donpeartree

That is some frightening play

I don't have much to say about this, but I finished it last night. The combat is really fun if you keep mobile and super aggressive (spamming powers and bullets). The atmosphere and "game feel" are excellent and I really enjoyed the weirdness of the Oldest House and the world-building in general. I haven't played a shooter I've enjoyed this much in years. There were still parts that I found frustratingly hard at times, but I think a lot of the time, I needed to shift my approach and ended up coming out a fight I was losing before relatively unscathed (minus one optional area quite early on filled with mold that ended up being a dead end anyway).

I tried to play Control today and my aim was all over the shop, having played non-invert on Fall Guys for most of the week. Not having the choice to invert Y is the most baffling decision in any game I've played this year. The game is great, though. 20 wins under my belt now. It's the first battle royale I've ever been good at.

Here's a tip that took me a while. Learn that your HP is a resource. As long as you can keep it above 0, it is often with spending it to power up your deck or get through certain fights more quickly. E.g. You might find yourself wanting to block all damage early on, but in some fights that will cost you even more HP further in the fight, if the enemy's scaling is better than yours (e.g. cultist early on and the Act 1 elites) Cards like hemokinesis that cost a bit of HP to use but have powerful effects. Using hemokinesis, for example, costs hp but does a lot of damage for little energy. If you use it, you might end the fight a turn earlier and avoid that big attack you would have taken otherwise. Remember that your HP is refilled after each act's boss, so if you finish an act with full HP, that's essentially a resource you wasted. You could have upgraded a card instead of resting or taken on an extra elite fight for a relic, etc.

I'm out til the patch goes live. I've had three recent games that were going pretty well, all ending in a black screen after teleporting. My interest in this game has gone from hot to cold more quickly than any other game I can remember. Edit: this is on ps4

Sorry to derail, but can anybody confirm whether this is the right stuff for squirting into joycon sticks that have drift issues? Amazon link

Are you sure you couldn't have dropped through the bottom to get out from behind the fruit machine door? As for the purple things, if you don't want the full information, look at the purple/red bar in the bottom-right corner when you activate them. For more detail: I think it's designed that way, annoyingly. Enemies will usually only spawn when you walk a certain distance into the room. One of my main bugbears with the game.

With these kinds of games, you shouldn't feel too bad about finding it hard early on. You've got to build up the knowledge about enemy types, approaches to fighting different types, boss patterns, items, where to spend your resources, etc, etc. By all means, stick it down to easy, because you'll still be learning those things. The most valuable thing you can gain in a roguelike/roguelite is knowledge.

That patch sounds great. They've already addressed a lot of the issues I'm having.

This game is doing its best to turn me off at the minute. I just had a run with the item that drops mines whenever you jump. Joyless. I had a little rock floating around me that blocks bullets, but every time it collides with the mine, it instantly explodes, so I had to make sure it was in the right position before jumping (not great in the middle of a firefight). Also, did you want to jump on a stone platform? Too bad, take some damage. On top of that, I had the little bastard who keeps taking hearts and sometimes drops shields to replace them. Now, Binding of Isaac has this exact same mechanic, but in Isaac you have time to decide to grab the heart as he floats towards it, or even leave the room and come back later for it. In this, he fucking ZOOMS, grabs up all the hearts before you have time to look up at your dwindling health bar. The payout rate is fixed in Isaac (like, 1.5 hearts to 1 shield or something), whereas it seems to be random in this. Frustrating when you just want some damn health because mines keep blowing up at your feet. I was already on quite low health because of this, but it's not even what killed me. I ran into a new room and jumped up to a platform. An enemy spawned right on me in mid jump. Down to my last HP. I finished the room and one of those purple chests spawned in on top of me. A stray bullet hit it, it turned into a spiky chest and killed me. Another one for the why list. It's a cool game but it's really fucking up some basics and it's souring the whole experience.

This game is cool, but there's been a while bunch of things that made me think, "why?" Why does the item drop in the floor when you buy it instead of going straight in your inventory? Why does the woman you start with have knife on the same button as interact (I've ended up stabbing those crystal things one too many times for this reason)? Why do I have to keep getting that goddamn cat with sunglasses that keeps turning all of my heart's to mould? Why can't I read the item description of items in the shop, when I have a character that can read item descriptions? Why do roulette doors break sometimes? And a few other things. Having said all of this, I do think the game is one of the better games of this type. I don't see it having the legs of Binding of Isaac or Enter the Gungeon, but I'm enjoying it overall.

It's pretty rare that I replay a game unless it really resonated with me. It seems to be happening more frequently in recent years. If I REALLY loved a game and it's not a crazy length or very difficult, then I might even replay it straight away, but that's reserved for a handful: Dark Souls Bastion Salt and Sanctuary I don't know why these three specifically. Maybe it was a lack of other things that I really felt like playing at the time. Or being curious about the different ways that you could play it. And then there's the obvious forever games like Slay the Spire and Enter the Gungeon.

Surely in a game where you are running and gunning with the right stick, the only place jump should be is on a trigger. I mean, you're right, you should be able to map the controls where you want. But L2 (or L1) is the only place that really makes sense for most people. Edit: it's also fairly standard to have presets for "bumper jumper" in FPS games for that same reason - so you can aim while jumping in games where mobility is important.

What does permanent progression mean in this game? Is it like Enter the Gungeon or Isaac where you're unlocking items and stuff that you can access on new runs or is it more like Rogue Legacy where you're improving stats and making it easier to complete subsequent runs?

Link please?