Sulphur on 13/7/2018 at 18:56
Thanks, guys. :)
@Thirth: I played Longest Night, which as henke notes is pretty light but has a good helping of the game's trademark banter. I'm in the middle of Lost Constellation, actually, and should be getting back to it soon because I want to see where it goes with its story device. That title theme is lovely, and reminds me a little of Aquaria's OST (also by Holowka, in case you haven't heard it yet). Aquaria's comparatively a bit twee in its composition, though, which might not be to everyone's taste.
Oh, and to confirm your point - Longest Night and Lost Constellation should indeed be accessible through the Extras option in the in-game menu.
Aja on 16/7/2018 at 22:29
You guys are convincing me pretty hard that I should pick this up for Switch, as soon as I get an SD card.
Aja on 2/1/2019 at 00:51
Well, I did it! I bought the game and have been playing it, and I think it's pretty great so far. I skimmed through this thread again but didn't want to spoil anything, so let me ask: do the mini games have any bearing on the story? I like playing bass but don't really feel like trying to master any of the songs, and I really don't want to play Demontower. Will I be missing out on much?
PigLick on 2/1/2019 at 01:31
I pretty much flubbed my way through the bass playing bits and only played a minimal amount of demontower, and I dont feel that I missed out on anything particularly.
Aja on 2/1/2019 at 02:52
Great! I will continue playing bad bass and no Demontower.
Aja on 14/1/2019 at 19:32
I finished it! Overall I thought it was excellent. I was particularly disturbed by how the game depicted Mae's psychotic break and subsequent depression. In fact, playing it late at night was kind of a mistake because it kept me up thinking about losing the ability to feel and the world being reduced to shapes and colours..
The ending was maybe a little abrupt, but it got realer than I was anticipating while still remaining open to interpretation, a balance that stories like this don't always achieve. After reading the microfiche articles, I was half-convinced that Mae was suffering from gas poisoning, but in retrospect I think that that tidbit along with lots of the other tidbits you find if you search everywhere exist more to establish the inter-relatedness of the town and its inhabitants rather than give clues as to what actually happened. I was sort of expecting a kind of Murikami-esque ending where all of the clues that have accumulated throughout the story amount to mostly window dressing and red herrings, the way his novels build up such a sense of mystery but then don't know what to do with it. But Night in the Woods is clever in that its story is both metaphorical and literal, and it makes sense on both levels. Maybe that's giving it too much praise, but I did feel that the ending was satisfying and about as clear as it could be given the tone they were going for.
The writing was some of the best I've seen in a game, and while the humour occasionally grated, tending toward a specific style no matter which character was talking, it was mostly hilarious and heartfelt, and I always felt invested in the world and its characters. It's a bit of a historical artifact in the way that it depicts the speech style of people my age when we were in our early 20s. So while Mae's immaturity could be annoying at times, it was always believable, as were the conversations with her friends. I played through Bea's story this time, and now I'd like to go back to see Gregg's. It sounds like you get to keep your journal, which is good, although I'm not looking forward to scouring the entire town every day again. It was fun the first time, but I wish I could've seen everything in one playthrough.
Anyway, if I had made a list in 2017, like Sulphur I would've put this near the top. Now I'm moving on to Oxenfree, which some say is better, some worse, but right away I see that it was actual voice acting, and I dunno how I feel about that.
PigLick on 15/1/2019 at 02:02
I bounced right off Oxenfree. I can see why people might like it, but I found its tone grating.
Aja on 15/1/2019 at 16:48
I tried it for a couple minutes, and after Night in the Woods I found the voice acting jarring. I considered playing it with subtitles only, but I realize that with games like this it usually takes a while to get accustomed, so I'll probably give it a couple hours first. John Walker said it was superior to NITW, but I think I enjoyed NITW more than he did.
