Porgy Review - a Sub with an Identity Crisis

[Gragnak]

I like the premise, a cute submarine exploring the sea to figure out why the creatures are upset. Exploring deep and finding upgrades to your sub to progress.
It quickly becomes a deep ocean horror, with horrible creatures chasing you, while trapped underwater in a claustrophobic maze of solid coral rock, and cursed to constantly be
rescued by the mechanical arm just to repeat the same nightmare over and over.

Constantly need to go refuel
I got all the easily-accessible fuel tanks and it doesn't help with constantly need to refuel. They need to give me more fuel capacity. Feels like the level designers are avoiding making more levels by forcing me to repeat the same parts of the level over and over.

The torpedo is so inaccurate, it takes too long to hit anything it wastes fuel, so it's almost never worth shooting enemies, just avoid them. Except you need to clear the way to run from the shark.
Un-avoidable Bosses right near the beginning- Shark and octopus
Bosses constantly patrol right near the refueling zone(s).
If the game is meant to be a skill based combat then give me an open arena or a specific boss area to fight where I have space to maneuver. Bosses appear randomly, and with the annoying trash enemies that then get in the way of fighting the boss. I guess the best approach is to find a way to trap the bosses in a corner where they can't hit you and cheese them, where's the fun in that? I guess the shark will stop coming back if I kill it once? Am I supposed to do that right away to be able to play? Shark seems overpowered for a starting area. A few times it just doesn't see me, so that may add to the atmosphere, but it usually sees me.

The buster torpedo is needed to trigger switches to open doors. But it's impossible to tell which door is opened by a switch before triggering it. Sometimes two doors are triggered. You can follow a trail of explosions to get some idea of which doors, but then you're usually blocked by a newly created door, and can't get back to the door that opened, and you need to go the long way back to get more fuel, which resets all doors.
If the game is meant to be exploration, give my fuel tanks more capacity so I feel like I can reach farther after upgrades.
If the game is meant to be puzzle solving, let me solve puzzles in peace, with no stupid little enemies
(let me annihilate them with a good weapon with enough fuel left to solve the puzzla)
If the game is meant to be a peaceful dive in the ocean with beautiful creatures, and relaxing music, make them non-hostile. I guess that's the storyline, maybe when I win they become non-hostile?
If the game is meant to be a survival deep-sea horror, make the atmosphere dark and forboding instead of cute and colorful. This game has made me frightened of cute colorful things now.

In summary, it seems like the developers simply didn't play their game or didn't have anyone play it who gave them honest feedback.
It tries to combine several design aspects and doesn't focus on one enough to have coherence.
The entire game seems set up for frustration. Recommend: Fix the torpedo so it fires the same way every time, consistently, so I can actually aim at creatures and hit them reliably.
Make killing the small enemies persist between refuelings.
Make the persistent fuel tank upgrade actually significant, or increase fuel dropped by enemies.
Color code the doors and switches - blue switch goes to blue door, etc.
Show the invisible doors as an outline before they appear.
Move the shark far away from the start area and from the secondary refueling area, or give us some way to make it go away for a while. If engaging both the octopus and shark at once, have them fight each other and make the player safe from their damage. And preferably the shark dies in the fight so it stops coming back.
Let me switch the buster torpedo on and off without surfacing.

Give me stealth or an unmanned probe with lots of fuel but no weapon, so I can sneak past enemies to learn the layout, learn the shark patrol route, plan the sequence of door openings, plan a path back with an upgrade module, etc. Alternately, give me a map (of areas I've previously visited) that I can study from the refuel depot before descending.
Give me proximity mines so I can attack around a corner.

P.S. It makes no sense that running out of fuel causes an implosion. I could understand drifting to the bottom, but the implosion seems to conflate a whale needing to surface for air to breathe with a sub needing fuel to move around. I run out of air so I lose air pressure and implode? So the sub must have a soft, inflatable hull? And the fuel is a gas also used to pressurize the sub?

In general, spend more time on design and decide if this is meant to be an action (dodging and fighting) or puzzle solving, horror or cute cartoon, a resource and time management or exploration. It seems like they took Dome Keeper and Subnautica and made a bastard child, while ignoring what makes those games fun. It's good thing this was a fictional game made by the fuctional company UFOSoft so there's nobody to blame for it sinking. I gave it a fair dive but the moral of the story is some mysteries are simply best left alone.

