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Hyper Light Drifter - Sarah McLachlan is the protagonist

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Jeran
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Re: Hyper Light Drifter - Sarah McLachlan is the protagonist

Post by Jeran »

As a filthy casual, i play games for story, or watch let's play of them to get that story. I will use Cheat Engine to get around anything that gates me from enjoying the story at a reasonable pace. I just dont get fun from having to practice something over and over to get past it. It used to be fun as a kid, but these days i dont have time. Hiding story content behind extra difficulty challenges is in my opinion bad design. Hiding little extras or easter eggs, thats fine. But to those who want to 100%, they also tend to see beating the challenge as the reward.
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Re: Hyper Light Drifter - Sarah McLachlan is the protagonist

Post by Money »

Alice wrote:So to put it simply: Fuck anyone who has issues because some people have zero self control. Got it.

Allowing the option for people to make it easier is not the same as requiring people to make it easier. Not allowing that option means that anyone who struggles with it is basically locked out of a portion of a game they paid for. The reverse is not true at all for people who want more of a challenge.
I mean that's just kinda how video games in general work? You dont get to continue a video game if you can't beat the part you're on, unless that part is optional. Like what's the point of a reward for those who are skilled at the game if you can get it with zero effort?
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Re: Hyper Light Drifter - Sarah McLachlan is the protagonist

Post by Alice »

MoneyMan wrote:I mean that's just kinda how video games in general work? You dont get to continue a video game if you can't beat the part you're on, unless that part is optional. Like what's the point of a reward for those who are skilled at the game if you can get it with zero effort?
1.) People who want a challenge are perfectly capable of enacting self-imposed challenges.
2.) The point of a game is to enjoy it. Not feeling as if you got your money's worth from the game is typically going to cause you not to enjoy it.

You guys who are arguing against me keep missing one very vital fact that I keep mentioning: It is 100% feasible for someone who wants a challenge to still have a challenge when allowing more casual players to deal with things. The reverse is not at all true unless the player goes out of their way to cheat, something not everyone is capable of doing to begin with.
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Re: Hyper Light Drifter - Sarah McLachlan is the protagonist

Post by Sebby19 »

Maybe you should talk to the game creator and ask them why they made that design choice? You seem alone in your thought, and I think all of us are just wasting our time arguing.


Anyways, many others and I thought for sure raocow would seek out the rest of the keys. He even stated you wanted to get past a certain barricade blocking stairs in the North, among other stuff.
Seems impossible to predict which games he chooses to 100%.
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Re: Hyper Light Drifter - Sarah McLachlan is the protagonist

Post by Voltgloss »

Best ending thumbnail possible.

raocow, thanks for play. I enjoyed playing along, and watching, both very much.
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Re: Hyper Light Drifter - Sarah McLachlan is the protagonist

Post by raocow »

Sebby19 wrote: Anyways, many others and I thought for sure raocow would seek out the rest of the keys. He even stated you wanted to get past a certain barricade blocking stairs in the North, among other stuff.
Seems impossible to predict which games he chooses to 100%.
That's fair, haha. Basically I play until I feel like I have played 'enough'. Basically after I feel like I did all the worthwhile activities, you know? But just hunting down the last few rooms that are going to contain clothes I don't know what they do or more money I can't do anything with doesn't feel like it would add much to my experience. I feel like I have 'played the game' and I'm happy with this.

I'll admit it's not exactly a scientific process.
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Re: Hyper Light Drifter - Sarah McLachlan is the protagonist

Post by WhimsiKarren »

I was hoping I'd see some conversation about the plot of the game! Since not, I guess I'll star some!

The weird jump from stabbing the big ol' phantom thing to stabbing the crystal seems to imply that that fight didn't actually happen; it's a metaphor for the disease he's been fighting the entire game. It's why that thing kept appearing and "killing" him. The big pink diamond could be a source of the disease, possibly a form a radiation threatening to destroy the world a second time over since this is a post post-apocalyptic world.

I've seen theories of the dog being an AI to the whole system leading people to shut it down due to causing so much distress in the world as well. The pink stuff that it looks like the big diamond secretes is distributed everywhere throughout the world and used as a power source in those fragments you collect; it's also often explosive as well. Down south you even see the giant factory where those titans and mass produced hobgoblins are made; that pink stuff is an incredible power source but also incredibly radioactive and could be said to have led to the apocalypse shown in the beginning.

