Arseniy Yavorśkyi

coming back to this, I have to say — I can't recommend this game to Ross, on the count of it being a Souls-like.

just to clarify: The Dark Pictures is the name of the series, the actual name of the game is Man of Medan. I haven't beaten it yet, because I honestly found it to be rather boring, but the next game in the series, Little Hope, is… interesting. it felt as if there was more to the gameplay than I initially thought.

the plot goes nowhere, and some of the jokes are beyond gross. I seriously regret playing this.

erm, Ross, this game is a Souls-like. you know what this means.

played it way back when it was just released, and had a positive experience overall. "too melodramatic"? well, if you go in expecting a plot about the conspiracy of Fire Ant People, then you'll be disappointed. I wish there were more games like this one, games that explore human beings while not pushing misguided agendas. which is an ironic thing to say, seeing as the people who made this game engage in some very questionable politics, but at least none of it infected their product.

I've heard this one described as 'clunky Souls', and it's true — mechanically it's almost identical to Dark Souls, just much less refined. nowadays it's easy to scoff at the shortcomings of this title, but back when it came out there weren't a whole lot of alternatives for those who craved more Souls, but had already played the original Dark Souls to death. Lords Of The Fallen suffers mainly from two major issues: poor balance and unresponsive controls (hence the 'clunky' reputation). to be more specific: some weapons are clearly superior to others not just in terms of damage output, but also because their attack animations (movesets) are much more practical — swinging faster, reaching further, and/or having quicker recovery. enemies have the same problem, as some of them are extremely fast *and* deal enough damage to kill the player in one hit *and* their attacks are not clearly telegraphed. as one can imagine, this combination of problems can lead to frustration, sometimes for prolonged periods of time. the best thing about Lords Of The Fallen is, without a doubt, it's graphics and visual style. some parts of the game look absolutely gorgeous, making for screenshots that are worth framing and hanging on a wall. all in all, I'd recommend this game only to the fans of the genre — the rest will probably ragequit after an hour.

okay… after witnessing Ross play Dark Souls, I think it's safe to take The Surge off the list. to play this (or any other Souls-like), the player has to put in the minimum effort required to get a grasp at the combat system. if the player doesn't do that, he won't have a good time with the game.

mixed bag. this game has truly excellent atmosphere, outstanding ambient sounds and music (especially in the sections set in St. Cecilia's Abbey), but really weak writing and characters, the lead being the worst offender (to call him a cardboard cutout would be too much of a compliment). the whole game is centered around randomized/unpredictable jump scares and instant death traps. there are also puzzles, and it's actually the first time I enjoyed puzzles in a game, so I that's an definite achievement. there are ways to deal with some of the dangers if you're careful, but sometimes the game kills you in a way that seems impossible to avoid. for example: it makes you look for a hiding spot in a room where there's none, but if you touch any of the doors you die instantly. this happened ~5 times during my playthrough. mechanically, this game is like NightCry (a spiritual successor to Clock Tower series), which means Resident Evil without combat.

hold on, isn't this turn-based?

unlike the previous game from the anthology, this one managed to hold my attention until the very end. mechanically it's almost an interactive movie, but with a lot of quick-time events. it's closer to Fahrenheit/Heavy Rain than, say, Telltale's The Walking Dead. the graphics are the best I've seen in a video game, but the writing isn't the best. all in all, I'd say Little Hope is worth trying — at a discounted price.

this may be the case. I didn't think about it this way, but he did say he was "ought to get the Dark Souls experience". what a shame it turned out this way. playing ranged characters is easier, and the game often expects the player to have a ranged weapon of some kind, but I have to say — it's not necessarily the most fun way to play. in fact, I'd say playing as a sorcerer is mind-numbingly boring. there are not a lot of spells, and 90% of offensive ones work exactly the same way. as for the chat pushing for a Knight character — this advice is not bad, since most players struggle with avoiding damage at the beginning anyway. aside from basic damage reduction, heavy armor also prevents flinching from enemy attacks, so the player doesn't get stunlocked by some combos. the thing is that wearing heavy armor requires speccing into Endurance (to prevent fat-rolling), which Ross didn't fully understand. the game is actually designed to work this way. if the player dies while traversing the area, he can get back to the dropped souls and get back what was lost (unless he dies before reaching them). as a result, the player will naturally accumulate more souls, so he can level up and get stronger while trying to beat the area and/or the boss. however, Ross didn't grasp this and neglected to spend the souls he got from failed boss attempts, and ended up losing most of them. Remastered version doesn't add any new enemies. what Anderson meant to say is that the player doesn't have to fight the butterflies *as opposed to* other monsters in that area. funnily enough, Ross's invincibility and one-hit-kill cheats didn't help him in a poorly-designed part of the game. don't worry about it. your writing is perfectly fine, compared to some of the utterly-maniacal stuff I had to read in this thread.

