This game needs some sort of quicksave / retry function

[Toren_S [Also Friendly]]

I was enjoying the game and the mysteries and discovery, but as I get towards the end it's basically become a 'fly back to where I died and wait' simulator.

The looping concept is really neat and resetting the loop on death, but is it really necessary for players to have to repeat a bunch of a tedious / finicky process in order to try again at the bit they suck at?

It's really killing my drive to do the last parts of it myself and not just go watch a Let's Play or something like that from a person who's better at controlling the character/ship do the ending.

When everything is new and you have a ton to explore, the setup works great, but once you're narrowed down to the final barrage of stuff, it's just really really painful for me. Am I missing something that makes doing this stuff easier? I did pick up a random 'here's how you can just restart a loop' upgrade, are there other things like that I'm missing that make redoing stuff less painful? The first hours of this game just felt so masterful and all about exploring and the end seems to be all about precision flying/jumping.

[Nert]

I can't think of any areas that require precision? You may be missing easier solutions..


But to answer: there are no other abilities that can be unlocked

Quicksave/retry features basically aren't compatible with the physics, the whole thing is a fire and forget simulation of the entire solar system

[Dustin Dalby]

What are the bits that are causing you problems? As said, there might be alternative ways to achieve them, or simply navigation tools that have evaded your notice all this time.

It would be a shame to give up so close to the end, I'll try my best to help without any spoilers!

[Terra]

Originally posted by Nert:

But to answer: there are no other abilities that can be unlocked

Not entirely true. You do unlock the ability to take a nap at a campfire after 2 loops, which helps with the 2 or 3 puzzles that require exact timing and don't have a workaround.

That's about as close as it gets though.

[Toren_S [Also Friendly]]

So I'm actually past a fair amount of these but I'm just going to comment on the things where I died and/or had to wait a bunch. Dying trying to jump across the sun station forces you to wait for the sand to drain a bunch. Just general bouncing around in Brittle Hollow, falling into the black hole, and waiting up to 5 minutes for the white hole station to send you back. Getting into the quantum tower at brittle hollow (because you can't rest on your ship). Landing on the Interceptor and going through the ghost matter, again a long wait when you mess it up. Everything about the dark bramble (I think I could term my last 40 minutes of play 'fly back to dark bramble').

The puzzles are fine, it's not like they require super elite skills, but I'm getting older and I don't have my youthful reflexes and it's just ugh when messing up means anywhere from 5-15 minutes getting set up to try again.

[Leb]

If you sleep at a camp fire, you get to choose when to wake up again, so if you need to do something 10 minutes into a loop, you can sleep for 9 minutes and fly to your destination. I don't know if that'll help, but many players (myself included), missed this during their first playthrough

[Toren_S [Also Friendly]]

Yeah, that could have helped me some for sure. I'm mostly just venting frustration after a bunch of random little events that caused me to have to reloop and I'm just really sick of the wake up -> go to elevator -> get in ship -> get suit -> get buckled -> try to quickly fly back to wherever I was -> get eaten by anglerfish again / fall into black hole again / etc loop.

I really enjoyed puzzles more like the quantum moon which are just about learning and thinking your way through it rather than jumping or getting somewhere really fast or trying to figure out how to efficiently wait for the right time in the loop and then get one shot at doing it.

[macr0t0r]

Sadly have to agree that this game needs a "casual gamer" option to allow a quicksave/restore option or make the hazards more forgiving. I absolutely loved this game until the last stage when I'm trying to navigate against the clock around the mouths of doom. I'm not an FPS/hardcore gamer (more of a Minecraft/Scrap Mechanic sort of guy), so I was about to throw my controller to the floor. I finally got through it, and I enjoyed the ending, but....man....it took me some time to shake off the frustration. It was unnecessary to demand such skill and dedication for a story-based game.

Please don't reply with "try harder" or "you're just doing it wrong." It really doesn't help this game find a wider audience.

[Nert]

What you're asking for is already there. Every hazard has a simple casual path around it, they can take exploration or experimentation to find, but they are there

[Blue Ranger]

Originally posted by Terra:

Originally posted by Nert:

But to answer: there are no other abilities that can be unlocked

Not entirely true. You do unlock the ability to take a nap at a campfire after 2 loops, which helps with the 2 or 3 puzzles that require exact timing and don't have a workaround.

That's about as close as it gets though.

Just to be complete: There is also the "Meditate until end of loop" ability you can learn. It's an ability for convenience so you don't have to try all sorts of things just to kill yourself to end a loop.

[SMJSMOK]

Originally posted by Adun153:

Originally posted by Terra:

Not entirely true. You do unlock the ability to take a nap at a campfire after 2 loops, which helps with the 2 or 3 puzzles that require exact timing and don't have a workaround.

That's about as close as it gets though.

Just to be complete: There is also the "Meditate until end of loop" ability you can learn. It's an ability for convenience so you don't have to try all sorts of things just to kill yourself to end a loop.

You can also just return to main menu and reload the current save, it achieves the same thing. I was afraid of this at first because I read somewhere that it doesn't save the ship log this way, but it does and I did it frequently during my playthrough.

[SMJSMOK]

Originally posted by macr0t0r:

I finally got through it, and I enjoyed the ending, but....man....it took me some time to shake off the frustration.