More on the hobgoblins, they're used by every villainous faction; they're a biological weapon. The whole southern area is all the weapons mass produced from the old era. The lizard people ended up digging through it and waking up its security; those robot bosses. Because the main diamond still existed, the whole system was still running and making weapons and hobgoblins and even building titan parts; you see the eyes and the heart after various bosses. There's also that giant robot? monster after one that tried to break out of its containment too.

Basically this game is amazing both in gameplay and in story/lore/worldbuilding.
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Re: Hyper Light Drifter - Sarah McLachlan is the protagonist

Post by Le Neveu de Rameau »

Welp, know we know that Zelda-style adventures totally do work for raocow LPs!
WhimsiKarren wrote:Basically this game is amazing both in gameplay and in story/lore/worldbuilding.
World-building, absolutely. Story--as in not simply lore and plot in and of themselves, but how they're delivered to the player--I'm not so sure. In fact, I think it may be one of the more noticeable misfires of an otherwise fantastic game.

I appreciate the boldness of the decision to tell the story entirely through images, but I don't think it quite worked in the end (and when I say "the end", I mostly mean "ultimately", but also sort of "the ending", to which my initial reaction was largely along the lines of "what on earth just happened?"). As it stands, precisely because of its complexity, I don't think this was really the type of story to be told in such broad brushstrokes. A bit of mystery is good--we're rummaging through the ruins of an ancient civilization; records are going to be patchy and incomplete, and just like the characters themselves, we'll never quite know for sure what happened in the past. Which is intriguing, and encourages people to use their imaginations to try to fill in the history of this world. My issue is that we actually know even less about what's happening in the present, and that feels less compelling. Ambiguity is fine, allowing for multiple interpretations of events is fine. But as we started to reach the games conclusion, it felt less like these things and more like missing essential information in order to process what's actually happening (and something quite concrete is very definitely happening)--I kept waiting for missing pieces to fall in which never did. If this game were more abstract an allegory- or fable-like--that is to say a little hazy on the horizons--a gauzier, more expressionistic main plot more could still work. But precisely because this game seem to put such a focus on backstory and world-building, making the storyline itself vague and told through implication seems an odd decision. It's not the edges of our field of view that are hazy here--quite a number of intriguing details can be made out on the horizon, in fact, and yet the area immediately around us nevertheless remains in submerged in a haze. It's a bit disconcerting in the end.

Still it was a treat to watch nonetheless. Truly a gorgeous game, with a level of atmosphere I haven't seen since Knytt stories. I looked forward to each episode of this, and like raocow, I'm a bit sad to see it end. But all things must.
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Re: Hyper Light Drifter - Sarah McLachlan is the protagonist

Post by Money »

Alice wrote:1.) People who want a challenge are perfectly capable of enacting self-imposed challenges.
2.) The point of a game is to enjoy it. Not feeling as if you got your money's worth from the game is typically going to cause you not to enjoy it.

You guys who are arguing against me keep missing one very vital fact that I keep mentioning: It is 100% feasible for someone who wants a challenge to still have a challenge when allowing more casual players to deal with things. The reverse is not at all true unless the player goes out of their way to cheat, something not everyone is capable of doing to begin with.
You're p much discrediting an entire subset of games though, "challenge games", of which i'd consider Hyper Light Drifter at least in part one. These games are about the feeling of actually overcoming something, instead of just "going through" it, and in fact this is why completing a game is called "beating" it in the first place. Dark Souls, for an easy example, wouldn't be anywhere near as satisfying if the only challenges were self imposed and born of dissatisfaction to begin with. There's always gonna be at least some people who aren't able to beat a game, no matter how easy it is. That's not the developer's fault: it's on the player to either improve their skill or give up. Ideally they should have known before buying it the level of difficulty vs their skill level. Not every game is meant to be beaten by everyone, and that's fine. Games don't "owe" you garanteed success, otherwise the game would be boring.
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Re: Hyper Light Drifter - Sarah McLachlan is the protagonist

Post by kitikami »

I really liked the storytelling of this game. I appreciate ambiguity in storytelling, especially when a key part of the atmosphere is built around wonder and mystery. Stories that build up some kind of mysterious lore and then clarify or explain all the important details in the end more often than not leave me feeling dissatisfied and wishing they had just left the same amount of ambiguity in the conclusion as in the build-up. So for this game to commit fully to that type of storytelling is right in line with my tastes. Plus this is basically the anti-SMBX of storytelling, which is nice.

