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.

[Xhoas]

Escrito originalmente por Simbabbad:

Escrito originalmente por 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.

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,

I was thinking wtf were you talking about, but then I realized that I'm not playing in English with this one. LOL. But about Porgy, yeah the map is difficult to navigate at times because every path reset so it's easy to get lost.

[Simbabbad]

Escrito originalmente por Malkav0:

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.

Actually there are quite a lot of retro modern games that work on old hardware: tons of ROM hacks that are completely new games in a popular series, many 8-bit computer games (C64, ZX Spectrum, MSX), and some console games (Xeno Crisis on Genesis for example, a good number of NES games)... some adapt to more modern gameplay, some are completely old school, and many are absolutely fantastic games from talented developers that don't have the issues of many games from UFO 50.

UFO 50 is a good collection, but many games have confusing, artificial flaws, and I'm not seeing a positive gap in quality compared to the good retro games I'm used to, and I play 90% retro games at least.

I expected a collection of games like Ninpek or Seaside Drive or Campanella 1/3, meaning short simple arcade games (but good), and I was surprised to also discover excellent big games like Mini & Max (or Vainger to some extent) that are hurt by button limitations, but also many weird games that don't seem to know what they want to be (Porgy), and flat out mediocre games (Big Bell Race, Planet Zoldath).

Escrito originalmente por Malkav0:

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

Volgarr claims to be an arcade throwback, but in reality it's a die & retro precision platformer like Super Meat Boy or 1001 Spikes. It's really good if you're into that. The sequel is more classic design.

BTW, by default it can be played with two buttons (plus the menu button), but you can disable down+B and up+X combinations to play with four buttons, and it's much better that way, like in Shovel Knight. I wish UFO 50 did this for some games (Mini & Max, Vainger).

Escrito originalmente por Xhoas:

I was thinking wtf were you talking about, but then I realized that I'm not playing in English with this one. LOL. But about Porgy, yeah the map is difficult to navigate at times because every path reset so it's easy to get lost.

English isn't my first langage, but in general translations aren't ideal, so I play in English by default. I got confused when the game used the plural to talk about an individual, and then I remembered this pronoun thing. It's completely misplaced and weird, but whatever: if developers can be anachronistic for this, they can be anachronistic for a gravity switch dedicated button, please.

[Tatra]

Escrito originalmente por Simbabbad:

English isn't my first langage, but in general translations aren't ideal, so I play in English by default. I got confused when the game used the plural to talk about an individual, and then I remembered this pronoun thing. It's completely misplaced and weird, but whatever: if developers can be anachronistic for this, they can be anachronistic for a gravity switch dedicated button, please.

As someone for whom English is my first language, it isn't weird at all. The "singular they" has been around for ~700 years (actually, if I remember correctly, predating the "singular you").

People have weirdly started acting like it's a new, scary thing but, nope; it predates the first school in England by a couple hundred years, and has been commonplace the whole time. I can completely understand it seeming a bit odd if coming from a language that either doesn't have none-gendered pronouns; a lot of English people have the same the other way, when trying to learn a language where gender is an inherent part of all nouns, like German.

You are correct that few, if any, console games from that era used it, due to a lack of awareness of and representation for non-binary human characters at the time, so yeah, anachronistic, but definitely a worthwhile change. That's rather different from breaking the two-button rule they've followed for the whole set of games, though.

[Simbabbad]

Dude, I've been reading English for decades, and it's only those last five years that I've read or heard of this, and in very specific context. No 1980 game used it, obviously. Let's not get pedantic.

I see they break the "1980" context for this but not for gameplay. It makes no sense whatsoever.

Intellivision had 16 buttons in 1979, BTW, likewise Colecovision, there were Atari 2600 optional controllers with extra buttons, 8-bit computers had the keyboard, even NES had the start and select buttons which were used in some games during gameplay (select for Metroid, start for Punch-Out). If you design games that need more than two buttons, make up a fictional console with more than two buttons.

Let's make up an optional LX controller with SNES layout, and give me good gameplay and not clunky combinations. No NES game felt this awkward. Shovel Knight or Volgarr give the 4 button option. Just do it.

[Tatra]

Escrito originalmente por Simbabbad:

Dude, I've been reading English for decades, and it's only those last five years that I've read or heard of this, and in very specific context.

O...K? I've been reading, and living, English for decades, and I assure you it's entirely common. Like, your experience is yours, not denying what you've read, but singular they has been around in English literature since at least Shakespeare; you can go read "A Comedy Of Errors" or... umm... "The word that Steam will filter Of Lucrece", right now, and it'll be there. Same with Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility", and "Pride & Prejudice"; it's been there the whole time. And, I promise you, it's been in common spoken parlance for as long as I've been alive.

This isn't pedantism (something which, admittedly, I'm not shy of) it's just... a basic fact. I don't know how you haven't encountered it before. I don't know what else to tell you.

If you design games that need more than two buttons, make up a fictional console with more than two buttons.

