I wish this game was more forgiving of mistakes

[JZig]

I enjoyed my 5 hours with the game so I'm not going to leave a bad review, but it's pretty frustrating to play as someone who occasionally presses the wrong button. I finished my first run through the story voided and I have gathered there is a lot to discover, but I'm not willing to solve the same puzzles again to find out. During my first run I accidentally pushed several people in holes because I pressed a button one too many times, and I wasted my locusts at several points. I also think I may have accidentally level skipped over important things.

Many other modern sokoban games have some sort of "undo" feature for mistakes, which would definitely increase the accessibility of the game. In normal sokoban you only lose a few seconds for failure, but with the persistent state of this game you can lose an hour of progress with a single mistake which is very unusual for a puzzle game. Puzzle games are normally better for people who have trouble with precise controller inputs. I also think that a level select and quick restart would increase accessibility, as right now I have no easy way of restarting my run after using the first unlocked brand.

I wouldn't have discovered the brand system at all without reading the forums, as it seems like you only find out about the first unlock if you deliberately fail and give up which is weird. After my first run I played though again until I saw the first tree was withered, which was when I started reading posts here. That might be a good time to drop a few hints as otherwise people will probably get frustrated and quit without realizing what they're missing.

The game is cool, but I don't think I can recommend it to other people right now because it is quite unforgiving compared to other puzzle/meta discovery games.

[Mr. Be Nice to Me Plox]

I get it, as someone who's dpad started dying in the middle of the run (and would scream "I DIDN'T HIT DOWN TWICE ARGHGH" everytime i accidentally went down some stairs)

however, theres a pretty good reason for a lack of Undo Button, that, if you keep playing, might become more obvious. Mistakes are going to happen, you're not going to be perfect on your first attempt, it's fine to run out of lives and continue, and it's fine to run out of lives and restart, there are no wrong choices, everything you do will give you some knowledge you can use in the future.

Originally posted by JZig:

I wouldn't have discovered the brand system at all without reading the forums, as it seems like you only find out about the first unlock if you deliberately fail and give up which is weird. After my first run I played though again until I saw the first tree was withered, which was when I started reading posts here. That might be a good time to drop a few hints as otherwise people will probably get frustrated and quit without realizing what they're missing.

The game is cool, but I don't think I can recommend it to other people right now because it is quite unforgiving compared to other puzzle/meta discovery games.

this is wrong, the brand system is pretty much screamed at you (numerous times) if you play the game normally, stop spoiling yourself and just Play The Game. You've got 5 hours on an 60-80 hour puzzle game, you shouldn't be recommending anything to anyone lol

[aoanla]

Originally posted by Mr. Dies to Headshot:

this is wrong, the brand system is pretty much screamed at you (numerous times) if you play the game normally, stop spoiling yourself and just Play The Game. You've got 5 hours on an 60-80 hour puzzle game, you shouldn't be recommending anything to anyone lol

Right, but what the OP is saying is "I think most people will give up before they get anywhere near the '60-80 hr' mark because the 'surface level' game is so unforgiving of mistakes". Which is certainly something that you can say to people after... giving up because the game is unforgiving of mistakes, regardless of how much playtime you have!

[xaerock [RVR-42]]

Originally posted by Mr. Dies to Headshot:

this is wrong, the brand system is pretty much screamed at you (numerous times) if you play the game normally, stop spoiling yourself and just Play The Game. You've got 5 hours on an 60-80 hour puzzle game, you shouldn't be recommending anything to anyone lol

Assuming they mean the starting/special brand system I think it's fair to say that it's existence is not transparent.
Unless you intentionally use the give up option instead of using other ways to continue your 'loops' their existence is only shown for the first time after certain ending(s) that kick you back to the title screen. This was my experience and made me unlock the first 6 special brands all at once.

