though it's aesthetically and narratively immaculate, it pains me to say that i don't like this game that much. i love everything this game brings to the table except its gameplay, because it is a very shitty roguelike. it lacks so many QOL features that you really need to make the genre work. you could argue QOL features would make it too easy when it's obviously going for a "difficult game to emphasis the oppressive and hopeless nature of overcoming the adversity" type of design, but i would disagree. your runs will get dominated by how good your drops are. and god help you if you get stuck with that shitty starting pistol because the game just doesn't give you any guns.
a regular issue i'd run into with this game is that i'd have runs that went extremely well or extremely poorly with very little middleground. this was almost always determined by if i got a good gun early and/or other consumables that were useful (and not useless ones like shocking springs). during those good runs, i'd have a lot of fun and feel that rare kind of stress that video games evoke that makes you feel good. meanwhile, when i had my bad runs, i would think that this was a stupid game masquerading as a brilliant one. that's not even mentioning how boss runs can be egregious and require so much time and effort to invest in that gets wasted when the game decides to give you dogshit to work with. the derelict citadel in general has some of the worst shit to deal with because you have an excessively long boss run combined with enemies that actively punish you for killing them with melee (the broken mech guys) or ones that will suicidebomb you if you don't focus your entire attention on killing them. there's challenging, and then there's just frustrating. this game does not walk that line even close to well.
and i know it's easy to comment "skill issue" or whatever but even when i was doing clean-up runs at the end of the game for the trophies and ostensibly had beaten the game, i was still getting runs that i couldn't get going because of drops. i think a very quick and easy band-aid solution to this would be to add the option for the player to pick between the god awful starting pistol and another randomly picked base gun. there's still bad guns (the shotgun, the disc gun) but at least they're not death sentences like the pistol. if we're going deeper, i think the game would either have to do a lot of restructuring to accommodate how actively unfun it can be to play (retool and balance enemies, change what secret areas can give out, make guns more guaranteed to spawn at certain locations, etc.). or, fuck it, just don't make it a roguelike. i genuinely love so much of this game, but i simultaneously detested its gameplay, and i often just wished it had been any other genre besides roguelike. i can imagine this game playing 20x better as a metroidvania with slightly tweaked mechanics. hell, maybe just turn it into a more platform-y type of third-person shooter like what control was going for. just, something had to be better than this.
i hate to belabor this point but i need to stress that this game plays worse than almost everyone i know has implied and i felt like i was taking crazy pills playing this mid-at-best roguelike formula. i found the setting and the themes of this game captivating, and they were truthfully what kept me going when this game repeatedly burned me and my time. there's a great, fantastic game buried underneath a lot of dirt here. i just wish i could've played that one instead of the one i got.
a regular issue i'd run into with this game is that i'd have runs that went extremely well or extremely poorly with very little middleground. this was almost always determined by if i got a good gun early and/or other consumables that were useful (and not useless ones like shocking springs). during those good runs, i'd have a lot of fun and feel that rare kind of stress that video games evoke that makes you feel good. meanwhile, when i had my bad runs, i would think that this was a stupid game masquerading as a brilliant one. that's not even mentioning how boss runs can be egregious and require so much time and effort to invest in that gets wasted when the game decides to give you dogshit to work with. the derelict citadel in general has some of the worst shit to deal with because you have an excessively long boss run combined with enemies that actively punish you for killing them with melee (the broken mech guys) or ones that will suicidebomb you if you don't focus your entire attention on killing them. there's challenging, and then there's just frustrating. this game does not walk that line even close to well.
and i know it's easy to comment "skill issue" or whatever but even when i was doing clean-up runs at the end of the game for the trophies and ostensibly had beaten the game, i was still getting runs that i couldn't get going because of drops. i think a very quick and easy band-aid solution to this would be to add the option for the player to pick between the god awful starting pistol and another randomly picked base gun. there's still bad guns (the shotgun, the disc gun) but at least they're not death sentences like the pistol. if we're going deeper, i think the game would either have to do a lot of restructuring to accommodate how actively unfun it can be to play (retool and balance enemies, change what secret areas can give out, make guns more guaranteed to spawn at certain locations, etc.). or, fuck it, just don't make it a roguelike. i genuinely love so much of this game, but i simultaneously detested its gameplay, and i often just wished it had been any other genre besides roguelike. i can imagine this game playing 20x better as a metroidvania with slightly tweaked mechanics. hell, maybe just turn it into a more platform-y type of third-person shooter like what control was going for. just, something had to be better than this.
i hate to belabor this point but i need to stress that this game plays worse than almost everyone i know has implied and i felt like i was taking crazy pills playing this mid-at-best roguelike formula. i found the setting and the themes of this game captivating, and they were truthfully what kept me going when this game repeatedly burned me and my time. there's a great, fantastic game buried underneath a lot of dirt here. i just wish i could've played that one instead of the one i got.