Hidden lake / Seven Gables Road too harsh [possible spoilers]

[tuomope]

Dying in Seven Gables Road took the motivation to play this game. Instant death? I just tried to get out of the house.

Those kind of happenings just make me want to check out the Wiki for solution to the quest beforehand. And it spoils the story of the game.

Otherwise the game is good.

[Kaaven]

It's only kills you if you stay there for too long... You have been punished for a horror-movie-protagonist mentality - a sensible thing to do once you realize that the house you are in is haunted is to run away, not go exploring :D

[Liberty Sandwich]

I really like the insta deaths. 3: to each is ther own.

[BOYCOTT S-T-E-A-M!]

I can see both sides of this arguement and I'm not sure which I support in the end.

Granted the horror house thing makes sense with having some choices lead to an instant death.

In the rest of the game, outside of these choose you own adventure dialogue events, your choices can also lead to death.

The thing is... death in the normal sections of the game rarely ever feel like you were "cheated" in any way. Whenever you die normally you can usually look at the situation and see "where you went wrong." Things like if you had remembered to bring more food, hadn't explored that one extra building, or just ran anyway from that last fight instead of charging and ending up faceplanting yourself into a coma, etc...

However, the instant death in the dialogue events can sometimes feel like you were cheated because you couldn't "logically" have seen that a given choice would be fatal.

For example...
When I went to that house the first time I never went to the basement! Thats generally a bad idea in a horror movie setting. I also looked at it practically and figured that if anything goes wrong and I need to retreat from here... I can much more easily escape when I'm upstairs than when I'm down in the ground.

So I chose to go upstairs. I mean even if things go wrong I could probably bail out a window... I'd likely be half dead from the falling injuries, but half dead beats fully dead hands down in a survival game. Naturally, things went bad upstairs when I got what I came for and I then had to make a choice.

1 - I could wait and see what happens... you know because that sounds safe and all.

2 - I could run back downstairs... and logically retreating the way you came would make the most sense since you would already know the terrain and possible obstacles you would encounter. But in a horror scenario it never works out to try to go back the way you came and I was fully expecting that an actual door leading outside would simply be "held shut by an invisible force"... The front door of a haunted house only ever opens when you're entering.

3 - or I could run down the hallway.

I decided to run down the hallway since it was the only option available to me that had a moderate chance of me not being dead.

Unfortunately, though expectedly, I was now faced with another choice. I could go left or right. There wasn't really much information available for me to make my choice so I couldn't exactly use deductive reasoning to narrow down a safe option.

I picked left... and the room seemed like the correct choice. The description seemed to offer a glimmer of hope in that there was a window here. All the choices available to me at this point aside from the "jump out the window and break your legs" one were, looking at the situation, 100% guaranteed death. So I picked the window... and died.

Looking back on the situation after I died... I couldn't see any point where I "went wrong" with reasoning through my choices. Of all the choices that I had been presented with the only one where I couldn't logically wittle it down to resulting in instant death was the left or right choice. So...

When my second character went through the house I did everything the same as my first until I reached the left / right decision where I naturally chose to go right this time. Going right was a choice I regretted the moment I started reading the room description.

I pretty much chalked this character off as dead at this point. I figured since none of my choices in this location could be logically narrowed down to a safe choice... I may as well just do whatever the hell seems like it would provide the most amusing dialogue since I'll be dying no matter what. So I made some choices that, by all rights, I couldn't see ending as anything other than a more gruesome death than my last one.

In the end... I walked safely out of the house. I was glad to be alive, but I still felt cheated in a way. I felt like how I survived that situation was the result of dumb luck combined with a complete disregard for my safety.

It reminds me in a way of those old text parser adevnture games from the era of Kings Quest and Space Quest. In any given situation in those kinds of games 99% of all possible actions available to you will result in an instant death.

Some of them you couldn't possibly miss as being instantly fatal...

' The red button on the wall has a sign above it saying "instant self-incineraction activation engine mark II."

Hmm.... > push button <. You are instantly burned to a crisp... THE END. '

While others were just a total, random, unforseeable, crapshoot...

' You are standing in a small clearing in the forest. To the north you can hear a cascade of rushing water, to the east is a dark cave mouth, west leads into a darker section of woods. There is also a beehive, a small hole in the ground, and a small stream here.

Hmm... > look at stream < "The water looks crisp and fresh!"

Hmm... > fill flask with water < "You reach down to fill your flask in the stream... the moment your hand touches the water you are infected with and consumed from the inside by flesh eating bacteria."

*sighs* I was supposed to see that coming? '

Another example from ages past... in Pagan Ultima 8...
When I read in a book about a spell that would kill every living thing in existence and I went and gathered the ingredients to cast it...I knew it was a bad idea. Naturally, of course, I cast it anyway... and in the end... when the result was that every living thing in existence, myself included, was eradicated... I never felt cheated.

Basically it boils down to this... when the player looks back on the death that occured to them... did it seem like something that they could have logically "known" was a bad idea?

Can they see "where they went wrong" and see that one of the other choices available to them was a better alternative?

In the end I actually like the possibility of instant death. I like that there is consequences to your actions and the fear of death makes those dialogue events very tense moments, but I dislike when I feel like my character was killed by something I couldn't logically have prevented.

[Kaaven]

Pretty good one Kol, but I have a counter-argument :D

I can see why you can feel cheated when presented with this left or right door choice and taking the wrong, deadly, way.

