Continuing on from: https://hexbear.net/post/6064592
I have been neglecting my work and playing anyway. Probably 10 or so hours in at the moment.
I’m curious how your impressions are changing as you play? I’ve unlocked a new moveset that seems to knock enemies back more with wider sweeps which has gelled with me better, and I’m struggling in combat less.
Overall I would still say I’m really mixed. The game seems to get easier the more I play which is a curious decision, the music is still very much taking a back seat which seems tragic to me given how strongly the HK music shaped my impression of zones. I have discovered a handful of tools but would say that experimenting with them seems actively discouraged, I’m always out of shards and a combination of the enemy types and level design mean I’m just not getting many anymore.
Emptying my set in a boss fight is about 80 shards, which to stock up for would be ~20 minutes of traversal and farming. Consequently I’m mostly just sticking with the “safe” set I’m used to. Bummer.
The world is beautiful, maybe a bit spread out. Hornet is more expressive than the Knight, something which shone in a particular involuntary sequence (if you know you know). Still very minimalist though.
Boss difficulty seems to swing wildly around, my experience is that the final phase often comes down to a DPS race and luck, particularly when ads are a feature. There’s just so much on screen and enemies move in more complex patterns, I get mind-flooded something I rarely felt in HK where almost every boss fight felt like a careful dance.
How are you finding it?
It’s noticeably harder than HK1, but I’ve been having a good time. Some areas and enemies are a bit frustrating but the overall experience has been fun.
More detailed (rambling) critique
Starting with negatives:
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I think too many enemies deal 2 masks of damage without really much reason or indication that they’ll do so. In HK 1, the big enemies and late game bosses, for the most part, did 2 or more masks of damage but now it seems like every other enemy does. Small farting flower? 2 masks. Tiny skinny flying dude with a needle? 2 masks. Literal dog? You bet that’s 2 masks. Lots more traps, tripwires, and surprise spikes too - also they deal 2 masks.
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I’m getting through the game fine and haven’t been stuck on anything yet, I just think the damage is overtuned. It makes the first mask upgrade actually pointless - 5 masks is the same as 6 when each boss does 2+ damage.
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With that, I think I don’t really like the healing system consuming the entire silk spool - it really makes me reluctant to use silk abilities outside the most secure circumstance, and even then I’m wary that I’m going to run into an enemy that can combo me to death.
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Oh my god not everything needs to cost 80 rosaries! I shouldn’t be yearning for the hostile architecture of Hallownest, but compared to this scam? There’s been more than a few times when I recently bought a map of an area and couldn’t afford the bench the next room over, or vice versa.
Neutral/Meh:
- I’ve been 50/50 on the souls game thing of not telling you what actions will move (or lead to the death of) an NPC, and I’m finding conflicting reports of causes online so shrug
Positives:
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Love the character designs, enemies have been extremely varied and have some surprising and neat visuals
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Sherma is precious and must be protected
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Hornet controls very well, with her dash/sprint being a great addition - her animations especially are very elaborate and fluid compared to HK1. The “gamefeel” in general is
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I enjoy the crest system, and the Reaper crest has been my main since I picked it up. I didn’t really gel with Beast or Wanderer but some people really seem to appreciate them
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The variety in area theme and style is fun, and I particularly like Greymoor
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I’ve actually had a lot of fun with the platforming, though I find it much easier when you can use a straight downward air attack rather than the default diagonal
Despite my negatives being more detailed, I think I’ve enjoyed it more than HK1 over all, I just think it’s a bit of an adversarial experience. I feel like it’d be kinda rough for new players
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I love it so much.
I really do love this difficulty, it’s exactly my level, so it’s great for me, but i feel bad that many people are struggling and not having fun. I think a difficulty or accessibility option would have been great.
I do share some of the criticisms but none of it is fundamental or makes it less enjoyable for me, just slight frustrations that are easily overcome. Yes I do think some attacks/moves/enemies/contact with enemies shouldn’t do 2 damage, but i’m generally OK with it.
