Cool game, definitely a learning experience

[Shiny Shaymini]

So, I wanna preface this with: I beat Hard Mode, and it was certainly an event.

That aside, Vanripper, you need a serious adjustment to what you deem as 'hard'. In Helltaker and Examtaker, Hard was fine as a definition, because it just meant needing to use all your moves and respond to pre-set attack patterns that still left plenty of room for you to avoid.

In this, it has all the qualities that your previous game/dlc had. Exceptional polish, fantastic art, great characters, and an interesting concept.
But it also has something that isn't acceptable if you want to make the game enjoyable beyond a surface level 'Just play Easy'. And that's a lack of balance.

Each ghost has cool attacks, and they're limited in a healthy way, yes. But pairing them up takes an already tough challenge and adds needless anxiety, stress, and panic. Adding independent map hazards that have jank hitboxes (electric box spark lanes only hit for .5 seconds, and only if you're on them...sometimes), and compounding that with the already limited timers on each shield, takes an already rough challenge and makes it unnecessarily hard.

Two ghosts? Challenging, but not too insane. One ghost and zone hazards? Rough but still doable. Shield timers and two ghosts? Challenging, but doable with the right ghost combo.

Shield timers, two ghosts, zone hazards, AND multi-step items? Excessive. Unneeded. Too much to keep track of that doesn't simply require a modicum of luck. And yes, I do mean all those 'sounds like mad cause bad' or 'maybe try being good at the game' types that love to find forums like this and rage-bait for free hypocrisy points. We all know you beat hard mode, sure, but even you have to admit that it came after failing 10+ times due to bad luck, bad spawns, or mechanics stacking on top of each other to such an extreme that you just died and reset.

As someone who enjoyed the Helltaker and Examtaker, and has seen you twitter/x feed, you're an amazing dev, cool person, and great game developer. It's cool you went with a different genre for this game. But, maybe change how things are balanced? Take the already Hard Mode, and make it a challenge mode, instead? Cause it doesn't feel like Hard, it feels like Challenge, with everything thrown at you at once.

TL:DR - Game is great, but it needs a bit of balancing, such as better cooldowns between enemy attacks, or less mechanics stacked on top of each other all at the same time.

[Silver l>>>]

Traps are a major design issue
dont despawn or trigger on their own, so you have to go around triggering them or end up encapsulated
With boss there isnt issue because Dash is a thing, before that it gets toxic, specially when she spawn in the middle of the passage, the player is out of sight, so cuts the attacks short, lives the trap and initiates another attack sooner, thus spawning more traps faster

[Hurkyl]

Originally posted by SiriusRhysTTV:

We all know you beat hard mode, sure, but even you have to admit that it came after failing 10+ times due to bad luck, bad spawns, or mechanics stacking on top of each other to such an extreme that you just died and reset.

Part of game skill is working out strategies and tactics that don't depend on luck to succeed.

But, maybe change how things are balanced? Take the already Hard Mode, and make it a challenge mode, instead? Cause it doesn't feel like Hard, it feels like Challenge, with everything thrown at you at once.

That has absolutely nothing to do with game balance. That's just the name for the difficulty level.

You may prefer games that calibrate difficulty so that "normal" is fairly easy to succeed. Others prefer games to be calibrated so "normal" is still challenging enough to require getting good at the game.

The latter, IMO, seems more appropriate for this type of game. (although I will admit I'm biased to prefer games that expect some amount of skill from the player)

[Shiny Shaymini]

Originally posted by Hurkyl:

Part of game skill is working out strategies and tactics that don't depend on luck to succeed.

The problem is that it's not 'working out strategies and tactics that don't depend on luck'. 99% of the players who've beaten Hard Mode all boil down to 'yeah, I got a lucky pattern', the 1% who didn't keep getting reset over and over until they got a lucky pattern, got lucky AI instead, where they decided to attack in a way that worked for them.

So no, it's not 'game skill' to get lucky, and that's all the final levels are. Lucky heavy.

Originally posted by Hurkyl:

That has absolutely nothing to do with game balance. That's just the name for the difficulty level.

You may prefer games that calibrate difficulty so that "normal" is fairly easy to succeed. Others prefer games to be calibrated so "normal" is still challenging enough to require getting good at the game.

The latter, IMO, seems more appropriate for this type of game. (although I will admit I'm biased to prefer games that expect some amount of skill from the player)

The problem with this, is that it's not hard. It's an excessive challenge. Hard is the culmination of attack patterns, game knowledge, and skill combined, while still being plausible within a reasonable margin.

The game at current has Normal as Medium, Easy as Very Easy, then Hard as Extreme difficulty. A good number of people are going into Hard expecting it to be Normal with no drone revives. Instead, enemies attack faster, move faster, spawn faster, spawn earlier (such as level 10), the hazards fire faster, the shield generators require more complex parts (getting tier 2 for both parts, 3 times in a row for example), with dramatically less time to react to the generators since they're constantly ticking down even when you don't know what parts you need, while you're constantly keeping track of projectiles, enemies, and spawn locations so you don't get instantly killed.

That isn't hard. That's a challenge or extreme difficulty. That isn't a natural difficulty progression, that's a challenge gamemode you'd typically unlock after beating the game once.

