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S. Vohaul

Novice
Joined
Aug 29, 2022
Messages
5
Spent a few hours with the game this evening and so far it has been a pretty awesome old school Resident evil clone with unique art direction.
 

toughasnails

Guest
Indie developers don't like feet.
There are posters of these female androids that you stumble on and they are depicted without feet. And the enemies I've encountered so far are all such androids gone haywire. So it's a conscious choice on artist's part, not just indie spritework being indie spritework.

Although some people are apparently really disappointed about it. From that thread:
She's supposed to be Scandinavian or German or something like that. So even if she wasn't an android her feet wouldn't sweat due to how autistic those people are. Meaning one could suck and lick them as much as one desired.
I... won't offer any further commentary on this.
 

HoboForEternity

LIBERAL PROPAGANDIST
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liberal utopia in progress
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Beat the first boss. Enjoyable game so far. The 6 items inventory limit is my only complain. It just artificially lengthen the game because plot item is in your inventory toom sometimes you have several keys, and you don't know which one you are gonna use, so when you find a locked door, it doesn't match the key you are carrying and you have go back to save location storage to take it again.

But the atmosphere and the first boss was fun overall. Imo at the very least separate keys/plot item with supplies, so it doesn't get annoying.
 

toughasnails

Guest
Yeah that's p much the only annoying thing so far. It would have helped a bit if, once you equip a weapon and item/sidearm, they are moved out of their inventory slots (not to mention how that would make perfect sense). Or if the keys didn't take any slots.

Have you been killing enemies or avoiding them (or using those stun prods for non-lethal takedowns)? They are p easy to avoid so far, I tend to get rid of them only bc of constant backtracking (again bc of that inventory limit). I'm wondering if there are some consequences if they are killed, either them coming back in stronger form (the bodies appear to stay around) or some impact on the ending.

Also, Ash looking forward to your take on this one.
 

HoboForEternity

LIBERAL PROPAGANDIST
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Yeah that's p much the only annoying thing so far. It would have helped a bit if, once you equip a weapon and item/sidearm, they are moved out of their inventory slots (not to mention how that would make perfect sense). Or if the keys didn't take any slots.

Have you been killing enemies or avoiding them (or using those stun prods for non-lethal takedowns)? They are p easy to avoid so far, I tend to get rid of them only bc of constant backtracking (again bc of that inventory limit). I'm wondering if there are some consequences if they are killed, either them coming back in stronger form (the bodies appear to stay around) or some impact on the ending.

Also, Ash looking forward to your take on this one.
I mostly use the permament kill for a non regular enemy in an area that i need to come back. The regular small mob are usually easy to avoid and even if i have to fight they don't need much bullet to put dowb
 
Joined
Nov 29, 2016
Messages
1,832
I've finished it in one sitting last daynight, a 9h30m playthrough (can send smegma samples to any requesting doubters.) I tend to spend a bit more time on games than most I think, so I estimate most people should be able to get 6-10 hours depending on difficulty. Which felt just right for an experience like this.

Never played the classic console horrors like BioEvil and Silent Hazard but I did watch that one let's play about some chick called Jill Sandwich so I knew the basics ie: run away from most dudes, save ammo for boss fights, etc etc.

I thought it was a very good experience. On the Survival difficulty, the resource management felt very well tuned, such that I felt like I was running out of everything about half the time but always had just enough resources to keep going. Felt like a perfect balance of incentivizing you to replay particularly sloppy plays while also giving you enough slack that you can just about squeak by if you roll with most of the punches that you take, man.

The mechanics felt very deliberate and the puzzles were intuitive but reasonably complex idk I just thought it was really solid overall? just like my

Like the 6 item limit got really tight by the end but I really liked that it made me deliberately prepare for each outing. Here is an idea: carry one gun, one tool, one stack of healing items for your "reconnaissance" runs - basically only for self defense and exploration. When you identify a room that you want to clear, come back to it loaded with extra ammo and thermites and whatever else you need.

The plot and aesthetics are certainly stand-out for me. I would say no one element of the game's story felt particularly thought-provoking or fresh - like, whatever you think of when you read the phrase "Do Androids Dream of Silent Hill?" probably encompasses the entirety of the game's narrative. However, I thought that the overall aesthetic, such as the way the music complimented the visuals particularly in the more demented sequences, came together in a brilliant way. I have a particular affectation for art that can produce a feeling of simultaneous awe and horror, beauty and disgust, some sort of transcendence that is indistinguishable from degeneration - and this completely hit the spot. If you like the mixture of psychological, gnostic, and occult horror especially in a sci-fi context, you will probably really enjoy this.