The 2 damage on environment hazards is weird tho. I get having one that makes sense and that you can reduce with a charm, but i’m in the middle of Act 2 and it is kinda strange how almost every environmental hazard does 2 damage. Again i’m OK with it but I don’t really understand the purpose, it feels weird design-wise.
I think the difficulty curve needs to be tuned, I accidentally skipped the boss everyone hates in Greymoor and fought it later, and even with the upgrade I had by then I agree it has too much HP. It hasn’t really made me struggle too much but I see what other people are talking about. It feels like game gets more open and more options after a certain point late in Act 1.
I love Act 2 so much, and I just realized
(act 2 map design)
the map/area concept is basically like a Hollowknight Castlevania, with tons of dense sub-areas compacted into the Citadel, you’ve got the equivalent of the Clock Tower, of the Library, of the fancy ballroom/aristocrat place, and of the gardens. It’s great!
Have not had this much fun in a long time, i can’t stop playing it and i’m taking my sweet time, doing everything, finding everything, re-visiting places regularly to see what changed, trying interactions and finding lore, etc. It’s so good.
PROS: Pretty much everything
CONS: I have been playing for days and Hornet has yet to say SHAW or ADEENA literally unplayable
for a lot of bosses I pause spammed to make my reaction time better. the game is definitely very unforgiving and could use more benches/ easy places to full heal but I am in love with the game
I’m in act 2 and think this game is generally better than hollow knight. Game has some hard bosses (I think widow kicked my ass like 10 times) but you have so much utility with hornet with tools and aerial mobility, plus different crest movesets, this game just feels better to play.
I think a lot of the difficulty complaints are people who are i frame spoiled. I have to actually space unlike with hollow knight where face tanking and down spell I framing is king
There are some annoying moments, some of the run backs do suck ass (lies of p did this right, just put a damn bonfire right before the boss).
Losing rosaries early game does suck but it gets less annoying with the enemies in act 2. It makes sense story wise too but idk I feel like it would help if bosses dropped a few
Cogwork dancers is one of my favorite boss fights ever, such a fun fight
I think lies of p was a garbage, joyless, game :p
I actually like runbacks, although a few have been a little annoying so far. Maybe they get worse.
I’m enjoying it, but some of the bosses do get really annoying. I’m also getting more tools so I can feel like I have a build rather than just using whatever I have. It’s probably more that exploring the world feels less like a slog and bosses can suck ass more often than not.
However, I managed to upgrade my silk amount and I think it increased it by 1? I was like ‘Excuse me?’ It makes almost no difference compared to getting another storage thing in HK. It’s like getting the equivalent of one extra hit so you get no more needles or heals from it
Its so fuckin fun. I don’t think my controller will survive the game, im getting a blister on my thumb from jamming the D-pad as hard as I can lol.
I was stuck on that stupid early boss I think everyone gets stuck on? (I’m not looking anything up ((except the location of the last item of a “find the 6 blanks” type quest)) as much as possible and everyone’s been great with being as spoiler free as possible.)
Once I beat that boss it all started to click and now im cruising through this thing knocking down bosses left and right… for now. I’m sure another challenge and wall is coming.
I could honestly use a little more sweaty platforming spots for optional and hidden areas, but im still in act 1.
I’m further than you seem to be and the game’s difficulty is in peaks and valleys but with the general trend of getting harder. Some bosses are easy, but many of them aren’t and even some areas are difficult and filled with enemies that casually do high damage while fucking you over in terms of positioning. If a boss seems to be a DPS race, you’re probably doing something significantly wrong because there aren’t any attacks that force you to take the hit except kind of if you let yourself get swarmed by adds (which so far I have found are not that difficult to immediately cull).
Also there’s a charm that lets you get more shards, so it should be easier to farm faster, and the degree to which a given tool consumes shards varies a lot. That said, I just stick with the knives and traps because they’re the easiest to use to full effect against most bosses.