So yes, it needs better clarity on how it functions with what it's called. And regardless, the difficulty needs to be toned down. Something needs to change. Either simpler generator requirements (1 tier 2, 2 tier 1, instead of tier 1 and tier 2, tier 2 x2, tier 1 and tier 1, aka randomized requirements), slower enemy attack patterns, or better responsiveness on controls and visual clarity.

Locking the art book behind Hard Mode or a paywall, and then making Hard Mode excessively difficulty to the point of being RNG for completion, is not good game design. Vanripper's art can be as pretty as it likes, and the animations as phenomenal as they want, but if you load into a level, die after 13 seconds, can't SEE any of the animations because they're all in the background, and then get put through the exact same death animation that takes 8 seconds every time it happens, you spend more time frustrated than actually enjoying the game and art.

Also, game severely needs a epilepsy warning. The bright flash on death when you have the hand grab animation is WAY too bright, way too sudden, and way too sharp of a contrast compared to the darker backgrounds.

[Hurkyl]

Originally posted by SiriusRhysTTV:

Originally posted by Hurkyl:

Part of game skill is working out strategies and tactics that don't depend on luck to succeed.

The problem is that it's not 'working out strategies and tactics that don't depend on luck'. 99% of the players who've beaten Hard Mode all boil down to 'yeah, I got a lucky pattern', the 1% who didn't keep getting reset over and over until they got a lucky pattern, got lucky AI instead, where they decided to attack in a way that worked for them.

X.

The problem with this, is that it's not hard. It's an excessive challenge. Hard is the culmination of attack patterns, game knowledge, and skill combined, while still being plausible within a reasonable margin.

Hard disagree. I find hard difficulty to be about what I expect from an action game. It's not the difficulty you usually get from games, but what I think it should be. The game is asking me to git gud, not to be a grandmaster.

Is it that you're not used to the "short levels quick retries" style of pacing, where you're expected to need a number of tries to figure it out? I've seen other games with similar sorts of complaints -- e.g. someone calling Celeste overly difficult because they're allergic to dying and having to try again.

edit: I mean that literally. The actual complaint was not that too much precision was required or other skill based things -- the complaint was specifically was that it resulted in a die-and-restart loop.

I've only played on Hard so I don't actually know how the difficulty jump feels, but my impression is that the drone alone would make the game fairly trivial. I would never need to bother learn to carefully bait attacks on level 9, or do crowd control on level 12, if I could just tank through the damage when pure reflex isn't up to the task.

(aside: I think lvl 12 hard will actually be fairly easy once I figure out the movement to avoid splatting all of the small spawns)

Do people really find the timers a problem? I've found them to be mostly a non-issue, only really coming into play if I wind up making several loops through a level without actually achieving what I intended on the loop.

And I genuinely don't understand the complaints about the generator requirements. Although I have watched one other person play a few levels and noticed they frequently fail to restart a machine -- either they walk by and don't double-tap, or they didn't think to bring the item required to start it recharging -- so I guess if people haven't figured out that tactic then that might make things a lot more difficult.

[Forblaze]

Originally posted by Silver l>>>:

Traps are a major design issue
dont despawn or trigger on their own, so you have to go around triggering them or end up encapsulated

I don't see how this is a design issue. It creates interesting situations and encourages forward thinking.

[Forblaze]

Originally posted by SiriusRhysTTV:

The problem is that it's not 'working out strategies and tactics that don't depend on luck'. 99% of the players who've beaten Hard Mode all boil down to 'yeah, I got a lucky pattern', the 1% who didn't keep getting reset over and over until they got a lucky pattern, got lucky AI instead, where they decided to attack in a way that worked for them.

So no, it's not 'game skill' to get lucky, and that's all the final levels are. Lucky heavy.

I don't agree at all that it's luck based. My second playthrough (both were on hard mode) was much quicker than my first because I had gotten better at the game.

It's easy to look at a complicated situation and boil the outcome down to luck, but there are a lot of factors that doesn't mean you're not actually driving both the lead up and outcome.

[Zenbe]

Originally posted by Silver l>>>:

Traps are a major design issue
dont despawn or trigger on their own, so you have to go around triggering them or end up encapsulated
With boss there isnt issue because Dash is a thing, before that it gets toxic, specially when she spawn in the middle of the passage, the player is out of sight, so cuts the attacks short, lives the trap and initiates another attack sooner, thus spawning more traps faster

That's the one thing I completely agree on. Everything else feels hard but fair. But Cutwire splooging up narrow pathways or access to items or shields while your are busy dodging other ghosts or projectiles is frustrating. At least in normal your drone can eat the damage but in hard her levels really did feel unfair and like luck was a bigger part of making it through the level than it should be.
Either they should have a timer or there should be a limit to how many she can place before the old ones disappear. That would make those fights feel much better.

[TestBot]

Nice to see that the only stage I ended up doing easy on has been agreed to unfun. It had less to do with being hit, more so to not waste time and get frustrated when the shields require parts that are blocked off and have a building time. The randomness of the shields breaking and requiring different parts adds to fun in replayability but the hard difficulty really brings it over the top. I wouldnt have minded, just let people have their achievements and bragging rights, but having gallery locked because of it sucks. I mean, I can do it over and over and sure ill improve with every attempt but it leads to getting overwhelmed unless you hit a lucky streak of repairs and finish quick