They seem to have forgotten the "But fair" part of "Tough but fair".

[galdon2004]

This is not my first time playing this game; been sort of going through replaying some of the more difficult platformers in my library back to back since I've been in a platforming mood. Many games can be described as "Tough but fair". By which, the meaning is generally that while the game is very unforgiving, the fault lays directly at the player's feet for every failure.

This game is practically the antithesis of this concept. Although it is compared frequently to dark souls, it's design philosophy has more in common with a bad Mario Maker level than it does Dark Souls. A large number of deaths in this game are best avoided by *already knowing what is going to happen before it happens.*

This can make the game *seem* fair to veteran players. They may say "I can beat this game without getting hit once. It's completely fair." but the reason you can beat the game without getting hit once is that you've memorized all the games tricks. To a new player, or a player who has not played in a long time, however, the game is a mess.

It is generally good design to introduce players to a new mechanic or unique threat in a relatively safe environment first, then escalate the intensity to challenge the player's understanding of that mechanic. While this game does that with traps, specifically, and only traps, many monster encounters seem to be designed to introduce new monsters by placing them in ideal situations to instantly kill a new player.

For example; when fighting on platforms where you can fall to your death is introduced, you aren't fighting melee enemies on even footing with you first, then have the difficulty ramped up later in the area; no, you are immediately fighting flying enemies and archer acrobats who for some reason do not take fall damage if you knock them off a ledge.

When it introduces slime enemies who blend into the background, they are spaced out to EXACTLY the distance of a dodge roll so that when you are caught by one, and escape, if you dodge roll to get distance you are automatically caught by another one.

When it introduces enemies that phase into view from being invisible, it's in a pitch black room so you need a torch to see, but if you are a mage you get to learn only right then that casting magic automatically extinguishes your torch even though using a melee weapon does not.

I could easily go on with examples; it seems though, that the general design philosophy is built around the idea of capitalizing on the player's inexperience to get cheap unfair deaths. This is not a good design philosophy. It will "challenge" the player exactly one time, and then it will never work again, greatly diminishing the challenge that the game poses to them on subsequent playthroughs.

It is strange that the developers go out of their way to ensure that every new trap is triggered by a monster first so the player can see it in action, but every new combat gimmick is introduced as a deathtrap. It would probably have been much better if combat was tutorialized the way traps are. It's always better to challenge the player's skill, than to challenge the player's memory.

[No One]

hue hue hue

[dannyaic]

Originally posted by No One:

hue hue hue

I laughed too hard at this.

I completely disagree. I’m a new player and I just finished the sunken keep. That was a nice difficulty spike but what it did more than anything else was slap me awake. It made me aware that I can’t just roflmao stomp everything cause I have a great sword and some potions. Yeah it sucks to lose some gold and salt, and I almost quit because of it. Take a breath, sit back and realize maybe you’re doing something wrong and it’s not the game.

Then again I grew up playing NES platformers like castlevania 3.

[William Wave]

The game seemed unfair in my first playthrough too, it could even be refunded that time. Salt and Sanctuary is a game that gives players a task to explore it. Exploration supposes memorizing routes, dangerous zones, and other details. It's a metroidvania after all.

[TheDoctor]

at the words of the wiser man "GIT GUD"

[galdon2004]

There is no "Git Gud" in this game. Git Gud happens when you are playing a game like Darksouls or Cuphead and need to fine tune your mastery of the controls, reaction speed, and knowledge of the game to overcome increasingly difficult challenges.

In this game, death is a formality. Assuming you aren't just terrible at platformers, death is usually the result of a "Well how was I supposed to know THAT?" moment. It kills you unfairly once, then you never die that way again because you know what to expect. A couple more examples;

The first bear in the game, with the first pin attack in the game is placed directly below an archer, so that when it takes out 90% of your HP with you pinned, the archer has time to aim and finish you off before you can respond.

The first time you encounter a claw ghost, it's designed so you need to jump to hit it, near some instant death pits in a dimly lit room so you can't see it clearly, and it has a deceptively long reaching attack so that it would have good odds to knock you into the pit when introducing it's reaching attack.

Practically every time a new combat mechanic is introduced, it is introduced in a way to trick the player into dying because they don't know that new mechanic yet and therefor cannot account for it. It's mistaking death count for difficulty; and the two are not at all the same thing. Challenging stages will see you dying over and over, as you attempt to master the game and make a little more progress each time. This game will kill you periodically when it comes up with a new gimmick to get a cheap death, but then is rendered clawless your second time through.

[Ziel]

Hmmmm... I don't know. I kind of see where you're coming from but this just really sounds like an attempt at rationalizing injured pride.

[galdon2004]

In this last week or so I replayed and beat Cuphead, and did enough NG+ in Rogue Legacy that I no longer had anything to spend gold on. My death counts in both of those games are magnitudes higher than in this game. I'm not complaining because "OMG I died in a video game and I just can't handle it".

As I enjoy being fairly challenged by a game, it frustrates me when a game tries to be difficult by just going for cheap deaths to inflate it's kill count rather than actually presenting a real challenge. This is why I compare it to Mario Maker; in that game, a level's difficulty rating is determined entirely by it's death/victory ratio. So, many level makers will design stages so that they get cheap kills as often as possible to make that death/victory ratio score their stage as a highly difficult stage.

However, you can clearly tell the difference between a cheap stage that abuses pick-a-pipe and off-screen kills vs a kaizo level which expects a certain level of skill from a player to survive. This is the kind of experience I am getting from this game so far; it's not challenging the player to actually be good at the game to avoid dying, it expects the player to already know what will happen in advance to avoid dying.