However, have you considered that you made your bad choice a little earlier and this all is a death sequence basically? You said it yourself, that the most obvious choice for survival was to escape vie the route you came in, and you had this choice given. Instead, you chose to run deeper into the haunted house, dooming yourself in that very moment. But instead of a standard "You're dead" screen, the game offered you some adrenaline, by recreating the frantic last steps of every horror movie protagonist ever. Blind escape down the dark hallway, trying to open any encountered door in panic, only to find them locked... You even can end up in a scary room with a dead body in it :D.

I don't know if Dan did that on purpose or not, but it looks like a recreation of a standard horror B-movie death scene - much more interesting than a black screen of death. What's more, there is also a, somewhat counter-intuitive on purpose, way to bail out from the hands of death in there. So it does not really seem unfair, as long as you can accept that in your games consequences can be not obvious and instantaneous in some situation.

[BOYCOTT S-T-E-A-M!]

Originally posted by Kaaven:

Pretty good one Kol, but I have a counter-argument :D

I can see why you can feel cheated when presented with this left or right door choice and taking the wrong, deadly, way.

However, have you considered that you made your bad choice a little earlier and this all is a death sequence basically? You said it yourself, that the most obvious choice for survival was to escape vie the route you came in, and you had this choice given. Instead, you chose to run deeper into the haunted house, dooming yourself in that very moment. But instead of a standard "You're dead" screen, the game offered you some adrenaline, by recreating the frantic last steps of every horror movie protagonist ever. Blind escape down the dark hallway, trying to open any encountered door in panic, only to find them locked... You even can end up in a scary room with a dead body in it :D.

I don't know if Dan did that on purpose or not, but it looks like a recreation of a standard horror B-movie death scene - much more interesting than a black screen of death. What's more, there is also a, somewhat counter-intuitive on purpose, way to bail out from the hands of death in there. So it does not really seem unfair, as long as you can accept that in your games consequences can be not obvious and instantaneous in some situation.

You raise a good counter arguement.

Its true that I was given the option to try to leave the house via the way I came in and it was my fault for instead choosing to run down the hallway. It wasn't that choice in particular that gave the cheated feeling though.

Leaving the way I came in could be rationalized as an "unsafe" idea because of the fact that supernatural things were obviously going on in there... and as stated if a house is haunted its a pretty safe bet that the front door will only be unlocked when you're coming into the house.

It was more the way the left and right room encounters played out that made me feel cheated.

Had I picked to run down the hallway and the dialogue was something like ... "You frantically run down the hallway and round the corner. Threre is only a single door here which you quickly rush through... only to find yourself in a dead end... the door lead only to a small empty closet."

Then I wouldn't have felt cheated as much. I would have just thought about it and said "damn I hadn't fully considered the fact that there might not be any more rooms or any windows down the hallway. Should have tried my luck with the front door."

The fact that the left room provided what seemed to be the best option for escape... a window. I felt cheated because it didn't work out. When I looked back I thought "well aside from that room on the right I couldn't have done anything else... waiting would have killed me, front door would have been locked, the hallway was the only choice."

Much like the hallway to nowhere example above, had the room on the left NOT had a window and simply been a deadend like a bedroom or bathroom then I wouldn't have felt cheated. I would have just cursed my luck a bit and moved on.

In the deadend deaths, while it would still be a "luck" thing, you aren't as likely to feel cheated since "you made intelligent choices" there just wasn't anywhere else to go at that point, except turning around and facing your death.

Granted, in a horror movie sense the idea of the hero being inches from freedom only to not make it is a common occurence. This happening doesn't bother me in the least when it happens in a horror movie, a horror themed choose your own adventure book, or a horror game like Amenesia. But, in those media there isn't so much of an investment of time and effort. If Neo Scavenger was a game of just going places, killing, and getting loot it wouldn't hit so hard with the instant deaths. Its the fact that I just spent the past several hours boiling water, fighting off scavengers, and doing other involved tasks to stay afloat. All of which are tasks where my choices have a direct and usually logical cause and effect relation.

I think the main issue in Neo Scavenger that makes it feel more like you were cheated is the fact that it constrasts the normal gameplay.

Like I had said in the first post the normal game is typically a logical action / reaction survival scenario where you really have to think and make good choices to ensure you survive. Its quite common to die in the normal course of the game, but aside from the bad luck oriented combat deaths, the majority of the deaths are a drawn out process and you have so many options available to do at the time that when you look back on it you often can reason that if you had just done or not done something you'd have been a-ok.

For instance when I'm starving to death and can't find food I can look back on that last encounter I had and say "You know if I had only eaten that guy I wouldn't be in this situation." Or maybe I could have gone south instead of north, or checked the forest to east for food and not the one to the west, etc...

Back on the topic of the house, after succeeding and safely leaving after going to the room on the right with my next character; I still felt a bit cheated. I certainly wasn't upset about it because I was alive, but the course of actions that led up to me being alive was a series of the most illogical things I could have done in those cirumstances.

Don't get me wrong here, I did enjoy wearing the burlap bag of tranquilty and leaving my happy home behind, but it just felt like a dumb luck win for me since everything in my brain told me that it was entirely the wrong course of action.

I suppose you could look at it in the horror movie light though and say that in those kinds of movies its often the totally insane solution that works, but once again its the fact that it contrasts so much with the rest of the game that makes it stand out.

I'm not saying that the events in the house seemed unfair. Just that the circumstances of your death, when you look back on it, can make you feel cheated. Granted, you're dealing with a supernatural occurance, but it just contrasts so much with the rest of the game.

Its also possible that this is just because the rest of the game is so scientific and logical that it makes the deaths (or even the win) seem so out of place. Perhaps as more odd occurances are added to the game it wouldn't stand out so much. Currently, aside from the house the only things I can think of that tie into the supernatural would be taking off your talisman and the DMC dinner.