Navigating to memories - is there an easier way?

[Peeling]

Really enjoying the game, apart from one niggle: for all the polish and effort that's gone into streamlining the experience, the process of revisiting memories involving a particular individual to track their movements seems offputtingly laborious. I can view their locations on the map of the ship - why can't I simply enter them directly from the map? Having to walk to the right bit of ship, enter the memory, realise this wasn't what I wanted (or that I've picked the wrong corpse out of two or three close together), find the exit door, back to the map, walk to the next corpse... am I being stupid? Have I missed a better way of doing it?

[Cifer]

Nope, that is literally the only way. The game's designer mentioned that allowing a shortcut seemed too immersion-breaking to him.

[Cally]

The only shortcut is if you want to see a memory of a dead person in the memory you're replaying, you can jump to it straight from there by looking at that corpse instead of exiting and finding their present-day [ghost] body.

Are you using the bookmark system? It will let you tag all the memories a certain character appears in.

[robopecha]

i was so annoyed by this fact, because i decided to play the whole book in order and had to walk everywhere, but once it started to feel like a movie and i found more and more clues, i didnt mind it anymore.
also, if you stand near a body and the watch pops up you can open the book and it will go to the page the body will lead you to. i found this helpful when there are various bodies around.

(probably you already finished the game by now, but maybe someone else reads this and finds it useful.)

[cikame]

That is helpful, right now i think i have to go 2 decks down and find the correct random pile of bones... ugh.

[DNes]

this is my only problem with the game, otherwise amazing so far, I just find it so hard to navigate memories

[yhibiki]

Gonna throw in my two cents and say that this also ruined a lot of the fun I was having with the game. Looking up clues became tedious rather than fun.

There's nothing immersion breaking about shortcuts. We already have a magical death watch, just have the watch "store" the info somehow.

(My other annoyances: watching the damn smoke cloud, and having to wait to record deaths until the intro sequence to the death is over. Oh, and not being able to replay the audio on command, when accents are important to helping identify some of the characters.)

[rotsch]

I understand the reasoning behind this decision but why not making the memories accessible through the map _after_ the storm hits and all the memories are found?

Would make it so much easier to browse through memories and find clues. This is the only thing that bothers me now because it's tedious to walk around the ship and find the bodies only to access certain memories... tbh this takes out a lot of fun searching for clues :(

[Inscrutable Taco]

This absolutely ruins the game for me. I love the concept and aesthetic, but after the inevitable ten minutes of futzing around necessary to start examining the next memory in a sequence, I can barely remember what the last one was even about, let alone try to search for any kind of clues or connections between them.

[Grimwear]

Hard agree on ruining my enjoyment. I did a cursory run through to unlock all events thinking I could then easily scour back through memories looking for clues and such. But no, turns out you have to waste time slowly moving back and forth between bodies. Better make sure you have the right one or else you need to leave through the door and try a different body. Better remember which one it was. Just why? How does it make the game better? It makes it tedious and annoying. Not sure if I really want to finish it now it just seems like a slog.

[Catovitch]

It's amazing that a game set entirely on a small ship has "it needs a fast travel system" as such a common complaint, even from people who liked/defend the game.

How did the design get so messed up? It'd be so easy to fix, yet hasn't been. It's hard to believe it's on purpose, but it must be.

This and all the other things yhibiki mentions above ruined it for me. Nice idea, but the execution became so annoying that I uninstalled it after about 3 hours and will never touch it again.

I just can't take having to wait around while the game plays some music while I'm locked out of doing anything for ages, or animates a page being drawn in yet again in the exact same way (60 times, I guess, if you keep going), or makes me wait for a smoke trail to move in the most slow and indirect route to a location I literally just walked to, etc. etc. etc. Those things happening, again and again, all as the idea of what I was going to look for or input next drains out of my brain which has either switched-off or started thinking about how intentionally annoying all this seems... To then think "OK, it's over, I have real control and can start playing the game again", only to then be interrupted by yet another forced corpse sidetrack rather than be able to actually, you know, do some investigating solving. It's so asinine.

