Ghostrunner took a concept I'd wanted for a while and made it real. Like Hotline Miami, it's a series of touch-of-death, speedrunning, kill puzzles but now in full 3D as a parkouring cyber-ninja. It didn't perfect its own twist on the formula, but it was more than good enough to start and I'm glad we're seeing more, soon.
When you play well, it's smooth and satisfying in a way few other first person games are. When you play bad, at least the respawn is instantaneous and the checkpoints are fair.
When it janks up… it can be a bit aggravating, I won't lie, but thanks to that instant retry it was hard to stay mad. And sometimes the things you do to try and recover are their own entertainment.
I was honestly shocked when I first played the game in a Demo shortly before release that the game controls as smoothly as it does. It's designed from an almost exclusively flow-centric philosophy. Almost nothing is animation based. Input is almost never ceded from the player even when the player control is pushed by something. It's easy to catch a high, responsive framerate.
(Well, maybe that last part was less true in mid 2020 for most people)
It can sometimes backfire a bit: feel a bit slippery and cause some funny physics mishaps for the player. But to me, that's the ideal trade off if you can't yet reach perfection with this concept.
The game's bigger missteps are probably with its attempts to "shake up" the gameplay with the puzzlier sections and the boss fights, and both because they suddenly force the player to go at their speed, not the other way around (with some exceptions).
In my mind, the whole game is a puzzle of efficiency, so having explicit puzzle sections is no issue. It's in fact a great idea to give the player a few low reflex requirement activities to do between the high points. Unfortunately, they have a tendency to involve elements that require waiting for an animation or forcing a fixed move speed while navigating a simple space giving the stuck-at-40mph-on-a-70mph-highway, "Traffic" effect.
Not all of them are like this, and I actually enjoyed a few, but it's a shame the last boss in particular gets the Traffic effect the hardest of them all with its simon-says-esque routine.
It's interesting to compare this now to Hi-Fi Rush (in hindsight) where one of the highlight bosses was even more so a simon-says, but because of the expectations set with the game putting EVERYTHING on a fixed beat from the start, it works amazingly there. So really, Ghostrunner's fault is just in that it occasionally fumbled its player-directed pacing after establishing it so prominently in the core game loop.
The overwhelming majority of the game does not have this problem, however and if you catch with the core game loop, the primary memories you'll get out of this game will be the fun you had there.
…
Mmm. I do feel like I need to state that I love first person platforming games, though. I saw at least one friend on my Steam list with 120 deaths on the last platforming segment compared to my 12. I know the appeal of that kind of gameplay is… niche.
But maybe this is the game that gets you into it? 😅
When you play well, it's smooth and satisfying in a way few other first person games are. When you play bad, at least the respawn is instantaneous and the checkpoints are fair.
When it janks up… it can be a bit aggravating, I won't lie, but thanks to that instant retry it was hard to stay mad. And sometimes the things you do to try and recover are their own entertainment.
I was honestly shocked when I first played the game in a Demo shortly before release that the game controls as smoothly as it does. It's designed from an almost exclusively flow-centric philosophy. Almost nothing is animation based. Input is almost never ceded from the player even when the player control is pushed by something. It's easy to catch a high, responsive framerate.
(Well, maybe that last part was less true in mid 2020 for most people)
It can sometimes backfire a bit: feel a bit slippery and cause some funny physics mishaps for the player. But to me, that's the ideal trade off if you can't yet reach perfection with this concept.
The game's bigger missteps are probably with its attempts to "shake up" the gameplay with the puzzlier sections and the boss fights, and both because they suddenly force the player to go at their speed, not the other way around (with some exceptions).
In my mind, the whole game is a puzzle of efficiency, so having explicit puzzle sections is no issue. It's in fact a great idea to give the player a few low reflex requirement activities to do between the high points. Unfortunately, they have a tendency to involve elements that require waiting for an animation or forcing a fixed move speed while navigating a simple space giving the stuck-at-40mph-on-a-70mph-highway, "Traffic" effect.
Not all of them are like this, and I actually enjoyed a few, but it's a shame the last boss in particular gets the Traffic effect the hardest of them all with its simon-says-esque routine.
It's interesting to compare this now to Hi-Fi Rush (in hindsight) where one of the highlight bosses was even more so a simon-says, but because of the expectations set with the game putting EVERYTHING on a fixed beat from the start, it works amazingly there. So really, Ghostrunner's fault is just in that it occasionally fumbled its player-directed pacing after establishing it so prominently in the core game loop.
The overwhelming majority of the game does not have this problem, however and if you catch with the core game loop, the primary memories you'll get out of this game will be the fun you had there.
…
Mmm. I do feel like I need to state that I love first person platforming games, though. I saw at least one friend on my Steam list with 120 deaths on the last platforming segment compared to my 12. I know the appeal of that kind of gameplay is… niche.
But maybe this is the game that gets you into it? 😅
2 Comments
@Detectivefail Yeah, the instant retry is the secret sauce to making this kind of experience work, just like Hotline. Keeps the feedback loop for the player's learning very visceral and immediate. No space in between to let distractions take you out of your focus.
Detectivefail
6 months ago
I will admit I died more in the last platforming segment & during this boss oof... Thankfully, the instant retry is well instant lol. So I didn't mind dying again and again.