¡Recently, Abandoned; Games!

For me, Salt & Sanctuary was the worst culprit in that way. It's literally just "hey, what if Dark Souls, but in 2D". At least Blasphemous has a lot of its own style.

I thought it was dull, dull, dull. All the areas looked so samey to me.

Hopefully it can have more of an identity in the sequel.

It's been 42 years since Rogue and we still use 'roguelike', so maybe 'soulslike' is here to stay. Though I like the 'procedural death labyrinth' term proposed to replace 'roguelike'; what could be a good description of a soulslike that doesn't invoke 'souls'?

Stiff, clunky and obtuse RPG survival adventure games. Or SCORPGSAG for short.

Just about to add Disco Elysium to the abandoned pile. Absolutely love the game, but the load times are too much. Every set of stairs, every door... This is on PS4- is it any better on PC?

Ffvii remake

Actually everything. I'm a tad salty

Clunky, obtuse role-playing struggle, encountering repetitive, unforgiving nemeses.

CORPSERUN

We’re getting there, we can workshop this

I see what you did there.

Hollow Knight, third playthrough. It's pretty enjoyable and fun for the most part, even if combat is pretty simplistic and repetitive. Checkpoints are a big problem, e.g. in The Hive the only checkpoint is in the beginning of the stage, if you don't kill the boss it's all that crap all over again.

There's an upgrade that lets you make your own checkpoints, but it's a double edged sword. It fixes the game by allowing you to set checkpoints in front of boss fights, but at the same time it trivialises the rest of the game by allowing you to set checkpoints almost anywhere you want. It would have been better, it would have been good game design to simply do proper checkpoints in the first place, God knows why they chose not to.

It's ok (if not great) for the most part. 8/10. But then I'm in the White Palace again. The game has to zoom out here so you can see where you're going and what's happening, but it doesn't. Need to jump down? Leap of faith, good luck, die because you had no way of knowing what's down there. Need to go up with wall jump? Boom, buzzsaw on your head at lightning speed. Die because you had no way of knowing, and return to the checkpoint of 5 minutes ago. This would be acceptable with generous checkpoints, but it doesn't have that, it's remarkably stingy with them. It's just crapping on you for whatever reason I don't know.

Which Metroidvanias have checkpointing? If they used checkpoints, it would undermine the mechanic of having to retrieve your body/Geo when you die. I think the lack of checkpoints and need to manually save at benches is intended to add tension like in Dark Souls. It adds to the atmosphere and sense of being lost/danger/exploration- having made progress but not knowing when you'll next find a bench can be quite nerve racking. It's annoying when you die and have to repeat a lot but I do think it adds a lot to the game. It's no different to any of the Igavania games as far as I know, they also use save rooms, same as Metroids

Can't you move the view by holding the up and down buttons for a few seconds in HK?

I didn't mind the save benches to be honest. Its not meant to be convenient. It's meant to punish you, which makes dying all the more tense. Having said that, if you're late game and have the extra abilities, traversing is usually very quick and painless.

I like how if you avoid saving, none of the enemies respawn. There's a challenge in which you have to get from one side of the map to the other without taking a single hit, but if you clear a path before accepting the challenge it becomes very easy.

Yeah with "checkpoints" I meant the benches/save rooms, as they effectively work as checkpoints in these games. I do appreciate that in HK and Axiom Verge, you don't lose your progress if you die, e.g. the map remains revealed and bosses stay dead. Igavanias are more punishing in this regard because it's an oldschool save/load game system. SotN could drive me crazy with this when it feels like you're exploring half the castle but can't find a fucking save room, and then you die and the last 20 minutes of play are undone.

Anyway, yeah basically what Molar said. I'm fine with bosses/sections that involve a lot of dying on the way to figuring them out, but only if there's a checkpoint nearby. If I'm sent back 5 miles every time, only for the next try of what's going to be several more, that pisses me off. If Bloodstained or Mega Man did that, I believe it'd ruin those games.

As for looking up, yeah you can do that while standing on solid ground. Not while you're climbing a wall or nail-jumping on a sawblade or whatever.

As for respawning enemies, I wasn't aware either that enemies stay dead until you save. Is that a Souls thing? I haven't played Dark Souls, but Nioh does that too. Kudos to The Messenger, which respawns enemies as soon as their spawn point comes on screen again. That's just so much more natural, just like God intended.

Red Faction: Guerilla: Just a replay, but still, I would've liked to stay with it longer. Unfortunately I'm again reminded how bad the game is at actually letting the player engage with the by far best feature: The building destruction physics. There are way too many mission types that don't lead to situations where the player gets to engage with them and the third area had almost none of the mission types that worked well. I mostly like helping to defend or attack locations with resistance buddies and a few others. Part of the problem is that outside of these mission types the enemies just keep respawning. It also easily leads to deaths and because there is no quicksave a lot of repetitive travelling. That's on Normal difficulty. It got a bit better once the second armor upgrade became available, but that was about ten hours into the game. The upgrade-system is also too restrictive. Especially the armor upgrades would be really helpful early on. Being able to refund things would also have improved the experience for me.