The evil within

[Vince]

More I'm playing more I'm loving! This is truly the sequel to resi 4 I've always wanted. Seems like the true spiritual successor to the greatest game of all time- Resi 4- black borders and all! Pretty creepy game throughout, even the "safe room" is creepy! Mikami is a master of horror.

[GameHED]

Did you even read the article?

What isn’t rewarding are the artificially difficult boss fights. Full of trial and error and rarely rewarding, these fights seem to intentionally keep valuable information from the player. You’ll feel like you bested them out of luck, not out of skill or cunning.....

...Alien: Isolation emphasizes survival over horror, and in doing so creates a thick layer of tension that isn’t easy for the player to shake. The Evil Within, however, starts to feel more like a third person shooter with a survival horror afterthought. A couple closet scares elevated my heartbeat, but I never felt that genuine sense of fear that Alien: Isolation (or earlier Resident Evil titles) conveyed. Instead, your main battle becomes finding where to go next, and trying to understand what the developers want you to do. It’s honestly not a scary game, not a game that instills fear. And therefore it seems to miss its intended mark.

Survival horror is always about trial and error. That would be like getting angry that you don't get to know where all the shortcuts are in mario kart games on the first attempt. Sometimes learning things over a long period of time is part of the depth of playing a game.

I will give you a quick example: when you start off playing fighting game, you know nothing about what the new characters moves are capable of and how abusive those moves are in comparison to the other guys you are used to using. When fighting against an opponent for the first time you have to take a much more defensive stance and observe the weaknesses and subtle limitations of the new character.

You don't just go in knowing how to beat them, you get beaten from lack of knowledge. Over time the knowledge builds and then you can adapt to the game. Same thing with monsters in monster hunter. You will go in knowing little about it until you have the timing down and observe before you get to fully master it.

Yes I know game design has changed a lot since the old days but if you go back to old arcade games like Dungeons and dragons, if you didn't know the attack patterns and best paths and if you didn't practice practice practice, you are not going to be able to 1 credit the game like a pro. The depth of the game is in finding out a little bit at a time what to do and when and then executing it the right way.

I guess one man's difficulty and frustration is another man's challenge. I am fully in support of difficulty sliders in games. (similar to elder scrolls) Because if you get stuck in a situation you just are not good enough to survive you have wasted a lot of your playtime which you invested in the game and feel cheated. But what I don't want is the survival horror being like GTA 5 where you just get to progress if you fail multiple times. That is just defeating the point of playing a game imo. You can get better with practice and persistence. And if you don't there are ways in many games to give yourself advantages by doing things in a specific way. (eg grinding stats before attempting to fight tough bosses)

Do you want survival horror genre to be like a shooter? I like being scared of dying. You can't be scared of death if the main villains are pussies. When playing a horror title it's not just about your skill as a player but the feeling of inevitable death being a part of what makes them have that psychological effect on you to not do reckless stuff. Your actions are only part of it. You can control your actions but not the environments or what happens in the story that turns the tide in your favour or in the favour of the monsters.

You are not an action hero. You are just there to solve mystery, find truth, and if you have to use combat in self defence that is ok but combat and killing the monster so easily isn't survival since you'd never act that way in the real world.

If I put a lion in a cage and chucked you in there and locked the door, you are not going to try to punch it to death. First thing you would do is know you are not going to stand a chance against it because it is stronger and faster than you and running will only get you so far before you get mauled. You would hide in the corner and hope it won't eat you. This is what boss encounter need to feel like. You are weak, they are tough, but you still have a chance of getting out of it and there has to be a respect for the enemy's power for you to react in sensible way. Finding the answer to beating them is the puzzle. If conserving ammo is part of these games, then acting in non-risky ways should also be part of it. Remember the scene in jurassic park when the T-rex eats the raptors and indirectly saves the fleeing human? You don't expect that to happen because you can't control it, but it scared the crap out of you. Too many games only want to be power fantasy of fighting the boss and not enough scaring the shit out of you.

Alien Isolation is scary too, but it's using a popular movie series to help it so it's going to sell no matter what. This is an original game trying to bring back the older feel of survival horror games but without the fan following of RE titles. I think it is unfair to compare. But overall this deserves more attention imo.

Also yes I am angry about the day one patch.

It seems like they could have easily delayed this game and waited until all the issues were fixed with the framerate. But I guess that is our fault for being doormats. Previous console game generations would have made a fuss about this and claiming that it was unacceptable for consoles to have to patch a game. But it only shows how soft people have become and it does not surprise me they are taking advantage of the situation. (seems like only nintendo have reliable enough quality control nowadays) The only games really that are acceptable to be released with bugs are the huge open world titles. Not the linear games.

For me if I am playing a game that is scary it should affect how I react. If I react emotionally it's doing its job of creating fear and paranoia. If I am only making decision based on logic and reacting calmly because I can foresee the end, it's just like action game and has failed. You should not know everything any more than you should have solutions to the puzzles in text based adventures spoiled for you by having the solutions be too obvious. Some boss fights are about luring enemies into traps and avoid conflict. It's a part of guerilla tactics of trying to use what you are given in a intelligent way. You may not feel powerful but that's not the point. You are not action hero for a summer blockbuster movie. You are the prey half of the time. Even powerful monsters like vampires have weakness like not being allowed to walk in the sun, having to feast on blood to survive, being in danger of getting hunted. You can have action but there has to be a limit to how much power you feel playing a game or it's not a true survival horror game where you fear encounters imo. Old bosses in zelda games had a puzzle like element to them too. Why does everything need to be easy in survival games? Shouldn't we be rewarded for experimenting and doing different things to find weaknesses? Did you have valuable information like having to use silver arrows and light lamps to hurt the Ganon boss in zelda LTTP? Nope. You figured it out by trying different things and that is part of the mystery. Sometime you might even have to soften a target before you can expose its weak point and penetrate defenses. Bosses are meant to be tough, you are meant to be smarter than them. (in a way you are like spider man and they are the hulk. Sure they are tear you into pieces, but you can use your brains, quick thinking and fast reflexes to avoid danger in time)

[Candy Arse]

TD;DR

[Gamma]

I will give you a quick example: <1229 words>

[Vince]

Taking my time with this one. I'm up to chapter 10 and I'm loving it! So many tense moments! It's actually quite difficult as well, even on Casual difficulty. I know it's hard for some people to see past, but if everyone looked past the locked 30 fps and cropped screen (easily removed on PC) then people would see this game is the next step for 3rd person survival horror!

[Vince]

Just released this morning for the PC version was a 1.5gb patch that not only added a 60fps option with v sync, but also a full screen option as well! Plays so much better full screen at 60 fps! Brilliant game got even better!

[t0mby]

Lol@ Vinces past two posts. Read them in reverse for epic lols.

[Vince]

Lol@ Vinces past two posts. Read them in reverse for epic lols.

Why? Not denying game is still an absolute joy cropped and at 30 fps- It seems like it's the only way for console only players to play it at this point in time. Just nice to have a superior option now on PC...

[Gamma]

Lol@ Vinces past two posts. Read them in reverse for epic lols.

See, before the second reply was even there, I read this one:

Taking my time with this one. I'm up to chapter 10 and I'm loving it! So many tense moments! It's actually quite difficult as well, even on Casual difficulty. I know it's hard for some people to see past, but if everyone looked past the locked 30 fps and cropped screen (easily removed on PC) then people would see this game is the next step for 3rd person survival horror!

...in the context of discussing GameHED's epic wall of text. I almost read up to chapter 10 myself to see what all the fuss was about, but at "locked 30 fps" the penny dropped.