My favorite thing about the game, that sets it apart from most other surreal horror thingies, is that it does not pull its narrative punches. It's not merely just "oh I get it the whole game is an allegory for -insert mental illness-" or "oh I get it the whole dream is just a dream flashback bro nothing's real aha."

No, without spoiling anything, the game embraces the fact that it is a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream, like "here are multiple contradictory versions of events, actually happening simultaneously - and they might as well all be fucking true, and they probably are, and if they weren't you would have no way to know." There is no certainty, no actual wake up call, just a demented megastructure formed by layers of context and meaning stacked on top of each other. And the result is that instead of the game discarding some of its own layers as artifice, hemorrhaging its meaning and context as irrelevant symbolism until only the True Meaning (TM) (R) remains, the game IMO simply grows over with revelation and evil, sick, tragic meaning like some sort of epistemological cancer.

Instead of "nothing meant anything," the game tells you "everything meant everything, even if that is an awful state of things that our minds are barely capable of understanding." And that IMO is one hell of a narrative commitment to make for a small indie horror game about a lesbian robot from east germany shooting silent hill monsters in space.

And I think that's pretty neat
 
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toughasnails

Guest
BTW, this is the Lovecraft story quoted right at the beginning ("Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl”) when you pick up a copy of "The King in Yellow".
https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/f.aspx


The thing about both of them is, in "The Repairer or Reputations" the narrator turns out to be batshit in the end so the only question is what extent of what has happened was only in his head (including the future US the story is supposedly set in), and in "The Festival" what the narrator experiences is a dream but not really.
 
Joined
Nov 29, 2016
Messages
1,832
I really enjoyed the Lovecraft/Chandlerian framing devices used in the game. Their implications are a bit more subtle than your spoiler alone suggests IMO, but along the same lines. Game also references Carcosa a lot.

The whole game can be understood as a demented pile of dreams and resurgent memories of multiple people - dream within a dream within a dream within etc etc. However, what stops it from being a cheap clusterfuck of storytelling cliches is framing. The game operates on a version of psionics it calls "bioresonance" - ie, certain people can send out or receive biological signals, like a human radio tower/receiver, and thus imprint their reality on others and/or have a foreign reality imprinted on them. The receivers do not have to be "bioresonant" themselves, only the sender.

So, in a typical sci-fi setting with psionics, or even with brain-hacking, there is horror potential of a few gifted/insane individuals being able to warp the minds of many others. But here, the idea is that a single bioresonant individual going insane or simply falling deeply ill, can create a signal that can be received by other such individuals, and twist the actual, physical, biological reality of a myriad individuals (because of course this premise rejects mind/body dualism and treats the mind as emerging from biology.) And this creates a feedback loop that makes the original signal sender even more corrupted, which in turn corrupts the receivers even more, etc etc. It's not like GITS where the solution is "just don't get a cyberbrain" - if you have meat, it will receive the signal, provided it is relayed to you. It's a cancer+dementia+schizophrenia wombo combo on a cosmic scale.

So the King in Yellow is a cool device because Chandler's stories reference a play that makes people turn insane just by reading it, and here it's like catching a stray thought that infects you with someone else's entire demented reality.

Carcosa is a particularly tender reference for me because both the original story and Chandler's poem reference a strange, desolate city that is only experienced in hindsight. The protagonist(s) entire reality-fucked existence is a mess of their own and other people's twisted memories, as are our lives to a lesser extent. Looking back on that life, trying to make sense of it - as an old person, or someone suffering from dementia, etc - might very well feel like exploring the lost and eldritch city of Carcosa.

Just a few cat facts for people still playing the game:

1. In my playthrough, on Survival difficulty, I have not seen a difference between using a repair patch and the repair spray. Former is supposed to restore small amount of health over time, latter a large amount - but both would only take me to the yellow condition (caution) and I could only recover up to blue (nominal) with autoinjectors. I have no idea whether this is bugged, or an intentional balance in Survival mode, or if I am too stupid to understand the hidden health stat. But basically, I ended up doing just fine by treating both health items as interchangable, and converting a lion's share to them to the repair spray+ which has an instant effect.

