This charming adventure could afford to take a few steps back

I personally always dislike it, too.

There are two reasons you might want to do this as a dev, of course. One of them I feel kinda half-asses your design, if you don’t want to get a threat or failure during gameplay to get into the way of your storypacing, just make a visual novel. Or at least something like SOMA, Amnesia or Still Wakes The Deep.
Or alternatively, if you want to make a game explicitly made for children that’s okay, but then also do the marketing a bit more kid-centric IMO. I dunno, maybe this one is actually genuinely meant for children, but some of the humor and writing doesn’t feel that way if I’m honest. Princess Peach does this more thoroughly: It is the same “handholding 100% of the time”, but it’s also very obviously meant to be played primarily by relatively small children!

  • magic_lobster_party@fedia.io
    2·
    4 months ago

    I haven’t played Plucky yet, but this is what I liked about Tunic. It gives you a hint, and then trusts the player to experiment with the hint they’re given. It makes it feel like your own adventure.

  • hate2bme@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    Either a shit article or shit website. The article gives a summary of the game then says the developers don’t trust their customers. That’s it. No reasons given. Am I missing something?

    • BradleyUffner@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      4 months ago

      There is a “continue reading” link buried several pages down, past a bunch of ads. Took me way to long to find it.

      Looks like this:

    • skulblaka@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      There’s a section under the “read more” split where it complains about over-tutorialization. The game hits you over the head with puzzle solutions and intended routes and leaves nothing for the player to figure out.

  • Thorry84@feddit.nlEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    Yeah this game is really annoying to play, which is a shame because it is cute as hell. It continually prompts you to do the thing. It’s like playing Mario and having someone tell you to walk right and jump all through the game. What makes it much worse is that the game fully comes to a stop to do so. Everything just pauses and the game explains what to do. Even when there is a puzzle, the game basically gives you the answer.

    The approach Astro Bot uses is much better. It let’s you struggle for a bit and then gives an animation with the move you need and which button it is. Which is really handy because even if you know what move you want it’s easy to forget the right button combination for it. It’s very non intrusive and if you know the move the animation won’t even pop up. An experienced player won’t notice the mechanic at all. If you come back from not playing for a bit, the reminder about the buttons is useful. For kids who genuinely get stuck, the help prevents them from giving up.

    Games that were infuriating with these kinds of mechanics were the new God of War games. At every fucking puzzle when you take 10 secs just to get oriented and look at what you need to do, some NPC (usually Boi of War) just tells you the answer. There is no way to turn this off and it made me turn off the game multiple times. If you want to put puzzles in the game, put puzzles in your game and let me figure it out. If you are going to give the answer, why are there puzzles to begin with? It doesn’t help Atreus is one of the worse characters ever written especially in the last game.

  • Wanderer@r.nfEnglish
    03·
    4 months ago

    Ah yes Kotaku, who’s activist openly try to destroy games with Sweet Baby Inc. and their dogshit woke agenda.

    This site needs to die, same as IGN aka Kotaku 2. Nobody wants them, nobody needs them and everything is run by worthless activist.