[7Soul]

Reviews are funny, I disagree with like 90% of this. One thing I'll say is that the tiny enemies shouldn't do as much damage in the late game

The only real problem I have with the game is that bosses refuse to show up when you actually want to go out to kill them. I wanted to fight the Nautilus so I went to the map he shows up in, searched every room I could and ran out of fuel. 3 times. On the 4th I found him but I was alread at half fuel and died. On the 5th I managed to find it early and finally killed it

[Yuga-Suggah]

Originally posted by 7Soul:

Reviews are funny, I disagree with like 90% of this. One thing I'll say is that the tiny enemies shouldn't do as much damage in the late game

The only real problem I have with the game is that bosses refuse to show up when you actually want to go out to kill them. I wanted to fight the Nautilus so I went to the map he shows up in, searched every room I could and ran out of fuel. 3 times. On the 4th I found him but I was alread at half fuel and died. On the 5th I managed to find it early and finally killed it

Yeah, idk. Reviews like this either gush with no analysis or complain about mechanics without finding a workaround strategy. Or give a video game comparison expecting it to be closer to that,

I do agree a little about fuel consumption and collecting items. The demo shows the sub with three items in tow and lol I’m kinda bad about immediately docking the second I find something.

But idk, I don’t like Porgy as much as a lot of YouTubers out there, but it’s fun and not too difficult.

[Tatra]

I think the only bit I really agree with is that I do think the chance for enemies you kill to drop fuel is a little on the light side, but that's a matter of taste really.

Also:

Originally posted by Gragnak:

The torpedo is so inaccurate, it takes too long to hit anything it wastes fuel...

Does it waste fuel? I think I did a little test on one of my first runs, specifically to figure out if firing torpedoes uses up fuel, and as far as I could tell it didn't; Fuel seemed to get used up at the same rate whether I was firing no-stop or not at all. Could be wrong though; I may be mis-remembering what I tested, or may have just done a bad job of it.

Just double-checked and, nope, firing torpedoes do not use up fuel (at very least with Buster Torpedoes equipped). You can check easily enough; you only use fuel while moving, not while floating in place, so just leave the dock, stay still, and starting blasting; your fuel won't budge.

There is a little bit of subtlety to the torpedoes. Long story short; if you're finding yourself tapping them constantly to fire, you don't have to, you can hold the button and they'll auto-fire, and lock the direction you're firing in; that can make it easier to concentrate on moving, and help let you attack and retreat at the same time.

...Buut, on the flip side, if you've only been holding the button to auto-fire them, trying tapping instead. If you get the rhythm right (or cheat like me and use a controller with an auto-fire option), you can shoot them noticeably faster than you can holding the button. Obvious advantages there, if you can get the hang of it.

[Typo]

> Just double-checked and, nope, firing torpedoes do not use up fuel (at very least with Buster Torpedoes equipped). You can check easily enough; you only use fuel while moving, not while floating in place, so just leave the dock, stay still, and starting blasting; your fuel won't budge.

Your fuel constantly drains, so if you take too long to kill enemies "it wastes fuel".

As you get better at videogames, you'll realize that sometimes not having very much offense is more dangerous than it seems because it increases interaction time and makes it more likely to take chip damage. You may have heard of the saying "A good offense is the best defense." I hope that helps! Have a nice day.

[Tatra]

Originally posted by Typo:

> Just double-checked and, nope, firing torpedoes do not use up fuel (at very least with Buster Torpedoes equipped). You can check easily enough; you only use fuel while moving, not while floating in place, so just leave the dock, stay still, and starting blasting; your fuel won't budge.

Your fuel constantly drains, so if you take too long to kill enemies "it wastes fuel".

Like I just tested and said, your fuel doesn't constantly drain. It's used up two ways; being hit, and moving (with the dodge using up more fuel, per distance covered, than standard movement).

As you get better at videogames, you'll realize that sometimes not having very much offense is more dangerous than it seems because it increases interaction time and makes it more likely to take chip damage.

(OK, first of all: what is it with people getting dickishly personal when they disagree with stuff like this? You can go "I disagree, here's why" without out-of-nowhere, completed ungrounded insinuations about a lack of overall ability on the part of the person you disagree with. You don't know me. Wind your neck in.)