My only objection with the game is how violent it is, and especially with it being pretty graphic about it, but the stylized/pixelated art style goes a long way to making that more tolerable, and contrasting the violent gameplay with such gorgeous visuals created an interesting tension.
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Re: Hyper Light Drifter - Sarah McLachlan is the protagonist

Post by Alice »

Either I somehow failed to submit this post or a mod deleted it for some reason and didn't bother saying anything. Since I heard nothing and don't see a reason it would've been deleted I'll have to assume the former.
MoneyMan wrote:You're p much discrediting an entire subset of games though, "challenge games", of which i'd consider Hyper Light Drifter at least in part one. These games are about the feeling of actually overcoming something, instead of just "going through" it, and in fact this is why completing a game is called "beating" it in the first place. Dark Souls, for an easy example, wouldn't be anywhere near as satisfying if the only challenges were self imposed and born of dissatisfaction to begin with. There's always gonna be at least some people who aren't able to beat a game, no matter how easy it is. That's not the developer's fault: it's on the player to either improve their skill or give up. Ideally they should have known before buying it the level of difficulty vs their skill level. Not every game is meant to be beaten by everyone, and that's fine. Games don't "owe" you garanteed success, otherwise the game would be boring.
My point here isn't necessarily that it cant be challenging. Just that it shouldn't arbitrarily changes its own rules to do so. (I could've been clearer on this form the beginning. Or have waited until after I'd finished waking up, lol.) See Super Meat Boy for example. You cannot fundamentally change the difficulty in SMB without changing what the game is as a whole. The difficulty in a given level, even if it's quite high, is not something totally arbitrary that ignores its own rules. These arena challenges on the other hand are exactly that. The entire rest of the game does not reset your available heals to arbitrarily enforce a specific level of challenge where these arena challenges ignore the way it was handled in the rest of the game to do just that.

Also I really wouldn't consider this a "challenge game" at all personally. I'd reserve that classification for games such as Wings of Vi, IWBTG, SMB, or other similar games where the high level of challenge is an integral part of the game's design. I wouldn't consider this game's challenge on the same level as those and as far as I've seen that hasn't been advertised as a major part of its appeal either. Even the Steam store page for it states "Easy to pick up, difficult to master; enemies are vicious and numerous, hazards will easily crush your frail body, and friendly faces remain rare." which is the opposite of what's typical for most challenge games. (I'd exclude Meat Boy from that though because that is one that is easy to pick up. Just unlike the other two I gave as an example SMB has a very decent difficulty curve whereas those other two start difficult and only get more difficult.)
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Re: Hyper Light Drifter - Sarah McLachlan is the protagonist

Post by thatguyif »

Alice wrote:My point here isn't necessarily that it cant be challenging. Just that it shouldn't arbitrarily changes its own rules to do so. (I could've been clearer on this form the beginning. Or have waited until after I'd finished waking up, lol.) See Super Meat Boy for example. You cannot fundamentally change the difficulty in SMB without changing what the game is as a whole. The difficulty in a given level, even if it's quite high, is not something totally arbitrary that ignores its own rules. These arena challenges on the other hand are exactly that. The entire rest of the game does not reset your available heals to arbitrarily enforce a specific level of challenge where these arena challenges ignore the way it was handled in the rest of the game to do just that.
Well, it goes back to the point I made earlier: This is an optional space, where the rules could be changed in a way that doesn't impact the real game as a whole. An isolated environment. As someone noted earlier, there's no way of knowing what the player has by the time they can reach this place. Maybe they have all five health slots, maybe they haven't upgraded that part at all. My guess is programming-wise, there wasn't really a function for them to set a specific number of health pack slots for the player to have in a specific spot without messing everything else up, and three health packs was likely too low for survivability purposes.

I feel you're just making a cyclical, solipsistic argument that basically says "This game should never change in function whatsoever because I will get frustrated, and that will ruin things for me." Your statement "A lot of players feel compelled to 100% the games they play" doesn't change the fact that 100%ing the game is optional, and that the compulsion you speak of is self-inflicted. It's not the game's fault if you completely refuse to accept your limitations. I mean, the way you phrase it, criticizing the game because the final mile in 100%ing is too difficult is like writing a negative review about a game after spending 80+ hours playing it: It begs the question "What are you even doing with your life?"
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Re: Hyper Light Drifter - Sarah McLachlan is the protagonist

Post by SAJewers »