Marecki on 18/1/2019 at 16:42
I have spent a ridiculously large amount of time playing Night in the Woods, in both 2017 and 2018 (I blame the Weird Autumn edition). In fact, according to my Steam stats I have so far played it for almost 60 hours - the second largest number for my whole library, after Brutal Legend (almost 70 hours - not really surprising given that game too hasn't got fast travel and that even if it did, I spent quite a while simply driving around in the Druid Plow with the volume cranked up to as high as I could get it without the neighbours complaining) and in the same ballpark as Atom Zombie Smasher and Bastion. This is of course somewhat inaccurate because it doesn't take into account endless hours I have spent on certain non-Steam games such as T/T2 (which I am positive are high in the lead even considering them independently and without counting the time I spent on fan missions), SS/SS2, the first Deus Ex, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (which I replay with amazing regularity), or Super Meat Boy - but it is quite something, especially considering we are talking about a game that features an overall quite small world, is almost completely linear, and is more of a walking-around simulator than a full-fledged adventure game with complex puzzles. Why have I spent so much time on this game? I must say it is quite hard for me to say for sure but I would say this is because of two things.
One, it really rewards you for exploring. An extra collectible for Mae to place in her room here, a couple of extra lines of witty dialogue there, another sketch in the diary - to me it has been more than enough to make me want to keep on searching for them. It also helps that that what you can find changes from game day to game day. Which reminds me - those of you who haven't seen the tram-tunnel section added by the Weird Autumn edition, go find it! It might be my favourite part of the game.
Two, the game world might be small but it is far from being bland. All those characters you get to interact with, all the glimpses into their lives, all the places you can visit... Somewhat ironically, even though in-game Possum Springs is supposed to be a dying town the game world feels very much alive. And you know what else it feels like? Home. I have just realised it. I was going to only say that for all the decay, human sacrifice, Mae's condition and so on I perceive the overall tone of Night in the Woods as somewhat optimistic - but it is more than that. It feels familiar. Peaceful. Not sure if anyone else feels this way about it or if I am even making sense here - but that's what it feels like to me.
Incidentally, the more I think about it the less convinced I am that the Great Old One in the mine is real. Okay, scratch that; what I really want to say is that it doesn't really matter if it is real or not. To me, it is really about the cultists believing that by throwing people in they prevented Possum Springs from dying. And that in the end, schizophrenic Mae and her outlook on life turn out saner than they are.
As for Oxenfree, I like it. It is nowhere near as good as Night in the Woods and it definitely says something about the main characters that I have found them considerably less memorable than the submarine ghosts as a whole - but it really gets to me emotionally. In fact, I feel more sad for than scared by the aforementioned ghosts, especially since I heard Clarissa say in the final cave why they hadn't moved on... Plus I really love a) the pacing of the story as a whole, b) the small but significant differences between the first play-through and subsequent ones (like what happens if you sit on the chair - you know which one I mean), and c) the whole meta-game / large time loop / the only way to win is not to play at all thing. I've got no opinion about the voice acting, telling the truth this is something I pay very little attention to in video games.
demagogue on 21/1/2019 at 03:04
I remember playing Lost Constellation right when it came out because it popped up when I visited Itch. I went in just thinking it was another Itch game, and on those grounds I was impressed that it was a cut above most Itch adventure games, with pretty graphics and whimsical writing... It reminded me of a Nifflas game on those grounds (with a slightly different tone).
That said, it didn't really speak to me at the time. The story didn't really gel, and to me it boiled down to a game of mini-games, which is always a risk. But, probably largely, it has a tone that's speaking more in the voice of the generation after me than mine. I liked it enough to finish it and see where it was going, and there were individual scenes and dialogs I liked, but later NITW came out and was getting rave reviews, and I probably held off on it as long as I have from that experience with LC. I still eventually got it on sale and will get around to playing it.
Reading other people's reviews and my own experience with LC, it's making me think about the idea of a game "speaking to people", since that's a common feature I'll read about NITW and the vibe I got from LC. I'm trying now to think of a game that really spoke to me to offer a contrast. What's coming to mind first are the interactive fictions that came around the early 2000s (Get a Grip, Edifice, Photopia), characters that are more stoic and taking things as they come without being nearly as opinionated or feeling the need to voice some dismissive or irreverent aside. There's a generational difference there, I don't doubt, but really at the root is my whole way of design thinking... I largely just trust a world & god-of-the-game that's agnostic to me and doesn't really care whether I'm there or not, and the systems just agnostically react to me, and the character to them, without editorializing what I or the world ought to be.