These things are often a matter of tradeoffs. A lot depends on personal skill and in-the-moment circumstances. Standing and fighting with a subpar offense, and possibly taking a few hits, may in the long run waste less fuel than trying to run away and finding another route... especially if, in your panic, you just run into more enemies. And, yeah, sometimes the converse is true, with using your mobility in place of lacklustre offense being preferable.

The in-the-moment decisions of which to use, and the gradual improvement both in your own ability to make those decisions and to successfully follow through, as well as the occasional upgrades for your character that help you to do them and to give you more options on how to follow through on your fights or flights... That's gameplay, that is.

[Alex]

I haven't made enough headway in it to really give nuanced thoughts, but I have one very strong impression so far:

The torpedoes you start with might be the worst-feeling weapon I've ever used in a game. The range is horrible and they constantly just kind of miss for no reason. It makes the game feel so much harder than it should and I'm struggling to kill these first bosses because it's just so incredibly difficult to land shots on anything.

I want to enjoy this, but Jesus man.

[Simbabbad]

Agreed 100% with the OP, it seems to be designed to be irritating. At this point, I'll just ignore it and move on. We're not at an age when it's hard to find good retro games.

[Malkav0]

It's another case of a game that I, on the contrary, find pretty easy. It's basically up to understanding what you can and can't do depending on what you have found. You can't attack bosses without any power upgrades. You can destroy them after a little farming. You can't reach super far without lots of fuel upgrades, but once you can, a few trips will net you even more upgrades. Etc...
The only missing feature, like with several other games, is a map. I think the compilation suffers from not using a 3rd button (select) for several games, a thing that would have been entirely possible for the era. It's possible and easy to make maps for cases like Barbuta, but it's a hassle for a case like Porgy. It also lacks a completion indicator per area, or something like that, but as the game goes on it becomes pretty clear what the final number of upgrades should be, just not clear at all where you should search for missing and hidden upgrades.

[Simbabbad]

Originally posted by Malkav0:

It's another case of a game that I, on the contrary, find pretty easy.

It's not a batter of easy or hard, it's a matter of being irritating, confusing, annoying and flat out unpleasant to play.

[Malkav0]

Originally posted by Simbabbad:

Originally posted by Malkav0:

It's another case of a game that I, on the contrary, find pretty easy.

It's not a batter of easy or hard, it's a matter of being irritating, confusing, annoying and flat out unpleasant to play.

To you maybe, but I enjoyed it so it seems it's not that obvious. By the way, you said we're not at an age where it's hard to find good retro games, it's technically wrong, you find good pixel art games with very modern tools and QoL, good retro design is extremely rare and is very niche, and not the cup of tea of everyone. And can easily be messed up.

[Simbabbad]

Originally posted by Malkav0:

By the way, you said we're not at an age where it's hard to find good retro games

To you maybe, but in my backlog I have tons of retro games I enjoy much more than Porgy. And that's the ones I haven't beaten yet, not even counting the ones I enjoy replaying over and over again. We live at an age when good retro games are everywhere, it's "technically" factual.

And Porgy isn't retro design at all. Scuba Dive on ZX Spectrum, which is extremely similar (Porgy is probably copied on it), THAT was retro design. Most of the games in UFO 50 actually have modern game design with no live counter, procedural elements, automatic saving, etc. but also some weird design choices.

[Malkav0]

Originally posted by Simbabbad:

Originally posted by Malkav0:

By the way, you said we're not at an age where it's hard to find good retro games

To you maybe, but in my backlog I have tons of retro games I enjoy much more than Porgy. And that's the ones I haven't beaten yet, not even counting the ones I enjoy replaying over and over again. We live at an age when good retro games are everywhere, it's "technically" factual.

And Porgy isn't retro design at all. Scuba Dive on ZX Spectrum, which is extremely similar (Porgy is probably copied on it), THAT was retro design. Most of the games in UFO 50 actually have modern game design with no live counter, procedural elements, automatic saving, etc. but also some weird design choices.

No live counter, procedural elements, it was already done. The only functionnality that wasn't technically in reach was saving for most games, especially since most of the market was consoles, and much more automatic saving. It wasn't because of will but because of tech. A lot of situations would be met with similar reasons, due to data size available, another technical limitation. I mentionned that Porgy could have used a map, I take into account that it probably would have been possible for its category. But I also admit that it was often expected from players to use pen and paper to cover for what couldn't be included.
What you call "retro" now takes advantage of many things that weren't possible before, in animations, hitboxes, controls... And it's great, can't deny it, but it's not exactly the goal with this one. There are even games on UFO 50 that emulates pixel mis-alignment... The devs mentionned that they considered very carefully when to use something that was out of the expectable possibilities of these years, and likely kept it to a minimum.