responding to @StrixLiterata: responding to @Konrad:

@kerdios greetings. so, I finally watched Joseph Anderson's videos on Dark Souls. I have to admit, a lot of the issues he discussed often get overlooked by fans, and I'm somewhat guilty of that too. I mostly agree with his point of view, with two major exceptions: 1) in my opinion, recycling bosses as regular enemies is NOT fine. it's bullshit when other games do it, and it's bullshit when Dark Souls does it. it doesn't make you feel stronger, it just devalues the weight of the original encounter. 2) I don't think that Dark Souls story is absent, nonsensical, or lacks a solid base. there are gaps, sometimes big gaps in its story and lore, but once you collect enough pieces of the puzzle, putting them together is trivial. sadly, the things he talked about in the videos don't really explain what happened to Ross when he played this game. in his critique he never touched on anything even remotely related to what Ross had a problem with. or maybe he did, but we don't know for sure because Ross gave up too quickly.

obviously not. I was talking about how things like these sometimes happen in RPG quests, how it can go wrong. I mentioned a specific example from Deus Ex, which is an RPG that provides its players with a lot of options, but doesn't always correctly handle every possible combination. I didn't say that's how it always happens in every game ever. he definitely realized it. he said: "If you try to break this game, you absolutely can." and proceeded to demonstrate how it can be done. "what if I decide to use my cyborg abilities to get over this fence", then "but it appears my new allies were a little too impatient with me", showing a clip of himself being attacked by a very large number of NPCs, which wasn't supposed to happen yet (or ever). these are examples of design faults turned into features by the devs themselves, which is not really what we're talking about. being able to gain absurdly high speed by repeatedly jumping backwards — now that's a game-breaking exploit, and obviously not the intended way to play the game. as I said, I do believe he had more fun. what I don't believe is cheats being the reason. in the second stream Ross looked like he didn't enjoy what he was doing in the slightest, and was just going through the motions. this leads me to believe it wasn't the cheats that made a difference, but instead whether he was streaming or not, as that can be stressful. I've heard very experienced players of Souls games talk about how going through the game blind, while also streaming or recording can be so stressful it's no longer fun (I specifically recall A German Spy and Rurikhan talking about this). sure, Ross can decide to play how he wants. but the way he decided to play made him miss out on something very valuable and unique. now he's never going to know if it would've been worth the effort.

responding to Psychotic Ninja: responding to Konrad:

no, that's literally how all games are made. it's just that some games are much better at hiding their limits than others, and some games are bad at enforcing said limits. in an RPG quest, for example, if you manage to break the expected chain of events in a way that wasn't accounted for by the devs, sometimes you don't just lose the game — it crashes, the quest gets stuck, you fall through the floor, etc. haven't you seen the Deus Ex episode of Game Dungeon?

I wouldn't take marketing fluff at face value. I'm sorry, I didn't know you were expecting me to watch it. I generally avoid videos where every other comment points out how this or that part of the video is factually incorrect. besides, the whole idea behind those philosophies seems ridiculous and far-fetch. I'll give you my take on Joseph Anderson's videos once I finish watching all the parts, however.

have you ever seen a game with that sort of requirement? the only one that comes to my mind is Getting Over It. when developers design a game, it's done with a certain expectation of what players will be doing. that's where 'intended experience' is derived from. when you buy a game, you expect to get what you paid for — what the developers created. it would therefore make sense to try to get this experience, instead of intentionally breaking the game in fundamental ways, at least on the first playthrough.

you mixed up the meaning of what I said, I clarified it in my response. that's it. I did not hand wave away anything, and I also didn't say anything about your arguments not being logical. although, in hindsight, I probably should have. no, because if the game is THAT bad it's simply not worth my time. the only exception is in case of a bug. I don't think morality of cheating is a concern in the single-player part of the game. if your objective is to simply reach the end credits as soon as possible, then yeah. but that's not why most people play video games. you know, you're right. let's just leave that for the people to figure out. I think they can tell which one of us is a raving lunatic.