[Mr. Be Nice to Me Plox]

Originally posted by xaerock:

Assuming they mean the starting/special brand system I think it's fair to say that it's existence is not transparent.
Unless you intentionally use the give up option instead of using other ways to continue your 'loops' their existence is only shown for the first time after certain ending(s) that kick you back to the title screen. This was my experience and made me unlock the first 6 special brands all at once.

ah i misread and thought they were talking about the ingame brands which is my bad. What they're referring to certainly isn't transparent on a first run but I think they reveal themselves as early as each individual probably needs? The brand system is there as a sort of quality of life, its just there to help you get back up to speed from where you were on the last run, rather than making the first run easier, as you keep everything from previous 'loops' unless you get a real ending, where you would then find out about the brand system for the next run, hard for me to really understand what the OP's point was by bringing it up though

Originally posted by aoanla:

Right, but what the OP is saying is "I think most people will give up before they get anywhere near the '60-80 hr' mark because the 'surface level' game is so unforgiving of mistakes". Which is certainly something that you can say to people after... giving up because the game is unforgiving of mistakes, regardless of how much playtime you have!

I've been seeing the "This Game Is Unforgiving With Mistakes" argument around and I think it fails on a number of levels but the important gist is that not every game is made for every person. I think the lack of an undo button is tied directly into the message the game conveys. And it's hardly 'unforgiving' in the first half, and I would even probably say it's actually pretty forgiving for letting you continue after you run out of lives at all. I think the major hangup is that people don't like the idea of failing and starting over at all (see zeroranger discussion pages where people lost their minds over their "save file" being deleted), even if it's a core concept of the game. Would probably also argue that starting over also just outright benefits you early on, as you're more likely to put the pieces together and find the items that give you strict quality of life upgrades that make the game easier to run through

[aoanla]

Originally posted by Mr. Dies to Headshot:

I've been seeing the "This Game Is Unforgiving With Mistakes" argument around and I think it fails on a number of levels but the important gist is that not every game is made for every person. I think the lack of an undo button is tied directly into the message the game conveys. And it's hardly 'unforgiving' in the first half, and I would even probably say it's actually pretty forgiving for letting you continue after you run out of lives at all. I think the major hangup is that people don't like the idea of failing and starting over at all

As someone who lost most of their interest in playing Void Stranger after my 3 hours of playtime, I can tell you that the major hangup isn't really "failing and starting over" - it's that on the surface level of the 'puzzle game', it's just not as ergonomic as equivalent (surface level!) puzzle games, most of which do have things like unlimited undos (things like Stephen's Sausage Roll, Baba Is You etc).
So, those of us who were getting Void Stranger partly because we wanted to like the surface level puzzles find the interface (deliberately or not) frustratingly unforgiving of even the slightest mis-press. Like the OP, I've basically ruined most of my optional NPC interactions by pressing into them rather than interact, mostly by accident, and that's ignoring the puzzles themselves (which, like the OP, I am just used to being able to play with "in the interface*, rather than planning externally and then solving "perfectly" in game).

Now, if Void Stranger is being intentionally "ergodic" by not having an undo, then that's fine... but it does make it a much more "marmite" game.

Also... I did refuse the fruit the first time I failed and presumably that's the starting over you mean? In which case... I have no idea what I am supposed to have learned from this...

[Mr. Be Nice to Me Plox]

I mean, we can talk about it more in-depth if you'd like, what did you learn by accidentally, or unknowingly, shoving the optional NPC? They didn't like it, and stopped talking to you altogether. and you know now, for the future, that that's a mistake you'll want to avoid.

So much of this game is made with the knowledge and intention that you're going to mess up, and you just need to understand that, and continue on, with the knowledge of the mistakes you've made. No one is getting through this game in it's entirety without doing the exact same things you're complaining about. Every single person who's finished this game has accidentally shoved an NPC, or messed up a floor one too many times and ran out of lives, chosen between eating the fruit or not eating the fruit, that's the Playing part of Playing The Game. and we've all ran it back and done things differently, and gotten new results.

