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jp's The Inner World: The Last Wind Monk (PS4)

[November 17, 2021 12:21:18 AM]

Oops. I started and then finished the game without writing anything in between. Oh well.

The PS4 version I have also includes the "prequel" (which I think came out before, at least based on the story). I meant to play the first one and then move on to the sequel. However, I goofed and ended up playing the sequel first...and, well, I'm not sure I'm ready for another old-school style adventure game.

This one certainly has character, I loved the art and the weird strange world the game takes place in, there is also a lot of "resonance" with...well, political issues and such. It's also a "true" adventure game in the real throwback sense of the word - collect stuff, combine stuff, use things on things and so on. However, I was super, super impressed by two of the game's features. I don't know if they're new/unique to these games or if they've become "standard" for adventure games?

(1) They solve the "hunt the pixel" problem a lot of these games have where it's not clear which things in the game are interactable and which are just background dressing. The solution is so simple, but also clever, you can with the press of a button, highlight all the things you can interact with (within a certain distance/radius of the character). That helps a lot. But, making things even better you can then cycle among them to make selection much easier! I used this feature so much!

(2) The game's hint system is super helpful AND clever AND pretty sophisticated (as far as I could tell). Sophisticated in that the messages/hints you get are automatically adjusted based on your progress. So, the hint message might say things like (I'm paraphrasing): you already have the item necessary for this in your inventory, or you need to complete another goal before you can complete the current one. The hints for each puzzle are also incredibly "deep" - rather than say, 3 hints per puzzle, a puzzle might have 20 or more...each providing a bit more information until the solution is given in its entirety. This makes it really hard to inadvertently get more help than you wanted and you can easily unlock further hints for a given puzzle - they really ease you in with indirect references, point you in the direction from which to get a vague clue, etc. I really enjoyed this flexbility and how I could adapt how much/little hints I wanted for a specific puzzle or moment. This was great especially when I wanted to confirm if I was on "the right track" and not waste time...so, a did a lot of "ok, I think I solved it, lets make sure before I spend time executing".