Game experience on controller is infuriating

[lordubbe]

I loved the first game, but it was kind of tedious to play using the controller. I see and appreciate the thought that has gone into the controller experience on this new title, and the ideas seem good on the surface, but the current implementation is borderline unplayable.

Here are some concrete points of feedback for the developers:
- Popups in front should always take priority when navigating UI. I experienced several times that I selected something behind the popups, often losing the ability to navigate back to the UI in front. Usually toggling the popup visibility off/on again resets the cursor position, which is a saving grace in this case, but not ideal. I most recently experienced this in the construction site scene.
- Speaking of selecting things both me and my wife often found it difficult to find the "cursor"/selection marker. Could you make it brighter and perhaps even animate it (pulsating scale or something) to make it easier to spot?
- Navigation between "information nodes" (or whatever these are called) can be extremely difficult. For instance in the car/bridge scene I had a very hard time selecting the building.
- I really want to be able to click an empty field and have the cursor jump to the right category of words (eg. names, or verbs). I know you can rearrange the words in the "inventory", but they are by default grouped by category. It could even enable a temporary filter where only the correct word types are selectable.
- Dropping a word on top of another word should swap their positions, not just eliminate the bottom word. There's already a button to remove the word (which I did many times by accident, as for me the "back" button (circle on PS controller) should go back in the navigation history, not delete words).

Now, I know as a game dev myself that controller support can be very annoying to maintain, but you should really test the experience more, because it is game-breakingly frustrating right now.

Perhaps it would be wise to add the "cursor emulation" control scheme from the last game as a fallback setting until these issues are fixed? The old way was tedious, but at least it worked and I could play the game without pulling my hair out!

I hope this is useful feedback. Feel free to reach out to me if you want more feedback or help in any other way.

[VastGirth]

Not sure why anyone would play a game like this with a controller.
Mouse or touchscreen is essential.

[Pudim]

Originally posted by VastGirth:

Not sure why anyone would play a game like this with a controller.
Mouse or touchscreen is essential.

"Essential" for what exactly? There is nothing in this game that "absolutely" requires mouse or touchscreen. It's literally just selecting something. No reason whatsoever to not support controllers. This widens the audience for the game and enables players to play however they feel comfortable.

[GrundleGrump]

Originally posted by lordubbe:

I loved the first game, but it was kind of tedious to play using the controller. I see and appreciate the thought that has gone into the controller experience on this new title, and the ideas seem good on the surface, but the current implementation is borderline unplayable.

Here are some concrete points of feedback for the developers:
- Popups in front should always take priority when navigating UI. I experienced several times that I selected something behind the popups, often losing the ability to navigate back to the UI in front. Usually toggling the popup visibility off/on again resets the cursor position, which is a saving grace in this case, but not ideal. I most recently experienced this in the construction site scene.
- Speaking of selecting things both me and my wife often found it difficult to find the "cursor"/selection marker. Could you make it brighter and perhaps even animate it (pulsating scale or something) to make it easier to spot?
- Navigation between "information nodes" (or whatever these are called) can be extremely difficult. For instance in the car/bridge scene I had a very hard time selecting the building.
- I really want to be able to click an empty field and have the cursor jump to the right category of words (eg. names, or verbs). I know you can rearrange the words in the "inventory", but they are by default grouped by category. It could even enable a temporary filter where only the correct word types are selectable.
- Dropping a word on top of another word should swap their positions, not just eliminate the bottom word. There's already a button to remove the word (which I did many times by accident, as for me the "back" button (circle on PS controller) should go back in the navigation history, not delete words).

Now, I know as a game dev myself that controller support can be very annoying to maintain, but you should really test the experience more, because it is game-breakingly frustrating right now.

Perhaps it would be wise to add the "cursor emulation" control scheme from the last game as a fallback setting until these issues are fixed? The old way was tedious, but at least it worked and I could play the game without pulling my hair out!

I hope this is useful feedback. Feel free to reach out to me if you want more feedback or help in any other way.

Completely agree 💯.

Going right across the points of interest won't always highlight the same selections as going left and vice versa depending on scene. The first puzzle with the Bagmans won't select the building at the back going one way but will the other.

I also agree that finding what you are highlighting is difficult.

I also swear the demo had ability to press boxes and it would fill the next available empty box but that doesn't seem to work now.

I dislike the window arrangements. I don't understand why it doesn't work like Windows where I can click the background window and bring it to the front.

Overall, I spent first hour more annoyed at controller than concentrating on game.

[androidcat]

I completely agree, it's really hard to get immersed in the story and puzzles when the controller input is so unpredictable. I'm playing on the Steam Deck, and moving the left analog stick left or right causes the windows to jump to new positions (typically on top of one another and the behaviour can be different left vs right) and changes the focus, which feels very unintuitive. I have played various similar games (including Case of the Golden Idol) on the Deck and whilst I don't mind controller support being a little sub-optimal compared to a mouse, here it is clunky to the point of making the game a very frustrating experience, which will make it unplayable for some.

[Tricky Joe]

I am also having some difficulty with the controller.

There seems to be a mixture of modes happening at the same time: there's a round-cornered selection cursor which moves around between items of interest (pressing A, Xbox layout, activates this item); there's also a mouse-style pointer which moves around with a joystick (the right trigger activates what it points at). Sometimes I forget to use the trigger for the pointer, so press A and activate something else unexpectedly.

It can be confusing having both things happening at once, and having to remember which button activates which highlight.

It seems that X (Xbox controller layout) also brings up some of the "answer sheets". I found that out by pressing all the buttons to see if one of them would do it; I couldn't see any in-game help for using a controller. (It would be very helpful if there was help!) It's not obvious to me which sheets get opened at any one time. I suspect it might be that I can toggle them individually, then the X button turns on and off only those toggled sheets.

(Sometimes one "answer sheet" is in front of another, but a word from the rear sheet appears in front of the front sheet. That's not a controller thing I suppose.)

I also get some confusion when a new item is opened in a scene, and I think (from memory; I've only had one session so far) that clicking away from the scene causes new words to cascade to the word list but doesn't close the popup, so a second click is needed. I get the need for the animation but since the expected close doesn't happen, the effect is that sometimes I have to click away twice to close an item and sometimes once. That's a minor niggle and I need to reply it to see if I've got it right.

(Love the game though; the new art style and animations are great and I'm glad to be back into these excellent puzzles.)

[ABK]

I don't know if this is relevant, but I had a similar issue playing this game and the original. The controller was extremely glitchy, glyphs were flickering, multiple things seemed to be highlighted and buttons acted unpredictably. I found I couldn't quit the game just now.

But, going into Settings > Desktop Layout and disabling Steam Input has made everything much more normal. I think maybe the game was getting a double input from Steam and it was like hovering/clicking in two places at once.