Le Neveu de Rameau wrote:Welp, know we know that Zelda-style adventures totally do work for raocow LPs!
Yep. If Startropics left any doubts, this answered it. I'll definitely be suggest Zelda-style adventures in the next patreon poll.
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Re: Hyper Light Drifter - Sarah McLachlan is the protagonist

Post by Le Neveu de Rameau »

kitikami wrote:I really liked the storytelling of this game. I appreciate ambiguity in storytelling, especially when a key part of the atmosphere is built around wonder and mystery. Stories that build up some kind of mysterious lore and then clarify or explain all the important details in the end more often than not leave me feeling dissatisfied and wishing they had just left the same amount of ambiguity in the conclusion as in the build-up. So for this game to commit fully to that type of storytelling is right in line with my tastes. Plus this is basically the anti-SMBX of storytelling, which is nice.
I like the sense of mystery and wonder, too, and I agree that some ambiguity (especially concerning the world's past) is essential for that; I just think the game went a bit too far in obfuscating what our protagonist is supposed to be doing in the here and now. It struck me while watching the final cutscene that the intro strongly implies that the world is under an immediate threat (akin to whatever cataclysm happened in the past), and that the ending implies that it is now free of this threat. However none of the rest of the game hints at what this threat actually is supposed to be. There's some local conflicts with tyrannical rulers, sure, and the protagonist had his fits of glitches, but where's this danger to the world as a whole which the intro implies and the ending assumes we're well aware of? This feels less like a deliberate mystery than a communications breakdown. The origins of the threat may lie shrouded in mystery, but that it's there at all shouldn't.

Indeed, what little information we do get about the threat--or at least the final boss, which I'm assuming has something to do with the implied threat--is via the text that appears on the library wall after you activate the monoliths. So in order to get just enough information to hint at the gravity of your final opponent, you have to a) hunt down a series of collectables hidden throughout the world, b) realize that this will cause a series of symbols to appear in a random room you have no reason to go back to on its own, and where there's nothing to indicate that anything special should happen there after you activate all the monoliths, c) realize that these symbols are not just decorative, but a real cypher hiding actual information, and d) decrypt this cypher. Now, that's all pretty complicated and oblique, but that's not really my main issue here. My main issue is that this blatantly violates the principle of "show, don't tell" used for the rest of the story. We're still getting a bunch of exposition via text dump; the text is simply made extra-difficult to find and read. This strikes me as the point where the game leaps from "innovative storytelling which is perhaps somewhat unclear in practice" to "cultivating obscurity for obscurity's sake".

Don't get me wrong, I still like the story, and I think the world the game takes place in is super-cool on the whole. I just think it went a little too far in trying to be mysterious, and not necessarily in the right places. If it had simply refused to compromise its core concept of visual storytelling for the sake of clarity, that would be one thing, but the fact that it does compromise it for the explicit purpose of introducing further unclarity feels vaguely insulting. Because durnit, this game is good enough that it doesn't have to resort to cheap tricks like that.
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Re: Hyper Light Drifter - Sarah McLachlan is the protagonist

Post by kitikami »

I didn't mind the cypher text providing some of the story, especially since I don't see any of it as really being central to the game. It kind of reminds me of the analects from FFXIII (which is another piece of storytelling I liked a lot), in that it builds on the in-game lore with in-universe historical text, but presented less as exposition than as a partial archaeological transcript with missing context that is less meant to answer the questions you are already wondering about than to flesh out the sociological aspects of the world and present new connections to wonder about. They aren't geared to explaining something to a person unfamiliar with the world, as exposition would, but rather as brief snippets of commentary from an in-game figure (possibly a poet) already familiar with the story.

Except in this case it is much more of an Easter Egg since no one could be expected to get the information from those texts just from playing through the game normally. So having the apparent gibberish being an actual cypher doesn't really change the experience of playing the game, it just deepens the world-building for people who want to actively research it, while still preserving the ambiguity and mystery in the rest of the story. I thought it was genuinely a cool touch that added to the game, and when I found out the monoliths actually meant something, I was always eager to see 10204307's transliterations.

I can definitely see the point that the game doesn't convey clearly enough what is going on or why you are doing any of what you are doing, and that to the extent that the monoliths are meant to clarify what is going on, that's not really a helpful way to do so. And I think in a game that wasn't executed so well in other aspects, it might bother me somewhat, but I think this game is compelling enough in its own right that what it does give in the way of story-driven purpose is fine for my tastes. There is still enough going on that I kept looking forward to each new episode to see where it would go next, rather than getting frustrated that there wasn't enough clarity or justification for what was happening.
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