seconds or so. That might have been unintentionally creepy, but it's just one more bug to acknowledge.