2. Game has 3 endings and people on the steam forums actually have no fucking idea how they are triggered. It almost appears to be completely random because people are achieving all with various combinations of kill/death counts, playtime, completionism, etc. I was lucky enough to get the best ending but basically don't stress out too much about playing in a particular way (like pacifism) just because you think it might lock you into a certain ending, because as far as anyone can tell this far, it may as well be random.
 

toughasnails

Guest
either them coming back in stronger form (the bodies appear to stay around) or some impact on the ending.
They do btw (but NOT in the different form) as long as the body isn't burned with thermite, altho I'm not sure if something specific triggers it (some folks on the steam forums claim that having the radio active on certain frequencies will trigger it but I've had them come back without that).
 

HoboForEternity

LIBERAL PROPAGANDIST
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
so what endings ya'll got?
mine is promise. the story is really great, with one of the best scifi cosmic horror/silent hill i have ever seen recently.
1. the general background of the world: the empire and the nation. it seems the empire was tyrannical regime that at one time a civil war broke out and the nation was founded, and the solar system was split. the new nation isn't much better too. they're basically space stalin regime.

2. bioresonance: in this world, some cosmic waves that encompass the solar system or even the universe. some people can control this waves and they're basically pychics. they're also what the royal lineage from the old empire was based on.

3. bioresonance technology: eventually they found out they can use technology to somewhat harness this cosmic radio wave and found they can create robot by copying brain wave pattern into an artificial brain. on the other hand, their computing and digital technology didn't advance much, hence they still use 90's earth equivalent computers and magnetic based computer storage.

3.b from what i process is gestalts are human """Volunteers""" that have their brain waves copied into into replikas. i didn't get any details about the nature of replikas, but they seem to be more organic than mechanical. the gestalt replika also doesn't seem to be a pair for their human copy either. for each model of replika they just pick suitable personality and just mass produce them. maybe gestalts are just umbrella term for humans that work with replikas.

4. Elster and Arianne: they are a pair of gestalt/replika sent on a mission to the edge of solar system to find habitable planets outside the solar system. it eventually "failed" the state just left them to die basically. but they actually found something. it's either in the planet they crashed it, or this being detected their radio waves and decided to check that out.

5. what comes next: basically this cosmic being, it seems either something that can manipulate the resonance on such a massive scale or even the source of the resonance itself. it got ahold of the penrose somehow, and probably able to scan consciousness with resonance psychic ability. it seems to consume consciousness. it's unclear whether this being can affect the real material world, or they absorb consciousness and put them into some silent hill-esque "virtual world", but for all intent and purposes, i agree with lithium flower that everything is real. a dream within a dream within a dream. with elster and arianne are the first people it found, so arianne is the core of the new reality

6. the influence spread like waves, began to absorb everyone in the solar system. without knowing, people got taken to this new reality. it began as sickness. then what seem to be delusion where people experience other people's memories and their reality merge, distort, and broken down they became corrupted. beacuse elster and arianne are the base, it seems with enough time, the memories of elster and arianne became imprinted and it merged with other's. (adler's and isa's especially and falke's) it merged multiple series of separate events (the penrose incident, the deterioration in the mines and the rotfond) into one, very confused chain of events about elster finding arianne to fulfill the event of your ending. the result is countless elsters making the journey you did in the game. you're not the real elster, most likely you're just random unfortunate replikas that got brainwashed into thinking you're elster and got merged into the hive mind. due to the chaotic nature of the hivemind and the new reality, each loop is slightly changed, and it's just a matter of probability until one elster succeeded, and that's the player's.
 

Ivan

Arcane
Joined
Jun 22, 2013
Messages
7,757
Location
California
how do you open this fucking cryobed
!!!!!!!!!!

sure, let's have the inventory tutorial after the inventory puzzle.

so far so good. I love the aesthethics, the sound design, the little details. It reminds a heck of a lot of Lone Survival and Resident Evil 1. On the easy side so far, I've not been drained of my resources just yet. Fun map layout has made backtracking fun. Not only have I noticed new enemies appearing, but ammo as well. Odd, dynamic difficulty at play? I already have more healing items than I know what to do with.

Still waiting for an a-ha, or wow moment. Some sort of twist, whether through story or gameplay. So far, gameplay mechanics are ye standard stuff.

-limited inventory feels annoying. why? b/c the game won't let you drop/discard shit, forcing another trek to the safe rooms
-enemies twitch like those of Silent Hill, kinda funny how they re-spawn by dramatically crawling out of tiles each time you enter/exit a room
-map should record names of rooms you can't currently open, it gives you the descriptive text when you CAN'T open them just yet (described the lock)

Welp, I'm stuck now, backtrackng all over the damn place, trying to figure out where to use this wrench. It's hard to strike that nice balance in a game like this, to not let frustration slip in. These little things are beginning to mount though.
 
