I decided to take a day and play return of the obra dinn. This game has been talked up by a lot of people I am acquainted with so I had really high expectations and I had been looking forward to playing for a while. Overall the game felt like a tremendous disappointment. I would like to think of myself as an experienced puzzle gamer but maybe I'm not an expert enough. I went through the game in several states:
1) what the hell is going on. How do I get to the gameplay. Why can't I get the box from this rower guy
2) wow, this time investigation mechanic is REALLY cool. Solving these cases is really fun (lasted about 20 minutes)
3) ok so I'm semi-stuck. I know the game told me to make assumptions about people. I guess I can try that for 10 minutes. Hmm...how do I find the next corpse to investigate? Ok, fine, I will check a spoiler free guide. In fact I'm pretty sure I'm doing everything wrong, so let me look up a "how to play" guide
4) ok, I was doing things right, I just didn't look out the window to find the next corpse. Wow, investigating corpses is fun. I will do this for two hours.
5) wait, I'm at the end of the game? Ok, I really want to solve some more cases. Let me investigate. I will scavenge for as much information as I can. Boy, is it REALLY ANNOYING to find my old memories to go watch again. If only the game let me stay in each memory as long as I wanted until moving on to the next one, I would have gotten some of this information
6) I'm completely stumped. All the spoiler free guides expected me to solve the puzzles in a different order. I'm certain I have these crew members right but the game isn't clearing my progression. Ok, I will resort to a full guide but only for this one sailor.
7) the game considers "crushed by beast tail" and "stabbed by beast" different fates????? F this, I'm manually entering everything from the guide.
There was a game here where I was having fun. The problem was it was lampshaded by extremely frustrating puzzles that I would simply have NEVER fixed without external help. In my age, I've grown incredibly inpatient with games. My issue with situations like this, is that in my head, I did everything right. I don't want to second guess everything I did in the game to try and 'fix'what the game considers a mistake. But when I look at a guide, I don't feel vindicated or relieved. I feel STUPID. I feel stupid that I had to look up something that other people probably figured out on their own.
This is like the 'metroid moments' that you might experience in fusion or zero mission. Arbitrary gates where you have no other option than to brute force everything you can. In fact the game tells you that this may have to happen at some points. But IF you are going to design your game like this...there's a real issue in how some of the memories you can access are placed 3 layers deep inside OTHER memories. Why can I not replay any memory I want once I've seen it? I would love to do this 'the right way' and study everything. But I'm too impatient to slowly walk to the SINGLE memory that gates the others then go through each of them, just on the off CHANCE I missed something.
Why does the game, inside a memory, decide when I looked at everything deemed important? If I'm supposed to note EVERYTHING, then let me stay in a memory until I'm done looking at EVERYTHING! I want to hunt for clues! And on the flip side, if there is only one thing to see in a memory with only one person in it, why are you arbitrarily making me wait 30 seconds for the music to end before exiting? Now I have constant anxiety every time I enter a memory, did I look at everything? Did I properly trigger the next phase?
This all feels like the developer didn't want this to feel like a "video game" and deliberately excluded a tutorial or button prompts for the sake of immersion. There is an idea here that is fun (solving each death). But the mechanics surrounding this idea...are NOT fun! And they easily could have been. I would have been much more likely to stick with this with these tweaks. And they couldn't even be put in an update, 5 years later?
This is a game that I got recommended to me by people who stream games. And I think this game actually gets better with an audience. Enough to bounce ideas off of without getting too far down the rabbit hole. Guides are COMPLETELY worthless. They come in three flavors: 1) follow everything the author does to a T and you are rewarded with the steps to solve everything spoiler free, but then are you really playing? 2) 100% spoilers of everything; a useful tool but not for a gaming purist 3) a series of "hints" on where to find information. Hmm, you don't say, I need to look around this scene to find the information I'm looking for? I've been looking for five minutes, I need a targeted hint just for me that doesn't give it away but can tell me "hotter" or "colder"
All that this has done is manage to piss me off. I see people say they wish they could forget this game so theycould play it for the first time again. I'm the opposite, I'm almost eager to play it AGAIN so I can bypass the stupid stuff and concentrate on enjoying things, because I've already forgotten 80% of the character's names and fates because they managed to make such little impact on me. Serves me right for 100%ing the game first try...it never works out.