Super Slow Burn

[Archgoose]

I'll start by saying I'm still in my first week in-game, and from some of the discussions I've seen on this discussion board I see folks with, like, almost 200 days in. My question is how slow burn/grindy is this game? How many days before interesting things start happening?

I bought it as I'm a fan of atmospheric puzzle games (Myst, the Witness, etc.) and certain roguelites/roguelikes (Against the Storm, Slay the Spire, Monster Train, etc.) but I'm finding this one so far to be pretty mundane in that it's not really all that exciting yet. There never seems to be enough keys, the RNG gets in the way of rather than aids the game, not enough to interact with (maybe that comes later. I noticed an unusual number of hats lying about and the chess pieces in the rooms), I seem to see the same rooms day after day, mechanics are not well explained, I was kind of hoping there would be some skill tree or upgrade mechanic between days (maybe something that increases the odds of keys, makes items persistent without needing the Coat Check, using some form of persistent currency to upgrade rooms, etc.), and if it's going to take, like, 100+ days when the average day lasts 30-60 minutes that's quite a bit of investment and if the payout is not there then I'm not sure I want to dedicate too much time on this game.

I'll continue at it and see if it improves but so far I'm not convinced it was worth the ticket price.

[ChickenStrip]

I think the game still needs a lot of work so I don't recommend it, and had to use an external mod to double the game speed to really start enjoying it.

IMO, start taking notes and taking a ton of screenshots. There's lots of tricks and puzzles and meta advancement that can be done at any point.

Reaching the initial objective is like only 10% of the game, with there being a meaty "main objective" post-game, and then a tier beyond that which I think is just some absolutely pure grindy ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that I don't wish upon anyone.

[sarah]

I managed to spend 5.5 hours on one day, game time! My average is about 2.5 hours, so must be doing something a bit different to you.

[Archgoose]

Originally posted by sarah:

I managed to spend 5.5 hours on one day, game time! My average is about 2.5 hours, so must be doing something a bit different to you.

Yeah, my question is what are you doing that takes 2.5 to 5.5 hours on a single day?! I based my average on what the Library told me. My longest day so far was 55 minutes and my average is 25 minutes.

[The Snopingasusual]

spoiler but there are a couple puzzles in the late game that requires you to wait for dozens of minutes irl

[sarah]

On the 5.5 hour day I was noting down absolutely everything in each room - so now I can tell with a glance if anything is different. I've only done 20 days, so I'm still making lots of notes and trying different things out. Trying to complete each room before going on to the next to save my steps.

[Draco18s]

Generally speaking you should be able to reach room 46 and roll credits before day 30 (I will note that I needed about 30 footsteps between "entering the antechamber" and "reaching room 46" so plan for some kind of buffer). Only record I have of when I saw it was that it was before Day 21 (I have a screenshot from about 23 hours real time later with a known Day # and at least 2 game-days afterwards). Day 18 sounds right, though.

But reaching room 46 is more like "when the game opens up" rather than being a conclusion. As an example, there's an item in room 46 that can mitigate red rooms, as well as a puzzle, and a note containing a clue to another puzzle.

Heck, there are items I haven't even found yet. One of them would be SUPER NICE too.

[ffrotty]

Originally posted by Archgoose:

There never seems to be enough keys, the RNG gets in the way of rather than aids the game, not enough to interact with (maybe that comes later.

It gets a lot worse, and how bad it gets depends on your RNG regarding what stuff you do in what order to mitigate some of it.

It's based on a puzzle book called The Maze (rips it off basically). In the book you decide which door to go through and flip to the page with that number scene on it. And it's actually difficult because the routes are obscured, etc. You can't really reverse engineer it by charting the connections. Imagine how difficult that can be.

Now imagine you know you want to go from start to room 5 to room 17. Except you have to roll a 50 sided die and only if you roll a 1-10 does is go to room 5. You succeed. But then you have to roll 14-22, and do, to go to room 17. Nobody holding that book would say "wow this is so much better than, you know, just picking a door and going where I want to."


And there are things that will increase the range at the expense of other ranges. Or ways to lower the sides of the die.

Then you get into 17, except when you were in room 5 and 17, you didn't RNG the right resources along the way, so you can't unlock anything or progress, so o boy, start over.

That's an extreme "short run" fail. Instead it is a protracted long-ish run fail.

To put it into context, you can complete the first major task in 1 day, there's an trophy for it. Once you know WHAT to do all that's left is RNGing into it.

Every single person I know who gave up on the game did so because they knew what they had to do, but they had to grind RNG to do it.

Originally posted by Draco18s:

But reaching room 46 is more like "when the game opens up" rather than being a conclusion. As an example, there's an item in room 46 that can mitigate red rooms, as well as a puzzle, and a note containing a clue to another puzzle.

FFS. you can add spoiler tags [ spoiler ] like this [ /spoiler ] without the spaces