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Joined
Nov 29, 2016
Messages
1,832
-limited inventory feels annoying. why? b/c the game won't let you drop/discard shit, forcing another trek to the safe rooms
You can destroy shit like ammo and consumables in your inventory, just not unique items or weapons.

Also, did you make sure to set the difficulty to Survival?
 

Ivan

Arcane
Joined
Jun 22, 2013
Messages
7,757
Location
California
-limited inventory feels annoying. why? b/c the game won't let you drop/discard shit, forcing another trek to the safe rooms
You can destroy shit like ammo and consumables in your inventory, just not unique items or weapons.

Also, did you make sure to set the difficulty to Survival?
I wish I had (I didn't notice it b/c of the language, "accessibility" or some such language). Still, it's easy enough to dance around enemies. It takes them a few seconds to spawn/finish their "reveal" animations.
 

Ivan

Arcane
Joined
Jun 22, 2013
Messages
7,757
Location
California
free on GP. will play Day 1
Free ... for only $9.99/£7.99 a month.
can be easily had for a mere dollar. I myself have the luxury of having a console-nephew so I get in for free...if I like the title enough I'll buy a copy on Steam or gift away (e.g. the only game that's had that affect on me has been UnSighted, my 2021 GOTY)

doing the 2nd wall safe puzzle thinking/hoping it will yield the incinerator key
1523465336072-Screen-Shot-2018-04-11-at-120751-PM.png

SNAKES - 5 12748 no 34568
SHAKES - 5
SWORD - 5
 
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Nifft Batuff

Prophet
Joined
Nov 14, 2018
Messages
3,580
The 6 items inventory limit is my only complain. It just artificially lengthen the game because plot item is in your inventory toom sometimes you have several keys, and you don't know which one you are gonna use, so when you find a locked door, it doesn't match the key you are carrying and you have go back to save location storage to take it again.
It is incredible how the absolute grandfather of the survival horror, Alone in the Dark (1992), managed the inventory limit in a better a more modern way than all its Resident Evil clones.

In AitD you have an inventory limit, but it is more natural and systemic. It is based on the actual weight of the objects and not on arbitrary gamey limit, like the six slots that allow you to carry only six keycard for some reason.
Also, in AitD you can drop your objects on the floor in any place you decide and then you can get it back later. You know, it is the most obvious action you can do in real world. You don't need any stupid magic chest that teleport objects in different specific rooms.

This way to manage objects feels completely natural and maintain (I would say improve) completely the layer of strategy related to object management, backtracking, etc.

To think that AitD was made in 1992, and that its mechanics are still superior and more advanced respect to games made in 2022 is so depressing.
 

Borelli

Arcane
Joined
Dec 5, 2012
Messages
1,305
6 item inventory would be doable if not for one single issue.
Why oh why does the flashlight (and camera for that matter) take a slot :argh:
 

Ivan

Arcane
Joined
Jun 22, 2013
Messages
7,757
Location
California
This one definitely grew on me, no pun intended. I had more than my fair share of frustrations with the title, ranging from the inventory system, the janky prompts to interact with world objects, some of the puzzle design. That aside, I found it a compelling experience. I was actually quite surprised to see that it's not quite over when you think it is. I thought the aesthetics were great, the enemy animations and design reminded a lot of the creatures from Silent Hill 3 in particular. There was one goofy one that just made me laugh, the one that looked like a walking bowling pin. I enjoyed the logic of many of the puzzles, but was lost quite a bit by the signaling. Once I looked them up online and saw you had to use tool x or tool y, I was able to figure it out for myself. I played it on normal and had a pretty easy go of it, that said, the main highlight of the game is the exploration and puzzle solving. The main thing I noticed when I switched to hard (I switched b/c I thought the game had ended and wanted to do a quick re-play) I just noticed the enemies hit like trucks. Anyway, it's pretty easy to juke/circumnavigate the enemies.

TLDR: add this to the new school indie horror games that one ought to play, right alongside Darkwood. no cheap jump scares/or gotcha audio stings here.

check it out. playtime ~10-11 hours for a slow, exhaustive playthrough, reading all the notes, struggling with the puzzles for a bit before looking online for hints
 

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