I get it, but... they didn't do that. The console limitations came first, not the individual game designs; as such, Porgy was designed for a 2-button controller, and so that design doesn't include a map feature (because it would require a third button, which they do not have). I understand you'd like a map, I'm not even necessarily disagreeing on whether it would've been nice to have (I'm a pro-in-game-map kinda guy), but breaking that constraint for just this game isn't about anachronism, it's just about consistency with their self-imposed design limitations. If you want a map, you'd need to suggest a way to do that that's within that limitation.

..OK, how about this: A good few single-player games from this era had secrets that could be accessed by a second player hitting buttons on their controller. What if they did that with this, as a nod to it? Player 2 holds down both fire buttons, and you get a map display, at the cost of some fuel? Or, what if there were in-game objects you can interact with in some way that gives you a sonar view of the area around you, like in Ecco the Dolphin?

[Malkav0]

Escrito originalmente por Simbabbad:

Actually there are quite a lot of retro modern games that work on old hardware: tons of ROM hacks that are completely new games in a popular series, many 8-bit computer games (C64, ZX Spectrum, MSX), and some console games (Xeno Crisis on Genesis for example, a good number of NES games)... some adapt to more modern gameplay, some are completely old school, and many are absolutely fantastic games from talented developers that don't have the issues of many games from UFO 50.
[...]
I expected a collection of games like Ninpek or Seaside Drive or Campanella 1/3, meaning short simple arcade games (but good), and I was surprised to also discover excellent big games like Mini & Max (or Vainger to some extent) that are hurt by button limitations, but also many weird games that don't seem to know what they want to be (Porgy), and flat out mediocre games (Big Bell Race, Planet Zoldath).
[...]
Volgarr claims to be an arcade throwback, but in reality it's a die & retro precision platformer like Super Meat Boy or 1001 Spikes. It's really good if you're into that. The sequel is more classic design.

I'd argue that quite a few of ROM hacks would have a hard time to work as a cartridge, though not all of them, and they generally are using, as a source, games that were outstanding exceptions of their generation, which does help a lot. Computer games are way more flexible, but once again cannot apply to console environment. Regarding the NES era, in the end, very few neo-retro games have been properly ported on a cartridge (also because it's expensive).
That being said, I'm not pretending UFO 50 is perfect or doesn't have any flaw, I'd probably find several design areas I would think differently from the devs, but I didn't find major obstacles to my enjoyment in the end, or it's more accurate to say that I tend to find ways to overcome them in most cases and that I maybe consider this to be part of the design - perhaps I'm wrong about this. Porgy didn't end up being a big issue to me, once I had decided a strategy to tackle it and it had turned out it worked.

Nonetheless I agree with your take on buttons, I think it ended up hurting the design to have such a low limitation, that even NES didn't have (4 buttons in the end). Some games are definitely "filler", while not being exactly bad, they reflect that some projects were very small sometimes - like, a bigger Planet Zoldath would be too ambitious for its year and it seems "experimental", and Big Bell Race was (in lore) designed to be given with the console (or Camouflage, that was just a short adaptation of a story for kids).

Lastly I've been brutal with Volgarr but I'm half kidding, it's good, but I regret a very small number of decisions in designn, mainly in the latter levels, because it's meant to be a game where your moves are carefully thought out then executed, and random moving enemies with infinite respawn totally goes against that design. That's probably my only grief with the game.

[Simbabbad]

Escrito originalmente por Tatra:

I get it, but... they didn't do that. The console limitations came first, not the individual game designs

Again: many games in this collection use clunky button combinations or designs to overcome a limitation they entirely made up. So either they should have changed game design, or they should have changed console limitations, it's as simple as that.

Bottom line: I play tons of recent retro games, and I never met games that struggle that much with their limitations. It makes no sense.

As for the binary thing: NOBODY used a neutral pronoun to designate the hero of a video game or any other story before 5 years ago. Even now, it's still marginal. Stop being silly.

And why not, if it's the intention of the author. Except it comes out of nowhere, and kind of shatters the "BUT IT WAS THE 1980s" excuse in other areas. Many games in the collection don't fit 1980 game design anyway, and nobody cares.

[Tatra]

Escrito originalmente por Simbabbad:

Escrito originalmente por Tatra:

I get it, but... they didn't do that. The console limitations came first, not the individual game designs

Again: many games in this collection use clunky button combinations or designs to overcome a limitation they entirely made up. So either they should have changed game design, or they should have changed console limitations, it's as simple as that.

I understand, but that's not what they did; UFO 50 was always designed to be for a fictional console with 2 buttons. Unless you have a time machine handy and reckon you can get hired as a designer with them in 2018, what they should have done isn't the point; this is what they did. But we're talking past each other at this point (it's what I call a "not argument", which is when two people just keep saying their own not-actually-opposed points over and over), so that's the last I'll say on the matter.

As for the binary thing: NOBODY used a neutral pronoun to designate the hero of a video game or any other story before 5 years ago. Even now, it's still marginal. Stop being silly.