[Anolise]

I cherried Porgy recently, and I think it's a very neat adventure game. The only real complaint I had was the level of backtracking involved with having to refuel at the base. This is something that doesn't really improve as the game progresses because while your fuel capacity increases, you are also diving deeper into the sea, so it takes longer and longer to get back. Missiles get much stronger with upgrades. Keep an eye out for breakable blocks that have secrets in them too. Later there is a radar you can use to hunt for the remaining secrets to get to 100%.

[Simbabbad]

Originally posted by Malkav0:

What you call "retro" now takes advantage of many things that weren't possible before, in animations, hitboxes, controls... And it's great, can't deny it, but it's not exactly the goal with this one.

Again: it is, though. A lot of game in UFO 50 would have been completely anachronistic in 1980. It's modern game design with retro nuisances artificially grafted on them, it's weird. It's totally unlike authentically retro feeling games but with smoother game design (what Locomalito does perfectly), or actual full retro design with old school difficulty (Roolandoo's games on ZX Spectrum or MSX like La Reliquia), or fantasy retro/modern retro games (Bro Force, Environmental Station Alpha, Axiom Verge, Iron Meat, Volgarr, etc.) or modern experimental retro (what PUNKCAKE Délicieux does), etc.

I mean, some games in UFO 50 even have neutral pronouns for non-binary characters. Why not, but it's not exactly the 1980s there, they weren't looking for authenticity - Vainger has neutral pronouns for some reason, but denies us a dedicated button for gravity switch which would have smoothed out the gameplay a lot because 1980 (?), two buttons is just clunky and the only real flaw of the game. I adore Mini & Max and I'm happy I have bought the collection because of it, but it's modern game design (and it's fine), even though here too the two button limit hurts the gameplay with tons of double tapping and button combinations.

@ Anolise Happy to read it gets better, but it's so slow and irritating, and it's not the only game to start like this.

[Malkav0]

Originally posted by Simbabbad:

Originally posted by Malkav0:

What you call "retro" now takes advantage of many things that weren't possible before, in animations, hitboxes, controls... And it's great, can't deny it, but it's not exactly the goal with this one.

Again: it is, though. A lot of game in UFO 50 would have been completely anachronistic in 1980. It's modern game design with retro nuisances artificially grafted on them, it's weird. It's totally unlike authentically retro feeling games but with smoother game design (what Locomalito does perfectly), or actual full retro design with old school difficulty (Roolandoo's games on ZX Spectrum or MSX like La Reliquia), or fantasy retro/modern retro games (Bro Force, Environmental Station Alpha, Axiom Verge, Iron Meat, Volgarr, etc.) or modern experimental retro (what PUNKCAKE Délicieux does), etc.

I mean, some games in UFO 50 even have neutral pronouns for non-binary characters. Why not, but it's not exactly the 1980s there, they weren't looking for authenticity - Vainger has neutral pronouns for some reason, but denies us a dedicated button for gravity switch which would have smoothed out the gameplay a lot because 1980 (?), two buttons is just clunky and the only real flaw of the game. I adore Mini & Max and I'm happy I have bought the collection because of it, but it's modern game design (and it's fine), even though here too the two button limit hurts the gameplay with tons of double tapping and button combinations.

@ Anolise Happy to read it gets better, but it's so slow and irritating, and it's not the only game to start like this.

I agree that the limitations on controls are over-enforced, I said the same above yeah. But I wouldn't say the global result is not an authentic process, a careful reflexion, and that I never feel any genuine throwback. Nonetheless, since it's, at core, a sensation, I would say it's interesting criticism for the devs if you still want to make those comparisons, though I maintain some of them wouldn't be relevent. Actual full retrogames would be perhaps the most fitting comparison, and by that I mean games developped on the actual consoles but long after they're dead ; these games are very few but they provide an interesting comparison point because they obviously can't avoid any technical limitation even if they wanted to.
It's also funny that you put Volgarr on the list, in my opinion, it managed to be super obnoxious DESPITE using modern tools xD