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Get This Kid Some Swimming Lessons


Hotspur000

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There are a few things that, IMO, make this actually a poor game.

 

I'm a bit annoyed by games where you die after going under water for two seconds. It's lazy.

 

Come up with something better.

 

That's a little thing. But overall, I hate games like this where there's only one way of doing something, but it's designed so that it's not obvious at all what you're supposed to do, and the only way to figure it out is to die a bunch of times.

 

I think it's done intentionally like that by the designers because they think it's clever, or something, but to me it's lazy and cloying.

Edited by Hotspur000
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Yep -- I didn't like this game at all.

 

It's not fun to play. It's not enjoyable. It intentionally toys with you and tries to piss you off. It basically seems like the designers were more interested in themselves as opposed to the enjoyment of the player.

 

Very disappointed I sent $17 on this.

 

Big rip-off.

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But there's a difference between thinking about how to solve a puzzle and having to intentionally die just so you can see what you're supposed to do. Many of the puzzles in here don't give you a chance at all.

 

I just think it's poor design and masochistic in a silly way. It could have been designed better.

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But there's a difference between thinking about how to solve a puzzle and having to intentionally die just so you can see what you're supposed to do. Many of the puzzles in here don't give you a chance at all.

 

I just think it's poor design and masochistic in a silly way. It could have been designed better.

 

I found that a fun way to find things out. Unless you wanted to get 5 or less deaths on your first playthrough. By the way, it's only a short game and the brainbrakers start when you're already halfway through the game. I had to look up a guide only 2 times because I was stuck and couldn't see how to progress.

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  • 5 weeks later...
That's the whole point of a game with puzzle elements. You're supposed to THINK to find a way to progress. Ever heard of trial & error?:rolleyes:

 

Trial and error has nothing to do with thinking( Monkeys can successfully write "War and Peace" by trying enough times, you know. This game goes straight into Nintendo Hard and Fake Difficulty territory (especially the extra level :mad:) and that's not good for a product released in 2010.

 

Nevertheless I enjoyed the game quite a bit especially the first part, the one in the forest. It was beautiful, scary and fun and had great atmosphere. After going to the city - not so much. It became frustrating and rather boring. I feel like the designers gave up on trying to give us a beautifully creepy game and instead had a comepetition of who can come up with more ways to piss the player off. Well done, they succeded.

 

I would still recomend this game to anyone interested in visual design. B.E.A.U.T.I.F.U.L.

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Trial and error has nothing to do with thinking( Monkeys can successfully write "War and Peace" by trying enough times, you know. This game goes straight into Nintendo Hard and Fake Difficulty territory (especially the extra level :mad:) and that's not good for a product released in 2010.

 

Nevertheless I enjoyed the game quite a bit especially the first part, the one in the forest. It was beautiful, scary and fun and had great atmosphere. After going to the city - not so much. It became frustrating and rather boring. I feel like the designers gave up on trying to give us a beautifully creepy game and instead had a comepetition of who can come up with more ways to piss the player off. Well done, they succeded.

 

I would still recomend this game to anyone interested in visual design. B.E.A.U.T.I.F.U.L.

 

Exactly. I feel the same way.

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Sounds to me like you two just don't play old-school adventure games (confirmed by looking at your profiles). All adventure games are like this. This is how they work and you can find yourself sitting there for 20 minutes trying to get past one part, dying dozens of times before you figure it out. They can be very difficult to complete legit, even if you're "thinking" about it. Imagine playing games like this 20 years ago, when there was no internet and you couldn't just quickly look up the solution. I remember playing Zork back in the day and in those games if you got stuck, you could spend hours trying to figure it out or you just gave up on the game.

 

The developers aren't being lazy, this is how these kinds of games are designed... most popular games today in other genres actually require you to think even less and hold your hand when it comes to "what do I do next"... the only challenge is your skill in platforming or shooting.

 

If you don't like it, that's fine, but I think you're being a bit unfair calling the devs lazy and such. Lazy is an FPS where you can get shot a half dozen times, sit and wait for twenty seconds for the red screen to go away, then continue on to get shot another half dozen times.

Edited by Vyrastas
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I'm actually of two minds about the game - I'm in both the Vyrastas and purifico camps -, but I have to say that the TC's problems would seem to be his own and not the game's; I mean, calling the developers lazy seems borderline cracked to me - the actual design of the game is quite brilliant, and by that I mean not only the aesthetic of the game (which is like a side-scrolling Bergman film, or - this is a thought that kept occurring to me when I played it - what might have happened if Vampyr-era Carl Dreyer had made a Little Red Riding Hood movie), but the mechanics of the game, as well: the puzzles are brilliantly designed and the game has outstanding physics.

 

And when I say that the TC's problems would seem to be his own, I mean the harping about there only being one way of doing things and having to die over and over again in order to figure out how to solve the puzzles; if you did any due diligence on the game before buying it you probably should have had some sense of what you were in for - I mean, were you expecting some kind of open world game? and if so, why? Plenty of games have "only one way of doing things", it's just that they're designed to either disguise that fact or make you forget it; Limbo is the opposite: it works very hard to make you mindful of the fact that the slightest mis-step is going to result in a clinical and - no matter how often it happens - weirdly devastating death...Without a doubt there's a bit of cruelty on the part of the developers in how fiendish some of this stuff can be, but...Having to die in order to figure things out? I didn't find that to be the case; I died plenty when I played the game, but I quickly got used to the nature of the puzzles and didn't often feel like I was operating without a clue as to what I was supposed to do...

 

Anyways, purifico's point is an interesting one:

Nevertheless I enjoyed the game quite a bit especially the first part, the one in the forest. It was beautiful, scary and fun and had great atmosphere. After going to the city - not so much. It became frustrating and rather boring.
I, too, thought the first half of the game was much better than the second half, but most of that had to with rhythm: in the first half of the game there were more "null" moments - a few seconds where you would just traverse a landscape, uncertain of what would happen next: would a spider suddenly emerge from somewhere? would those creepy little children reappear to spring a trap or fire blow-darts at you?...The quiet moments when you made your way from one "area" to another were quite chilling and affecting; once you reach the "industrial" parts of the game the rhythm gets thrown off - there really aren't any "null" moments anymore, you move from trap to trap without any intermission and, so, the haunting atmosphere kind of evaporates because it's just one thing after another...A game like this really needs those intermissions in order for the tone to really seep into your bones, and once that stops happening it can - and I feel did, somewhat - become tedious and chore-like. Edited by Mitsuru Kirijo
had to "lowercase" the "p" in purifico
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  • 2 weeks later...

I enjoyed the first half of the game a lot more because of the 'damn, they are trying REALLY hard to kill me, and it's working' factor. It makes it fun to show to other people. Not so much for replay (I quit at the 5 deaths trophy for now, may go back someday), but really as a kickback to just how sadistic a game can get and still actually be enjoyable. Personally, in the first half, I was laughing every time I died to something new (which was several times per chapter). Hell, when I showed it to my friends, we were all laughing every time the player died. (it made it even funnier that the one playing is semi-afraid of spiders and was panicking at that 'boss' early on!)

 

The second half took that away and just made the deaths seem frustrating. There was no fun factor, just straight trial and error puzzling. The first half was a lot of trial and error too, but the style was done well enough that it felt like an adventure rather than a chore. I know that doesn't sound right, but it makes sense in my head...

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