And yet so easy to fix:

- Remove the timer the first time you enter a memory. What is the actual purpose of it? If you've already looked around the scene, you're just waiting for the book to open. If you haven't finished looking around, the screen sloooowly fades and the book opens when you were still actively looking. It's annoying in both cases. After that, you can open and close the book at will, so why not just let the player open and close it from the start!? About the 15th time this happened was when I alt-F4'd and uninstalled the game, hoping it corrupted my save in the process.

- Let people solve things and explore at their own volition, instead of railroading them.

- Don't make people walk to corpses *twice*, adding two extra mechanics to the watch that don't even need to be in the game. Maybe it seemed a shame to code their effects only to throw them away, but it would've made the game better. Just let people find the bodies themselves! Exploration and discovery is fun!

- Let people jump directly into memories they've already seen. The game is about tying clues together, surely, not about navigating an obtuse interface. Anything that gets in the way of letting the player find clues and input solutions should have been streamlined or at least made optional. The idea it'd be "immersion breaking" to do this, when you have a magic time-travelling watch which literally teleports you in both time (obviously) and space (the way you have to walk to corpses twice) when it wants to, is ridiculous.

- If the player can't solve many things until they've unlocked everything, and the game wants to railroad you into unlocking loads of things before it even lets you solve things as a result, then just have all the corpses visible and memories open from the start and let people go at it. Don't make people sit through minutes of the identical tedium every time they unlock a new memory in a game with 60 memories and little time or variety in between each one. What was even the purpose of that?

- Harder to fix, but, really, the graphical style went against the gameplay. You're meant to be tying clues together and noticing details when the graphics obscure detail. (There are other technical and performance issues but I'll stick to the game design here.) This also results in the most immersion-breaking thing of all: You magically know who is who in each scene. You might not know their names but you can tie them to a face, despite the photo being such poor quality you can't even see half the people's eyes let alone enough to recognise them. You even automatically know the artist is the artist the moment you see him in a memory, despite having no visual record of him except his initials on the photo. Not through a process of elimination, either, as you haven't seen everyone else yet. If the graphics were better, part of the game could have been in deducing not just the names of people, but whether person X in scene A is also person Y in scene B, instead of magically knowing it.

Too much of the design felt like padding, and like it was intentionally wasting my time. I found that frustrating and couldn't keep playing the game.

[Jethro Tull]

yeah im alrdy immersed in the game, not having to slowly walk from cargo deck to poop deck would be nice because by the time i get there ive forgotten what i wanted to investigate

[Catovitch]

I gave the game another chance and, once all the forced animations and music were done with, found the actual puzzles to be great when I could focus on them. There is a good game there, but it's buried under some IMO poor design choices.

[Penguin]

Just hit the storm and realized I would have to navigate through all of those memories again, i really thought I could jump from one to another very fast since the main exploration thing is over, but apparently not... Welp, I will just uninstall this game and maybe play it again in some years

[jimmyd95]

I thought the same thing at first, but the navigation and how to review the scenes (or chapters) is part of the gameplay and emersion as well. I had to view, and review (and re-re-re-view) the scene with the 2 boats. I then got good at choosing which body on the deck I needed to click on. The same thing happened with other scenes as well. Did I want to replay the scene where the guy gets crushed by the cannon but wanted to see the preceding scene that led to those events? Easy, find the gooey body on the floor (or open to that page in the book and see where the body is, though I didn't do that too often). The ship isn't that big. Walking from one end to the other isn't a big deal.

I was more annoyed that I couldn't open the door nearest to where the wife's body lies but had to use the other door and walk around 10 feet or so of desk. But again, no big deal.

Even if you find it annoying, it's not game-breakingly annoying,

[worstcase11]

@jimmyd95: But it makes sense that you can't open that door - I mean there is a dead body lying right behind it on the other side and it is blocked by a chair on top of that - you wouldn't be able to open it without disturbing the scene.