RaTcHeT302, will you chill out already? calm down. take deep breaths. it's like you're on acid or something. the advice was to play the game without cheats. I wasn't talking about backseat gaming happening in the chat. P.S. the reason I put the post under the spoiler was to reduce the space it takes up on the page.

responding to Psychotic Ninja:

if I was completely unaware of it, then of course it would be impossible for me to be bothered by it. funny how it works, isn't it? sometimes the things we look forward to the most end up bringing us the most displeasure.

well, I've heard people say Death Stranding is just a bunch pretentious nonsense. but, as I haven't played that game myself, I can't say for sure. but it definitely doesn't appear compelling to me at a glance, neither in its gameplay, nor the story. the game's director, Hideo Kojima, made some denigrating remarks about people who didn't enjoy his creation, which made me even less inclined to give it a chance. to answer your question: it depends on whether or not those other elements will have the same impact as when playing normally. usually, not. if you really want to *see* the game and/or its story, but you absolutely can't stand the gameplay, you'd be better off watching a let's play on YouTube, or reading the story summary on a wiki. in a game like Dark Souls, on the other hand, difficult boss fights are used to punctuate progression, and also to accentuate story elements. everybody remembers Gwyn not just because the story says he's important, but because getting to him and beating him was such an ordeal. meanwhile, Dark Souls 2 ends with a fight that's incredibly easy, a lot easier than some of the other boss fights. because of this, the ending to that game doesn't feel special. I could go on, but I hope this brings the point across.

more than one experience? sure. more than one FIRST experience? not possible. the right experience is the one that's better, not necessarily the one the player chooses. players can make mistakes, and they often do when they don't have enough information, such as when playing a new game for the first time. players can sometimes choose to play the game in way that's more "optimal" in terms of difficulty and progression speed, but not in terms of quality of their experience. for example: I've beaten Vigil: The Longest Night recently, and I did so by grinding 80 000 gold and buying the best sword in the game, which completely broke some of the boss fights, thus damaging the experience. guiding the player towards the best possible experience is an important element of game design. I absolutely guarantee you that bypassing the core mechanic of the game (which Ross did in Dark Souls) does not provide the best experience. I played Code Vein. there's some good in it for sure, but in terms of balance, combat encounters, and level design — it's utter dogshit when compared to Dark Souls, or even some of the better Souls-likes. so I can totally understand why somebody would want to skip the bullshit parts (and boy oh boy are there a lot of them). the question is, why would you even want to spend your time on a game like that? if it was actually a good game, but just not the kind of game you prefer, then you're still better off playing something else. for example, I don't think any amount of cheating can mitigate Ross's dislike of turn-based combat. difficulty options aren't a solution. it's basically game devs throwing their hands up and saying "we couldn't balance the game properly, so here's a slider, figure it out". coming back to the game to play it properly — that's not an impossible scenario. but you would only do that if the game is actually good without cheats, and in that case there was no point in cheating in the first place. hmm, I guess micro-transactions are malware, in some sense. that's irrelevant. is the game good? yes — keep playing. no — uninstall. the only time I pay attention to what 'urges' go through a dev's head is when they try to push their political agenda on me.

it's too easy to make a mistake when picking the 'right' difficulty, because you have to know what's coming. I think it's better to have one properly balanced difficulty that gives the players the experience intended by the developer. this doesn't mean that every player is going to have the same experience, but we all know what happens when the devs try to make their game appealing to everybody. how is Ross supposed to go back, though? once you finish the game, you're stuck with whatever experience you had. in his case — just one big nothingburger. ask any Souls-fan what they want the most, and they'll all tell you the same thing: to play Dark Souls for the first time again. that's how important it is to do it properly the first time around. playing this game with cheats isn't a worthwhile experience, it's a waste of time.