Woo, another game off the backlog. I liked most of this game, but found the last chapter a bit frustrating as the controls aren’t particularly tight when you suddenly have to deal with 4 guards. And when you need to deal with the spell “pillar of rat” it’s even worse. I bet a full hour of my 12 hours of playthrough was devoted to trying to counter spell pillar of rat, but I was always out of mana.
A lot to like about the original game - did the sequel get performance tuned to where it was worth getting, or did it lack in other areas in ways that were less fixable?
I finished this last night! It’s really good, a wonderful little gem of a game.
Unlike others I didn’t find it to be too difficult. There were a few moments where I hit a puzzle that I couldn’t quite get, but in general if I just put it down for the evening when I came back in a day or two the solution jumped out at me.
Probably the hardest part for me was the final boss, specifically his third phase. He drops five environmental effects and I kept trying to spread them out and failing. But then it occurred to me that I could layer the rat pillar on top of the rat pit, and that left plenty of space for my brother’s rat tornado and then it was easy.
Someone upthread compared it to The Last of Us, and I think that’s apropos. It’s visually spectacular, great writing and voice acting, really engaging story, wonderful characters, and the gameplay is… pretty shallow. From a gameplay perspective there’s not a lot going on; you’ve got a nice selection of tools sure but until nearly the end of the game every encounter has a “correct” way to approach it using those tools. I happen to also be replaying Arkane’s Prey, and the difference between them is stark: Prey is all about player creativity in terms of environmental navigation & how you approach encounters.
Some of the later encounters are a bit more freeform–I’m thinking specifically of areas where you face multiple guards–but even then it’s all pretty straightforward.
Agreed that it is pretty shallow compared to an immersive sim, but it fits well for these two games, I thought. I loved both of them. But this is a good reminder for me to:
a) Finish A Plague Tale: Innocence (still stuck on the sequence near the end where you play as the boy).
b) Play Prey from my backlog. That sounds awesome.
