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Reticent baller, faultless beast, etc
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Favorite Games

Noita
Noita
Dark Souls
Dark Souls
Outer Wilds
Outer Wilds
Devil Daggers
Devil Daggers
Dwarf Fortress
Dwarf Fortress

481

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000

Played in 2024

016

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Devil Daggers' cooler cousin, but the blistering pace combined with piling on new tech means a lot more salt. The hyper-aggresive scoring essentially repairs the frustrations of DD - Hyper Demon is entirely the climax of a DD run with none of the setup. In exchange, however, it's added a lot of new tricks & tactics to help you keep up with the new paradigm of aggression. This makes the skill ceiling seem higher, but also leads to drastically more frustrating or unreadable deaths. I'll elaborate for a bit:

- The dash / stomp keybinding takes a while to adjust, and you will be constantly misdashing into enemies.
- Scuttlebugs are a source of frustration, eating a lot of damage if you fail to stomp them out or rail laser them (and those misdashes will inevitably cause such an occurrence).
- Snakes are extremely difficult to read and have to be widely avoided when attempting to grab the powerup, which is made difficult by their flailing hitboxes.
- The dodge is interesting, but seems to fuzz up hitboxes or squeeze you out of unlivable situations, which leads to some uncertainty with what is lethal and what isn't.
- The triple-laser auto aim is just fuzzy enough to feel inconsistent, with no clear indication of range beyond a sound that I find occasionally hard to parse (it'll ding '3' times and only target one or two enemies).
- The rail laser itself is extremely precise and requires much harsher aim than anything else in the game.
- The mega-laser you get from holding rclick when you nab the powerup is almost totally useless without a green bomb or a big crystal.
- Spiders are meant to drop and become vulnerable when approached/dashed under, but the trigger / indication for their drop-invulnerable states is mediocre (a sound cue very late into their descent, and not much more than a leg flail when spawning a bomb).
- The arena's dim-lit wobbliness makes it hard to tell where any edge is when shit's gone wrong until you're already walking into it, and enemies completely disappear when outside the border.
- Loads of bullet-time slowmo + crazy ultra-bendy FOV nonsense makes gauging distances hard.

Since a lot of these are less "hardline issues" and more "control scheme and enemy handling fuzziness", I expect to care less about them the more I play. At ~200 seconds, I still find them decently frustrating, but it was distinctly worse as I was initially learning the ropes. That's more likely a consequence of Devil Daggers' extreme simplicity and my own expectations, though. That is to say - if anyone can correct/inform me on why these features act this way, please do. Even with a tutorial mode, this game is fairly obtuse.

The tl;dr here is that HD has managed to squeeze the best-est bits of DD's prime, but has lost a lot of the level-headed consistency and simplicity during the translation. I wouldn't disagree with anyone who thinks that's a good thing, but I think it means HD is less of a Devil Daggers replacement, and more of a fantastic accompaniment when DD's frustrations boil over (and vice-versa!)

I've not spoken much on the visuals because they can't really be conveyed thru anything other than gameplay. This game opens your third eye or some shit. It's pure magic. Play at 180 FOV and develop perfect vision.

What's really interesting about P.T. is the liberties we afford to something that isn't just unfinished, but absolutely unfinishable. It's essentially a palette of ideas implying the shadow of a far more elaborate and terrifying whole (which we'll never get to see anymore of) - and if that isn't an ironically meta expression of what makes classic Horror work then I don't know what is.

A part of it is in the execution – P.T.’s ideas are braindead simple, but they’re represented in a very fittingly-and-convincingly photorealistic way that continues to age quite well. It isn’t really meant to surprise or refresh more than precisely evoke a familiar feeling and aesthetic.

This means that people can freely acclaim P.T. as essentially perfect, since it's a clean execution of setup for a nonexistent whole – just the fun parts. It has no time to run out of steam or to overextend and compromise the uncertainty of its world and rules. It's an island of ideal horror tropes sharpened and angled towards nowhere, unburdened (mostly) from narrative, meaning and interpretation. Where a full game would likely introduce more certainty/specificity in interpretation so as to appear cohesive, P.T. gets to relate on a slightly more direct level to each player's understanding of its sharply-imagined classic imagery - just the scares, the atmosphere, the thesis - and that purity is worth something.

Yeah, I am that guy (apparently not the only one by any measure) that thought NMS was "better" at launch - but only because it was more honest. I think Hello Games were beaten into submission by a general audience that wouldn't have ever played the sort of game NMS would be if it was advertised correctly, and even then, I'm not sure if it even would have worked out.

I at least want to acknowledge that it's a great thing when developers can recover from failure without collapsing under the infinitely-hostile weight of the internet. Hello Games buckled down despite nigh-constant vitriol and managed to probably save their careers in the process. It's an admirable thing, but it doesn't excuse the game on its own.

See, I only marginally enjoy resource-grinder base-builders the likes of which NMS now rests alongside. I find that they survive off of the "promise" you make to yourself right at the start, that you totally could make something badass and enormous given enough commitment- and very rarely ever do, as the systems become cumbersome and you realize that there isn't much point in building an epic gigabase in a game you hate playing. NMS offers the appeal of having Your Own Planet to build on, with endless possibilities for surrounding terrain and architectural context, but that doesn't change much - especially with how limiting the systems themselves are. Resource gathering is grindy and unrewarding in much the same way it is in other, similar games.

When NMS adopted this ethos, it was doubly baffling because the core appeal of the game (to me!) was disjointed wandering. I don't want to be bolted down, I don't want to seek resources to continue, I want to fly through a bazillion retro sci-fi book covers, shoot at some stuff and listen to breezy electronic post-rock. It should be evident that the scrutiny of settling down will kinda murder the illusion of an endless cosmos once you start to see the patterns for what they are.

That's the real issue, then - it was always a bit too optimistic to think this terrain engine could produce infinitely-many unique and involving locations. The idea that I conjured up for what NMS ought to be when I was watching the earlier trailers was a foggy, impossible game that even I didn't understand why I'd like beyond audiovisual satisfaction. I've had moments with this game that felt fun, exploratory, and evoked the right kind of starry-eyed excitement, but that always comes with a timer - how long until you've seen it all? For launch NMS, it was a short and middling experience, with some highs that were quickly stomped out by awkward mechanics. Visual updates have moved that finish line a bit further down, and mechanical updates have subsequently mired it in a lump of mostly-dull dead-ends that do little to motivate.