Frisk from Undertale, 9 years ago?
Testament from Guilty Gear, 26 years ago?
The Knight from Hollow Knight, 7 years ago?
Faris from Final Fantasy V, 32 years ago? (Arguably gender-queer rather than strictly non-binary, admittedly).
Nights from Nights into Dreams, 28 years ago?
Never mind every none-human character; classic games are full of playable heroic robots, aliens, and sentient vehicles of every kind that don't fit into the gender binary. I'm not up for trawling through classic manuals looking for examples, but it's very silly to claim that every single videogame hero (let alone heroes from all stories) from before 2019 was a "he" or "she", no exceptions; that's pure revisionist history. And, of course, if we extend this beyond just the explicitly heroic main characters, well, the sky's the limit.

It's also well worth considering that, especially in the 80s, games often just didn't really have much of a characterisation to speak of. Even in the manuals, which was often the only writing the game had past "Player One Start", "Game Over" and "You Win", it was very common to not use any pronouns to refer to the characters... Because they often wrote everything directed at the player. "You have 3 lives, you can press up to enter doors, you have to kill the evil emperor"... ironically, usually referring solely to the player in none-gendered terms. That it was usually "you" and not "they" was a matter of first- vs third-person writing.

This is going to be my last reply on the matter. I appreciate that this is apparently not something you've ever encountered or (at least ever noticed), but this has always been here, it's just apparently fallen into your blind spot. Whether you want to acknowledge that is up to you.

Right, I'm off to Play Ultima III, from 1983. I think I'll play an Other-gendered Bobbit Druid; I wonder if that's the first game to let you explicitly choose a non-binary gender in a game? Probably not. Take care!

[masterplum]

I couldn't find the radar and got hard stuck. Had to look at a guide to figure out where I missed it.

Once I got that it was easy enough to finish. Liked it before and after that point

[Dare Wreck]

I mostly agree with the OP, though I can't say I found the torpedoes terribly hard to use. What I really wish were different about Porgy is the limitation of only having two upgrades at a time. I can't stand having to choose between torpedoes, the drill, depth charges, missiles, etc. I really wish I could have 3 or 4 at a time.

Overall, though, the game seems fairly tedious to me as the OP is suggesting. Having to repeat sections of the map gets incredibly tedious because you didn't plan out your fuel well, or because you made a wrong turn and suddenly realized that you went a way that you already cleared. I've gotten to 43% of the game cleared, have no idea where the flashlight ability is, and have decided to move on, because I got all the fun out of Porgy that I'm going to get without pulling my hair out or looking up a walkthrough.

[Anolise]

Escrito originalmente por Dare Wreck:

I mostly agree with the OP, though I can't say I found the torpedoes terribly hard to use. What I really wish were different about Porgy is the limitation of only having two upgrades at a time. I can't stand having to choose between torpedoes, the drill, depth charges, missiles, etc. I really wish I could have 3 or 4 at a time.

If you look carefully, there is an empty space next to the 2 equipped items that reveals it is indeed possible to equip up to 4 items.

[Dare Wreck]

Escrito originalmente por Anolise:

Escrito originalmente por Dare Wreck:

I mostly agree with the OP, though I can't say I found the torpedoes terribly hard to use. What I really wish were different about Porgy is the limitation of only having two upgrades at a time. I can't stand having to choose between torpedoes, the drill, depth charges, missiles, etc. I really wish I could have 3 or 4 at a time.

If you look carefully, there is an empty space next to the 2 equipped items that reveals it is indeed possible to equip up to 4 items.

That's great to hear, but it doesn't help me since I have no idea where you would find upgrades that open up those extra equipment slots. And honestly, I've lost the desire to go back and play Porgy further. I feel like one of those extra slots should have been available much sooner to make the game more fun. (You'll probably tell me next that it *is* available early on, that I missed some little hidden spot in an alcove near the surface. :) If that's true, it would have been nice if the in-game character said something back at the base that we need to look for that next).

[Anolise]

It's impossible to miss. You get item slot expansions by killing bosses

[der.dida83]

Well, the one thing I truly disliked about this game, is that even when you are super powerful (which you become eventually), killing enemies gives you way to few fuel-drops. Other then eliminating the danger, there is no reason to shoot anything at all.

Also only being able to carry 4 items at max isn't enough when trying to 100% items, since you need the light to travel through 3rd area, you need the radar to find all the hidden stuff, then there are only 2 slots for items. Do you get more fuel? The armor? Well, you pretty much need drill and exploding shots as minimum to reach most places...

Additionally the difficulty doesn't really scale, the endboss is much easier than some of the early game bosses (like the shark).

Still a good game imo, but especially the few fuel drops got really annoying... and those teleporting fish, I hate them!

[Dare Wreck]

Escrito originalmente por Anolise:

It's impossible to miss. You get item slot expansions by killing bosses

Thanks, I appreciate the tip. However, I killed the octopus and still can only hold two items at a time. I can't even come close to beating any of the other bosses that I've come across.