as a presentational piece taken on its own? it's really good, great visuals, great music, very cool.

the catch here is that you have to play the actual game, which is way, way too easy and trivial, and never really gets any more difficult than the first couple puzzles in portal and antichamber. you know, the ones where you're just being taught how to press a button or put a cube on a pressure plate. at least half of the time spent in this game is walking through hallways, pressing buttons, or grabbing cubes off of trees and putting them in their color-designated receptacle, all of which are more tasks of persistence than of being able to solve anything.

begins to approach some interesting puzzle concepts once or twice in that last stage, but it never really gets there. shame, since it looks and sounds so good

*Shrug*

Trying to get better at dropping games I'm not clicking with and not forcing myself through them, and I guess Myst III is next up on the chopping block.

Not because I think it's bad or anything. The panoramic interaction scheme here is the best and most intuitive the series has seen yet, and the bits of story I've seen so far have been fun, and some of the puzzles I've done have been neat as well. I'm just not really locking into the vibe as much as I did with Myst. Feels too trial and error with the story being too forward.

I think Myst [original] works the best for me since you're piecing together everything, not just the puzzles. Once Riven comes along, the Myst series now has capital L Lore and it's not so mysterious anymore, just fantastical (as well as the puzzles being far too difficult/trial-and-error-y for me to be able to parse without a guide). That lack of mystery is heightened to a fever pitch here, to the point where the "Myst" name stops really making a whole lot of sense. I can tolerate old school trial and error-y point&click puzzling through gritted teeth, but it's hard to really justify it in my head when the atmosphere isn't really as opaque as the puzzles (to no one's surprise, I am not the biggest point & click fan lol).

It does just feel like more of the same to me, only not as good. If you're ride or die for this series coming out of Riven, then that's probably still pretty dope, but I tenuously like Myst and tenuously dislike Riven, so there's not much going for me here.

the worst shit ever. fuck those fucking bear traps and fuck that guy with the gun. actually unplayable without a guide and even then there's like never a moment it's not miserable. only fun I had was streaming to friends and pretending to be a 3 subscriber youtuber and being fake scared at everything and even that i was completely tired of less than halfway through

good for realigning your perspective on what a 1/10 is

edit: this is $40 on steam what the fuuuck

friends were saying "hop on trove?" as a joke and we did not last an hour, lol.

reminds me of this minecraft modpack I played a bit back in the day that restructured the entire game to be a dungeon crawler action rpg. wish i remembered the name, but i doubt i could find it now. strange duality of extremely simplistic and brain-dead combat, paired with 10 years of feature creep mechanics and menus. it's very obviously a game made in the wake of minecraft, with building and mining mechanics, but I never got to the part where that's ever anything more than an unimportant side-gimmick (if such a part exists).

feels like a fake video game that the main character in a cartoon would get really addicted to for a single episode.

played 10 hours back in 2020.

the most fun i had was in the character creator, the rest was a series of increasingly tedious and lengthy quests that consisted of things like "walk 500 meters to the north to this person and press e on them" or "go to this area and kill X enemies", layered with dozens of confusing and unintuitive menus.

which, to be fair, has been an issue with almost every MMO i've tried, but i've particularly never been a fan of the WOW style real-time rpg gameplay that proliferates through so many of them. admittedly i've had very limited MMO experience, but its bizarre that the only one ive tried with combat that wasnt mindnumbing was wizard101 lol