Ideally the difficult parts you had to overcome are supposed to make you value your subsequent achievement more and make the overall experience more memorable. Some of my best memories from games is from beating a really hard boss and really enjoying the ending after it. I'm sorry it made you feel frustrated :/
I also wouldn't call it a story-based game. Yes, the story is important but this is no "walking simulator" like Firewatch, this is very much a gameplay driven game. I feel that many people come in expecting something like Firewatch and then burn themselves (no pun intended :) ).

[Toren_S [Also Friendly]]

Originally posted by SMJSMOK:

Originally posted by macr0t0r:

I finally got through it, and I enjoyed the ending, but....man....it took me some time to shake off the frustration.

Ideally the difficult parts you had to overcome are supposed to make you value your subsequent achievement more and make the overall experience more memorable. Some of my best memories from games is from beating a really hard boss and really enjoying the ending after it. I'm sorry it made you feel frustrated :/
I also wouldn't call it a story-based game. Yes, the story is important but this is no "walking simulator" like Firewatch, this is very much a gameplay driven game. I feel that many people come in expecting something like Firewatch and then burn themselves (no pun intended :) ).

So basically what I (and I think the other person) are saying is that we don't mind the parts being difficult, we mind having to redo boring easy parts to get back to the difficult part. If we could just try the difficult part repeatedly we would solve it and get that satisfaction because we're always working on the thing we need to master. When forced to experience significant downtime or filler easier bits in front of it the frustration and tedium overwhelms the sense of achievement, I just think 'I'm glad that's finally over'.

Edit: Think of it like an unskippable cutscene you have to interact with every time. Most people really really hate unskippable cutscenes before a boss fight.

[SMJSMOK]

Originally posted by Toren_S Also Friendly:

Originally posted by SMJSMOK:

Ideally the difficult parts you had to overcome are supposed to make you value your subsequent achievement more and make the overall experience more memorable. Some of my best memories from games is from beating a really hard boss and really enjoying the ending after it. I'm sorry it made you feel frustrated :/
I also wouldn't call it a story-based game. Yes, the story is important but this is no "walking simulator" like Firewatch, this is very much a gameplay driven game. I feel that many people come in expecting something like Firewatch and then burn themselves (no pun intended :) ).

So basically what I (and I think the other person) are saying is that we don't mind the parts being difficult, we mind having to redo boring easy parts to get back to the difficult part. If we could just try the difficult part repeatedly we would solve it and get that satisfaction because we're always working on the thing we need to master. When forced to experience significant downtime or filler easier bits in front of it the frustration and tedium overwhelms the sense of achievement, I just think 'I'm glad that's finally over'.

Edit: Think of it like an unskippable cutscene you have to interact with every time. Most people really really hate unskippable cutscenes before a boss fight.

Yeah, what you're saying makes sense. I agree that unskippable cutscenes are the worst thing ever. I think a good solution might be to have some kind of fast-travel to the places you've already visited (which could even be somehow integrated into the narrative), so you don't have to repeat the "easy part of getting there" all the time. But I can see the problem with this already...it would significantly cut down the average play time and I'm not really sure the devs want that. It's a really short game even with the constant time looping and I feel the absence of "convenience options" like save/load system is meant to pad the play time a little.

[Toren_S [Also Friendly]]

Originally posted by SMJSMOK:

Originally posted by Toren_S Also Friendly:

So basically what I (and I think the other person) are saying is that we don't mind the parts being difficult, we mind having to redo boring easy parts to get back to the difficult part. If we could just try the difficult part repeatedly we would solve it and get that satisfaction because we're always working on the thing we need to master. When forced to experience significant downtime or filler easier bits in front of it the frustration and tedium overwhelms the sense of achievement, I just think 'I'm glad that's finally over'.

Edit: Think of it like an unskippable cutscene you have to interact with every time. Most people really really hate unskippable cutscenes before a boss fight.

Yeah, what you're saying makes sense. I agree that unskippable cutscenes are the worst thing ever. I think a good solution might be to have some kind of fast-travel to the places you've already visited (which could even be somehow integrated into the narrative), so you don't have to repeat the "easy part of getting there" all the time. But I can see the problem with this already...it would significantly cut down the average play time and I'm not really sure the devs want that. It's a really short game even with the constant time looping and I feel the absence of "convenience options" like save/load system is meant to pad the play time a little.

So I get that, but again as I get older I find shorter games are better.

Like if you told me the game was only 3 hours long but it's a tight 3 hours over a padded 6 or 10 (arbitrary numbers here), I'd still pay for that. I realize I may not be a majority enough opinion for it to be profitable, though!

I'm still going to try to finish this one up, so here's hoping I make it through!

[Nert]

Originally posted by SMJSMOK:

It's a really short game even with the constant time looping and I feel the absence of "convenience options" like save/load system is meant to pad the play time a little.

I'd be slightly less cynical there, this is extremely tightly packed and having watched a lot of playthroughs, ones without taking the convenience options are far, far better experiences - for both player and audience. In a purely physics based simulated solar system so much is going on that you're going to miss without spending time in it. Plus the option to quit and reload is always there

When people get spoiled about Meditation early they tend to start resetting at the slightest inconvenience and they turn the game into an information collectathon without paying any attention to what they're learning, get to the end and have no idea what's going on. It especially makes all the time puzzles difficult since they don't spend any time actually looking around

It's clearly there to be difficult to find by chance but something you can let on exists if the player is stranding themselves frequently and are getting frustrated