I'm sorry, but this game is just too stupid.

[Julius Skeezer]

So I just made it down to the 4th layer for the first time. Things were looking decent, until I got Orb Piercer poison (on the way in, no less), but despite that, I continued on, did Riko's entire little episode, and made it back up to the third layer with enough food and healing items that I thought, with a little luck, I could make it back up to the surface.

So I backtracked as well as I could, until I made it to the hot/cold area only to find out that the GEOGRAPHY ALTERING path I'd opened up on the way down - a steady and unending stream of gigantic boulders blowing through walls and the like - had miraculously closed back up.

The spawning issues are bad enough.
The fact that every weapon in the game is made out of dollar store peanut brittle is bad enough.
The fact that this kid who has a metabolism so out of control that she's starving from a full stomach after 5 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ minutes is bad enough.
The fact that half the food items in the game only fill her 1/5 of the way up despite their weight load is bad enough.
The fact that poison never clears her system, despite said metabolism is bad enough.
The fact that every rope you use is mysteriously stolen every time you return to town is bad enough.
The fact that pitons that you HAMMER INTO THE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ROCK get stolen in the same manner is bad enough....

But when you do something that actually alters the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ landscape and clear a path, and that just decides to retcon itself mid-dive just to give the player the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ middle finger, I have to stop giving the devs the benefit of the doubt and start believing they hated this project and wanted it to fail so badly that they coded it with malicious intent.

I wish I had bought this on Steam, so I could at least look forward to a cleaned up game thanks to the mod community, but alas, as stupid as this game is, I am too.

[Azerate]

The game has its issues for sure and is quite punishing. I agree that the "geography altering" parts should remain cleared. Little point to them as they are now. However, when you get poisoned and you don't have an antidoe on you just reload the latest save though, continuing to play poisoned was a bad call on your side.

[Silaf]

The abyss want you dead. You should enter with the mentality that the world itself is alive and an enemy.
The protagonist should at least be able to retrive ropes and the hunger mechanic was probably exagerated when in development they removed cold, hot... and other survival elements.

Remember that the strongest weapon the abyss has is tricking you in overstepping and going too deep.

[esukI̳̲̻̫͔͑ͅ]

So it wasn't just me and my friend who think this mechanic is dumb haha. Yes I think if we did something to the environment it should stay there until you go back to Orth. Doesn't make sense why there's a shortcut from Cold Heat area to Glass Layer when you can't use said shortcut from Glass Layer entry. Quite an unnecessary difficulty.

[AFRO THUNDER]

Outside of the poison imo, I feel those are all valid issues. The double-up gathering skills you unlock later on feel like they should have come far earlier in the skill tree with how your weapons disintegrate like toilet paper.

Dev announced there is a balance patch coming soon. Hopefully the changes will make the game less of a sprint and more of a journey.

[Silaf]

Originally posted by AFRO THUNDER:

Outside of the poison imo, I feel those are all valid issues. The double-up gathering skills you unlock later on feel like they should have come far earlier in the skill tree with how your weapons disintegrate like toilet paper.

Dev announced there is a balance patch coming soon. Hopefully the changes will make the game less of a sprint and more of a journey.

Yes i hate the speedrun aspect of this game.

[tim.]

You know what, you're pretty much right on most of your points, but still despite that it's honestly incredibly fun for me. There are pretty much 0 games that actually do what this game does. The prep, the exploration, the risk:reward balancing, and crafting that actually feels like it matters, no game that i've played ticks the boxes like this one.

It's crusty, it's unpolished, looks like it came from 2009, and will probably never be the best version of itself it can be, but it fits a very under developed niche that i would love to see more of.

I guess i can only say that i hope you'll be able to see past the really unpolished edges and find the same fun i have. Ironically, as much praise as i have for it, it's very difficult to legitimately recommend (ESPECIALLY FOR 60 DOLLARS???). Maybe another dev studio will think "I can do that way better" and actually deliver.

[Julius Skeezer]

Originally posted by Azerate:

The game has its issues for sure and is quite punishing. I agree that the "geography altering" parts should remain cleared. Little point to them as they are now. However, when you get poisoned and you don't have an antidoe on you just reload the latest save though, continuing to play poisoned was a bad call on your side.

I wasn't aware that poison never cleared at that point. By the time I realized, I had already switched zones, and reloading a save wasn't an option. Besides, if that shortcut hadn't closed itself, I actually would have made it. I still had something like 18 cooked bird on me when I got there and realized I was screwed. I remembered the route I took on the way down, and once I got to the second layer, it would have been very fast to the top. Poison or no, that wasn't he main issue, it was just a dollop of icing on a ♥♥♥♥ cake.

[Hentaika]

All area alterations(pushing rocks, breaking ice, etc) only remain until you change area.

Surprised you didn't discover that so long into the game.
Instead of cooked food you could always carry salt for much easier way to maintain food. 5g, one hit of weapon and a random 'spawn' that you are annoyed with and you have delicious food in your stomach.

With 18 cooked food you can still easily make it out via the usual path even with poison. Herbs to heal HP, meat to fill fullness. Most difficulty in normal path comes not from the length of that way but from requiring you to reload a couple times if bird decides to kill you.

[Azrapse]

Why you want to climb up all the way up the third layer. Can't you fast-travel back to like Great Fault, or all the way back to Orth?

[TheGing3r09]

Originally posted by Azrapse:

Why you want to climb up all the way up the third layer. Can't you fast-travel back to like Great Fault, or all the way back to Orth?

Alas, no. Until you unlock your black whistle, Layers 3 and 4 are considered a single layer, as such, fast travel is impossible.

[Julius Skeezer]

Originally posted by Hentaika:

All area alterations(pushing rocks, breaking ice, etc) only remain until you change area.

