I highly recommend turning on the Opportunities/Mission Stories system for your first playthrough of a level - either the full monty, with mission markers and everything, or the hint-type popups. They help orient you to the level, keep you focused on an objective, and show you some funny/good story stuff. They also teach you a few ways to move through the level–which you can then iterate on later.
I did this a few times until I felt solid, and then went ham on each level, going super deep and doing lots of challenges and generally fooling around and letting crazy emergent stuff happen. A buddy followed each Mission Story for each level (there’s like 3 or 5 for each) and then moved on to a new level, feeling great. They’re great as training wheels, or as a full experience.
I finally tried out Boyfriend Dungeon and it is surprisingly charming. I think the zelda-style dungeons will eventually cause me to stop playing though.
I also tried getting into Hitman a few times over the last few years, and it wasn’t until last year that I finally got into it. I stopped caring about perfect runs and scores and just did missions and opportunities which seemed fun.
Changing that mindset - going with the flow, avoiding a need for perfection - enabled me to sink into the systems far more comfortably, and really get into the series. With that comfort, it was then much more fun to breeze through the campaign once and later go back to missions to repeat them for other goals.
Yeah, that’s hard for me. When a mission goes wrong, and it often does, I just want to quit and then come back later and reload a saved game. But then, all that does is just makes the Hitman games feel like a series of failures that I have to endure.
This was supposed to be a celebration post but now I’m pretty sure I will be noping out of my Archvale on Hard run.
I busted my ass to get through the final boss fight and I did it!.. only to discover it was merely Phase One. Along comes another huge health bar at the top of the screen and I have to fight the little dude who has been helping me all along and I just got instantly creamed.
Then my heart sank as I realized there probably wouldn’t be a checkpoint… and there was no checkpoint.
This reminds me of the fact that in the last few years, I’ve stopped playing three or four games on the final boss because the challenge was just not fun, and I felt like I had otherwise seen what the game had to offer. Two of them are Blasphemous and Sundered. I guess I also bailed on Hollow Knight without beating the secret boss. I got better things to do!
I bailed on Crosscode’s last puzzle before the final boss - plus nowadays you can just pull up a walkthrough on Youtube, and watch the part you didn’t finish. Although I must have been burning out because I remember a bit of the final boss fight and I don’t remember anything about the ending - had to look it up to remember what the “big reveal” was…
I think there’s a huge disparity in developer styles from “the player can have fun however they want, I’d never recommend you enable any of these options but feel free to mix and match” all the way to “you must play the game in the one true way to see it as originally intended”.
I remember how in Wolfenstein the New Order I played the game almost all the way through on Normal but just couldn’t beat the last damn boss to save my life. It sure would have helped to at least have a save anywhere option so I could come to that fight better prepared but nooooo.
I finally gave up after five or six tries and switched it to easy.
I’m definitely a “hoard all the good stuff just in case” - especially for RPGs - so it’s nice if the final boss is tough enough that you definitely feel like you need to use everything to win (and is super clear that “this is the time to use it”), but also easy enough that you’re not just doing boring safe things. I’ve definitely “accidentally” finished the game and not used the “you can only use this once but it’s supposed to be amazing” item because I didn’t realise or forgot about it, and I’ve also “won” the game by doing some ultra cheese because anything else is a one hit KO… I still remember bits of the final fight in Chrono Trigger just because it was somehow a super epic fight including a bit of a “greatest hits” track of the entire game by bringing back some older bosses and their mechanics…
Game design is hard - glad I can just play games and complain ;)
I didn’t mind the incredibly tough boss fights in Archvale… that Banished Executioner I wrote about a few days ago turned out to be a lot harder than the next two. Beating that guy felt like a huge victory. But I really don’t like the egregious removal of a checkpoint between two insane bosses right at the end. That seems cheap to throw in only at the end.
These bullet hell boss fights aren’t fun tests of skill like Nioh 2 or Sekiro… they’re just arcade twitch-fests where you get better at dancing around or dashing through all the bullets and laser beams. But two in a row is lunacy.
And it doesn’t help that I feel like the only one in the world playing it. :D I’d say 50 hours is enough for that little Game Pass trifle. (I still had a blast and recommend it highly… but maybe play on Normal.) And now I can get to some of those AAA games I bought during the winter sale!
FWIW, I played a decent chunk of it and enjoyed it. Got to the second boss on hard and then decided to restart on normal, and got through a half dozen of them before getting distracted by some other game.
Literally, the same experience and reaction (though I only played through on normal) - I had a couple more halfhearted goes and then uninstalled. I enjoyed my time with Archvale (though I would complain about missing checkpoints creating difficulty spikes throughout the entire game, often to reach areas with nothing in them), but this was such a puzzling design choice.
Interesting! I loved how the checkpoints were spaced out in the main game… needing to clear enough areas to reach the next save fountain (and not knowing where they were!) really enhanced the fun and challenge for me.
I liked how the map showed my progress so sometimes I could take alternate routes or explore and level up in other areas before returning. That also forced me to improve my weapons and armor or experiment with different badge combos. I went ranged only until the final Brinkreef levels when I switched to melee for the first time.
I’m glad to know some other folks (mostly) enjoyed it. I guess I just needed this Zelda-like setting and framework to get into a bullet hell title for the first time.