[Cat Pondering At Yarn (mogging)]

Originally posted by galdon2004:

In this last week or so I replayed and beat Cuphead, and did enough NG+ in Rogue Legacy that I no longer had anything to spend gold on. My death counts in both of those games are magnitudes higher than in this game. I'm not complaining because "OMG I died in a video game and I just can't handle it".

As I enjoy being fairly challenged by a game, it frustrates me when a game tries to be difficult by just going for cheap deaths to inflate it's kill count rather than actually presenting a real challenge. This is why I compare it to Mario Maker; in that game, a level's difficulty rating is determined entirely by it's death/victory ratio. So, many level makers will design stages so that they get cheap kills as often as possible to make that death/victory ratio score their stage as a highly difficult stage.

However, you can clearly tell the difference between a cheap stage that abuses pick-a-pipe and off-screen kills vs a kaizo level which expects a certain level of skill from a player to survive. This is the kind of experience I am getting from this game so far; it's not challenging the player to actually be good at the game to avoid dying, it expects the player to already know what will happen in advance to avoid dying.

lol using a game as simple as cuphead an example

[galdon2004]

As an example of how many times I've died, Anakin. I'm sure you're past third grade reading by now, act like it. The point is, I can clearly handle dying in a game without throwing a fit or getting a bruised ego. My criticism with this game is that it does not provide a challenge. Almost all of the relatively few deaths I've had in this game have all come from unfair situations that are designed to capitalize on a player on a blind playthrough being unaware of game mechanics.

Which means, it kills you once, and then is never challenging again no matter how many times you go back through the same spot. It's fake difficulty, not a real challenge.

[Scythia]

Learning what an enemy does, and how to avoid it, is called pattern recognition. That's the basis of all 'difficult but fair' or souls-like game play. Even if you're excellent at the controls in Dark Souls, if you don't know what a boss is capable of then you are more likely to die until you do learn what the boss can do. All of these games are really games about what you know.

[galdon2004]

Pattern recognition implies the existence of a pattern. The actual boss fights are better about this as they do have patterns that you can learn, and in general, you can respond to most boss attacks in predictable ways as long as you have the timing right, and you generally have enough healing items and hit points to get tossed around a little bit and learn the boss moves before dying.

In the exploration and general combat part of the game though, it is not nearly the same. The game sets you up for failure by introducing new mechanics or movetypes out of nowhere in scenarios where that move will be maximally effective on it's first usage; but then the enemy will be unable to replicate it's success at any other point in the game because you know about the trap that kills you the first time, and every other scenario is less optimal for the monster.

Rather than getting an arc where the enemy is introduced in a low risk environment, then gradually upping the danger and difficulty to ensure you've mastered combat against it, most of the time you get the most dangerous form of the enemy right away then most other fights happen on mostly flat ground and with even footing where the enemy is no longer much of a threat.

[No One]

So your actual complaint is that the enemy placement is a bit amateurish compared to a million-dollar-budget AAA game, and the enemies are too easy once you know how to deal with them.

I have no idea what you're talking about with the pitch-black room.

...since the world has demonstrated that's it's dangerous to you, have you tried playing cautiously instead of having the aggression at 100% at all times?

But anyway, look man: you don't like the game. Probably not for rational reasons, but you'll never start liking it. It wasn't a good purchase for you. It happens.

[TheDoctor]

dude i finished this game with a pure dagger build on my second run and it felt pretty fair to me.

[galdon2004]

Not quite, No one. My complaint is that they go out of their way to make the first encounter with many enemies unfair to the player to make up for the fact that the enemies aren't actually difficult, and that designing in that way is *very* amateurish, even compared to other difficult indie games. Souls wasn't considered AAA until DS2 which was their third game. Cuphead and Rogue Legacy are also games I mentioned in this thread, both of which are indie games as well.

The dark room is in the entrance to the sunken keep. You enter the room and it is pitch black, so you need to light a torch. If you are a mage, this automatically switches you to sword/wand and disables your wand, or just disables your wand if you are using sword/wand in the first place. You drop down a short fall, not long enough to hurt, but long enough to prevent you from escaping to safety. Then Retchfeeders will fade in on either side of you and attack. It is only at this point that you will learn that your spell casting button simply extinguishes your torch and does not cast anything, leading you to now be in total darkness and possibly stunlocked by multiple Retchfeeders using their rapid spam attack, or pinned by one using it's lunge attack.

In subsequent visits, you can avoid this by simply running through the room without stopping because there isn't anything dangerous to either side of the room, but your first time through *you don't know that*. This isn't a challenge; it's an interface screw and takes advantage of the player's inexperience with the new area and enemy.

This segues into your other question about playing cautiously. This ambush occurs BECAUSE the player is playing cautiously, giving the Retchfeeders time to fade in and attack. It's not a matter that playing aggressively causes you to consistently get punished; some ambushes are designed to punish cautious play, and some are designed to punish aggressive play, and there is no way for the player to predict it.


TheDoctor: As I said, once you've memorized all the tricks, they won't trick you anymore. The unfair aspect is about abusing player inexperience to get cheap kills, rather than challenging the player.

[stevo]

The only thing that even smells of unfairness are the grabs and those dumbass teleporting skeletons. 99.9% of the game is completely fair. Surprises aren't unfair unless they go beyond context and are over used.