(Mild Spoilers) - I am stuck between liking this game and being frustrated by it's pacing

[IMTheWalrus610]

I was reading some of the back and forth here about this game, and just want to give my two cents. I have about 17 hours in, because that's the amount of time I have to put in the game around my life (which I think is still a pretty nice chunk of time), and when you play a little bit at a time, the game feels incredibly slow at times due to the core nature of the game forcing you to do new runs, RNG, repeated safe combos/billiard rooms/parlors, etc.

I look at this game as an example of you have to be willing to take exactly what the game gives you, for better or worse. As I was solving the puzzle with the drawings (that's all I will say), I sort of understood what the puzzle was presenting and how I needed to solve it, but then I also realized that to go through the exercise of finding the solution, it would take hours, require tons of note taking, several runs, etc. And I thought to myself "I have to do all of this just to get to the answer I already sort of understand?" This is kind of the crux of why I am so torn on this game. I got the puzzle, thought it was a neat trick, but then was annoyed I had to go through the process it wants me to take because it feels tedious. At times it does have some nice moments that scratch the puzzle itch, but it feels like it wants me to spend so much time and jump through so many hoops to get there. It's a little frustrating to play for an hour or two, and then feel like you crawled forward because a big part of that time was the game slowing you down.

Even if you accept that the RNG/roguelike stuff is part of the core design of the game (which is totally fair), it doesn't excuse many of the criticisms I have about respecting the player's time. It could speed up your walking. It could have a setting that makes it so the blueprint by default pops up when you are drafting instead of pressing Tab EVERY TIME. It could have a faster terminal. It could give you the ability to "fast travel" from room to room while deducting steps if you want to backtrack from one part of the estate to the other. Why even place the room outside the garage SO FAR to walk to once you unlock it? It couldn't be closer? There's probably a bunch more examples I could think of. There should be less friction between the player and doing the thing they want to do. Maybe in some of these examples there are "gameplay reasons" for them to exist that I have yet to discover, but I would argue that if your gameplay requires the player to go through things that are unpleasant or just not fun, that's a design flaw. They stuffed a ton of neat puzzles in here that are muddied by some slow mechanics. I'm at the point with the dart/box puzzles where I groan when I approach them. They aren't fun to do anymore. I want to spend my time working on things I haven't solved yet, not slowing down because I have to redo a basic puzzle, or re-inputting a safe combination.

If I have a run with a garage/billiard/parlor/greenhouse/security room combo, I'm probably spending several minutes of that run just repeating the tasks those rooms require of me, and not actually making progress on the broader goals of the game. If I have an hour to play after work before I make dinner, that's a ton of my gameplay time spent on things I'm not really enjoying at this point. It's not fun finding the breaker room early knowing how the dark room works, then knowing that no matter what, you will have to backtrack to the breaker room to flip the dark room breaker, especially because there's a good chance these rooms are not close in your layout. Just make it so that when you flip the breaker on, the dark room's lights stay on and you don't have to walk back to the breaker room after drafting the dark room...yes, I guess it would give you more steps, but it would be more fun. Isn't this about having fun?

It's also a little arbitrary what is permanent progression and what is not. When I solved the weathervane puzzle in the secret garden, it's solved permanently. Why isn't a safe solved permanently? Why should I have to find the broken lever and fix it again and again? This game does have some permanence in between runs, so would it kill the design of the game to keep some more of these things in place if only to speed up runs? I don't think so. Enter The Gungeon, a roguelike, makes it so that you don't have to recollect the bullet parts once you find them, so maybe this game should just unlock the antechamber doors permanently once you do it the first time. The roguelike elements would be better if they were more directly tied to the specific run (where random resources pop up, what rooms you draw), as opposed to forcing you to redo key meta-progression tasks or light puzzles that after a few hours in are not challenging and feel repetitive.

Would this make the game easier? I mean I guess, but I feel like it speeds the player up and doesn't get in the way of it's true difficulty, which is solving the puzzles, and this gets back to why I'm not as big of a fan of this as other puzzle games or roguelikes. I feel like I should be further along 17 hours in, and the reason I'm not is because the game wants to be slow. I'm down for a challenge. I'm not down for a slog. I think I'm going to try and stick it out at least a bit longer and be patient, but I feel like this game is really testing me.

Anyway, that's my opinion. I certainly think it's a decent game, but I also think it could be better. Also, I'm glad other people are probably less caught up in these issues than I am. I wish I had the time and patience to not let these things annoy me, but maybe this is just how it is as I get older and busier, and why I prefer Obra Dinn/Golden Idol/etc. to this.

[bross92]

I don't see any responses to this, but dude I just want to say 100% agree. I actually found this thread because I'm about 14 hours in and am finding less and less fun mysteries and more and more frustrations, was googling to see if others ran into this. I keep on almost accomplishing goals, then the RNG decides my last 25 minutes were useless. I love Slay The Spire and Hades and all types of roguelikes, but those games had an element of learning to work with strategies and synergies each run. I'm just not getting the chance to make synergies so I'm kinda just hitting my head against the wall. And so many of these later mysteries depend on getting certain combos

[jazgalaxy]

Originally posted by IMTheWalrus610:

I was reading some of the back and forth here about this game, and just want to give my two cents. I have about 17 hours in, because that's the amount of time I have to put in the game around my life (which I think is still a pretty nice chunk of time), and when you play a little bit at a time, the game feels incredibly slow at times due to the core nature of the game forcing you to do new runs, RNG, repeated safe combos/billiard rooms/parlors, etc.

I adore this game, but I quit today. I threw in the towel due to butting up again the randomness to many times and ultimately, like you, can't justify this kind of gameplay style in my current life.

I went and read a full walk through of the game and just kept saying over and over again, "HAHA! Oh I am soo glad I quit. I am SOOOOO glad I quit."

Solving puzzles is on of the most fun things in existence. EXECUTING the solution to those puzzles is often completely tedious and boring.

I am incredibly glad this game exists, and I hope it encourages someone to make a game just like it, but without the drafting roguelike element. THAT is a game I would love to finish.