Unless you can dodge forever all bosses are a DPS race to some extent.
Just in like hollowknight I can easily just dodge the radiance forever. Generally taking damage felt like you had to do something obviously wrong.
Whereas even like the fast travel guy tended to have 3 or 4 things to track on screen at once. Very overwhelming.
I am not the best at video games, but I can like reliably beat things that don’t need fast reflexes.
If you’re interpreting the Bell Beast as frequently having 4 things to track on the screen at once, you’re misinterpreting it in basically the same way that you would be if you said Radiance has like 7 to track because of all of the spears. Most of the projectiles aren’t going to hit you unless you try to dive into them. Only one or two are going to actually be relevant and the rest are noise.
The spears move as one object. I’m not sure if you are being deliberately silly but:
Only one or two are going to actually be relevant and the rest are noise
It’s the visual parsing to determine that which is difficult lol. It’s why it’s done to increase difficulty, and why overstimulation becomes torture eventually. Sorting good info from bad doesn’t happen automatically, you have to use your brain.
It’s extremely easy to tell in that encounter, all you need to know is where they start and you can tell which ones to ignore. You need to learn how the projectiles behave to make this judgement, but the end result is much easier than tracking them constantly.
What’s silly is acting like these encounters are DPS races because “well unless you can dodge literally everything every time forever, there is a DPS value you can attach to it” because fundamentally you aren’t helpless to getting damaged nor do you have a time limit (e.g. Four Kings in Dark Souls has a soft one), nor do any of the bosses I’ve seen so far heal (idk about later, though perhaps none do since there’s no health bar anyway). At worst, you can just pick certain scenarios to play in a purely defensive manner if you feel overwhelmed, and you’ll most likely get habituated to it over time and in any case can just win by only attacking some of the time. You don’t need to play that way, of course, but the very fact that you can means that it’s clearly not a DPS race in any meaningful sense of the term. For many bosses, even being on the defensive also typically still leaves a lot of room for attacking if you’re using tools like the throwing knives or are willing to spend resources on the spear skill.
I suppose I’m wrong about my experience then? Thanks for clearing that up for me.
What I’m saying is that these games have a learning process because you aren’t really intended to sight-read encounters, and once you have learned them they become much easier, with some of your description just being factually untrue because you don’t need to actively track 3 - 4 things most of the time, you have brief moments where you are presented with the tells for attacks/projectiles and you can determine the possible paths (of which there are at most two but often just one in the case of Bell Beast). This has nothing to do with your subjective experience of being overwhelmed, which could be true even if it was just 1 thing on the screen (and that would be fair enough, there are encounters that will do that), and everything to do with the objective fact of how many things need to be actively watched at a given time, which again is only rarely 4 in the case of that boss (if you get especially unlucky with your positioning relative to falling bells).
Like, it’s fine if Moss Mother is too difficult for you, people who moralize about video game difficulty are the most miserable people in the world, but that’s not the same as justifying Moss Mother being too hard by saying that she deals 4 damage per hit, which just isn’t true.
I can’t play this game after work and enjoy myself. I don’t have the patience.
If you’re having shard problems try saving tools for phase two on bosses. That way you get the easy phase mastered without spending resources and when the boss enters phase two, you can pretend that you did too. There’s some that absolutely trivialize certain bosses.
I think I’m nearing the end now. Incredibly good game so far. Ran into some few genuinely frustrating parts that got better when I looked up some spoilers online. There’s an area in this game that makes blighttown look pleasant, and given what they named it I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what they were going for.
Obviously you can not use tools or grind for bundles, it’s just a bummer. They’re really fun, I’d like to feel like I wasn’t penalised for playing with them or using them during exploration.
The current pattern I’m on is never use them, then in phase 2 of a boss race with spike trap and ant boomerang. That is… not fun it’s the sort of “optimising the fun away” type strategy that is the result of feeling like a game doesn’t reward approaching it playfully. The point of a game isn’t to beat it, it’s to play with it.
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