The thing about the game being "unforgiving" is that for a major bulk of the game, the floors are super merciful, this isn't Stephen's Sausage Roll for a long time. There's a multitude of ways to get through a floor with varying amounts of steps, but they all get you through regardless. Sure, eventually, it does hit that level, but at that point you've learned from so many past mistakes that it's all muscle memory ingrained.

Originally posted by aoanla:

Now, if Void Stranger is being intentionally "ergodic" by not having an undo, then that's fine... but it does make it a much more "marmite" game.

you should see how people felt about zeroranger then lol, i think void stranger has certainly filtered it's fair share from what I've read, but boy, the dudes who got filtered by zeroranger got filtered HARD

I don't think it's really anyone's fault really, but there is something odd about how people can find this game on the store, watch the trailers, look at the images, read the description of what the game describes itself as, and then still get upset when the games a little more obtuse than whatever game they're trying to compare it to. Like, it seemed pretty obvious to me that this game had more going on under the hood, that's the only part I wanted to interact with. Within the first 3 hours of playing the game I was decoding the cipher that's in the friggin trailers, I wasn't getting upset over a few missed inputs, lmao.

[JZig]

I was basically saying the same thing as aoania and xaerock. I've played enough similar games that it was obvious from the beginning that there were other things going on under the surface, but finding them is not worth the time when I'll probably just mess up something an hour in. I'm glad it is for some people, enjoy the game! I was mostly writing this as feedback to the devs.

I understand that undo probably would be difficult to do, so another option might be a manual save/load. If I could checkpoint my run + decisions every 10 levels or so (trees could be save points?) then I would lose less time having to restart things. There are a lot of similar games that do auto saves with discovering secrets in a run, but right now my "second run" of the game would be several hours and very similar to the first as I managed to miss most of the things on the first run. I was kind of assuming there would be a level select of completed levels so I wasn't paying super close attention on the first run.

[aoanla]

Originally posted by Mr. Dies to Headshot:

I mean, we can talk about it more in-depth if you'd like, what did you learn by accidentally, or unknowingly, shoving the optional NPC? They didn't like it, and stopped talking to you altogether. and you know now, for the future, that that's a mistake you'll want to avoid.

I mean, I accidentally nudged *both* the optional NPCs so far and I knew I shouldn't nudge them after the first time, so...

I don't think it's really anyone's fault really, but there is something odd about how people can find this game on the store, watch the trailers, look at the images, read the description of what the game describes itself as, and then still get upset when the games a little more obtuse than whatever game they're trying to compare it to. Like, it seemed pretty obvious to me that this game had more going on under the hood, that's the only part I wanted to interact with. Within the first 3 hours of playing the game I was decoding the cipher that's in the friggin trailers, I wasn't getting upset over a few missed inputs, lmao.

I think this is the thing you're not understanding about the difference of viewpoint here.
Of course we knew that there's stuff more going on under the hood!

The difference is that we don't have the tolerance for the game trying to be difficult in letting us get to the stuff under the hood. Our tolerance for the friction built into the surface game is much lower than yours.

(For example: sure, I've messed around with the status line at the tree stops, but the fact that most of the options just crash the game isn't very interesting. And I still have to play a bunch of sokobans with repetitive music and no undo to get to any other things that might happen.)

Compare to, say, Glittermitten Grove (which is of course, also Frog Fractions 2). Glittermitten Grove itself is actually a pretty good game - it doesn't have to be unpleasant to play just because it's hiding stuff beneath the surface.

[Kituss]

I get your point but calling it "unpleasant" is a bit of a stretch! It's arguably too punitive and while a straight up "undo" button wouldn't fit the game, people have suggested adding stuff like an option to undo moves tied to your HP number. I think it's an interesting idea and that something could definitely be done!

[Moonie]

The undo button is holding ESC.

[Lovin]

Let them fail and give up, they will turn into eggs...
Don't ask me how I know.