Surprised you didn't discover that so long into the game.
Instead of cooked food you could always carry salt for much easier way to maintain food. 5g, one hit of weapon and a random 'spawn' that you are annoyed with and you have delicious food in your stomach.

With 18 cooked food you can still easily make it out via the usual path even with poison. Herbs to heal HP, meat to fill fullness. Most difficulty in normal path comes not from the length of that way but from requiring you to reload a couple times if bird decides to kill you.

The way I play, I guess I don't really re-tread a whole lot. This was actually my first trip past layer 2, and while I remembered the path I took to get where I was, I don't know what you consider the "usual path." I know the way I got there, but I imagine it's far from optimal, and layer 3 is just a nightmare to navigate anyway, without the stupidity of one-way magically closing shortcuts.

I do carry salt, usually 30 or so a trip. All that cooked bird I had was from letting Riko kill the infinite bird spawns in the Goblets of Giants when most of my weapons were already near break and I was almost out of food from finding my way in.

That said, most of the areas in the game have bugs as their infinite spawn nuisance fun police, so no, that's not really helpful half the time. The ones that have birds are usually areas that are much easier to navigate anyway, and don't really result in a lot of time wandering lost.

I went back and made the trip today, and got back, and the worst part, to me, is the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Madokajacks that seem to have a hitbox 3x their body width. At least half of the 3 hours navigating back from layer 4 this time was just figuring out the puzzle of how many lunges I can make in what direction to just barely get missed by them while climbing those ridiculous walls. One too far, and they "hit" you from 20 feet away as they fly past, and one lunge too few they come from a different angle for the same result. All the while having to fend off 300 moths and try to figure out where I'm climbing with the useless map and no way to look straight up.

You didn't say it in so many words, but I've seen many variations of the defense of "The Abyss is hostile/wants to kill you!" but what I'd really like is for people to differentiate a hostile game environment due to lore reasons and a hostile game itself for programming reasons. There are dozens of great games with dire, foreboding environs that feel dangerous because of the former. This game is hostile to the player, not the characters, for reasons of the latter.

[Hentaika]

The usual means you literally backtrack a bit and take the other exit and take a bit harder way out than the shortcut one.
Which in fact might be shorter no matter the way you decide to go via that alternative.
Jacks are the only difficulty on that route and honestly once you figure out how Jacks work - you will understand how to get at least somewhere... and loads of paths lead back up.
That being said Jacks are glitchy and indeed the most annoying obstacle in the game.

Not really trying to protect the game here - it has issues, but not the ones people complain about... and certainly not really ones out of the big list you wrote:
Spawning issue - no real issues, this is both very lore accurate AND helpful in not getting stuck. In fact it's 'too friendly', I am surprised we didn't see something like an Orb Piercer appear occasionally with a heavy aggro on you to pressure you further.
Metabolism/food consumption - explained via original lore in fact... Ozen has even higher one than you but delvers generally need to consume much more food and the time flow issues are there.
Food filling not much? Well, I mean looking at the weight I am surprised they fill how much they already do going by your logic. Then again having same size meat/same amount of resources from both small and big creatures IS pretty stupid and mostly gameplay balance I guess.
Poison not clearing passively - played too many stupid RPGs, I guess? Any remotely serious poison will KILL you before your body manages to 'clear' anything.
Orb Piercer if anything has one of the most dangerous types too...
Rope/piton disappearing - kinda semi agree semi disagree. Abyss has it's own rules, doesn't really make much sense to us and neither does it make much sense in manga. Some big objects say but some locations get entirely changed... so yeah, it's really hard to say what even the author thinks about it.

Surprised I never see anyone complaining about actual big issues - disastrous fishing grind, disastrous kill requirements in guild quests making them useless even with optimal farm... early layer monster big kill amounts gated to high ranks like black whistle.
Poor exp scaling on quests.

[D]

Don't be sorry just because you'r honest.

[shoopy]

If madokajacks are killing you, you are probably trying to go the wrong way. You can go both ways with minimal exposure to them. If you go the right way, the couple times you do encounter them, you can bait them to attack first and miss you then start climbing and you'll already be finished before they can reset.

Going from 4 to 2 is actually really easy, getting murdered is the games way of telling you that you're trying to brute force the hard way. 99% of it is easy climbing inside the caves. The most important thing is to have one rope with you, and the spot you need it often has a rope plant somewhere anyway. You can make the trip with basically nothing.

[MartinX]

I saw your thread a few days ago but I hadn't yet reached that point in the 3rd layer you were talking about, so I couldn't fully relate...until today. I was properly exploring the layer for the first time and the moment I noticed that the passage in the hot/cold area had magically sealed back up on my way back, I immediately thought back to this thread.

It took me well over an hour to barely make it back to the 2nd layer and fast travel to Orth, but I honestly thought I was screwed on several occasions as I had run out of salt despite having brought like 20 of it. Luckily, I managed to stumble upon some backpacks which just happened to have some food in them.

Also, finding those hidden cave passages in that dark area leading to the hexagonal pillars was a nightmare as everything looked the same there and it's practically impossible to climb the fault wall directly thanks to the Madokajacks (which is admittedly accurate lore-wise). What ISN'T lore-accurate is a giant, 50 meter long tunnel filling itself back up with rocks after a few minutes.

Oh, and I was playing WITH the no-spawning mod. Can't imagine how anyone could tolerate the 3rd layer without it. Someone needs to make another mod which keeps all the geological changes you make (hammering pitons into rocks, breaking ice blocks with your whistle, digging up rocks to create wall openings with your pickaxe, pushing slabs of stone to create bridges and triggering that stream of MASSIVE 100-TON BOULDERS ACTING AS DRILLING MACHINES in the hot/cold area).