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dkirschner's Vessel (PC)
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| [June 13, 2017 08:43:58 PM]
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Man, this is such a neat idea, but the game isn't fun to play. The story is throwaway for the neat mechanics, which involve liquid physics puzzles. You have a gun that sucks and shoots liquids (water and lava so far). There are machines that create little elemental automata when you fill them with liquid and power them up. You later get the ability to create the automata by getting "seeds" that you can sprout by yourself.
These automata are important because they do things like press switches and pull levers and create steam (when a water and lava one meet), and these things remove barriers, power machinery, and help solve puzzles. They can also bypass certain barriers that you cannot. Later on, some automata clone themselves and are enemies, so there are many different kinds to keep in mind.
Now, this all sounds really really cool in theory. But the controls are clunky, for one. It's a a puzzle platformer, and the running and jumping and grabbing things is awkward enough to have caused me countless missteps and deaths. There's a slight lag between pressing a button and the action happening. Trying to jump off of a moving object like a lever or spinning wheel is so imprecise. As with so many physics puzzle games, it is maddening when I know exactly what I'm trying to do but I can't get the objects to interact properly.
The other letdown is that I often don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. I mean, I know the overarching goals, but on a per puzzle basis, I'm scratching my head. There are large, fairly complex puzzles here, but the goals are unclear. This can be a good thing, as in goals that emerge through interaction with the puzzle, that you get closer to completing with new insight. But here I didn't get "aha!" moments. I got "Oh...I didn't think that would work. Okay." or "Huh? That's what I need to do? How the..." or "Wow this is a big puzzle and I see no clue as to what I should do. Hope these random guesses get me somewhere..." It's a lot of boring trial and error with lots of deaths and checkpoints the locations of which I do not know until I am respawned some way back.
This would be cool if the platforming was more precise and if there was just a bit more direction!
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dkirschner's Vessel (PC)
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Current Status: Stopped playing - Got Bored
GameLog started on: Tuesday 13 June, 2017
GameLog closed on: Tuesday 13 June, 2017 |
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