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Crack_Smoking_Warlock

3
Posts
A member registered Dec 24, 2020

Recent community posts

The amount of work that went into this is pretty impressive, but honestly I found it way too hard and gave up after my third game over. I get that the dolls function as a life system, but forcing the player to replay the entire thing from the beginning if they run out seems really, really punishing, especially considering the amount of times the game throws unforseeable things at you. My deaths were:

-Dying to the tree after running out of ammo. I hadn't met the witch yet and didn't know totems could be used defensively.

-Dying to a pig in the village while fighting one of the four legged panther like enemies. I guess firing a gun near them angers them?

-Losing two lives to whatever that invisible thing is in the graveyard, then finally dying to the resurrected kitten after killing it accidentally. Is it invincible after resurrection? I put 5 rifle shots and an axe swing into it and it didn't die.


Gameplay wise, I noticed that especially in the forest bullets fired from the rifle have a weird tendency to not connect. I'm guessing the hitbox on them might be a bit big and they could be getting caught on trees. I think having some sort of hud indication as to if the rifle is loaded or not might be a good idea - I'm not sure if it takes a moment to finish the reload or not, but I had a few moments where I pulled out the rifle and it wasn't loaded even though I could have sworn I reloaded it. I also think maybe having some indication of the invisible enemy in the graveyard would be nice (quickly fading footsteps where it moves, soft laughter as an audio cue etc.) and - if it is supposed to be some sort of ghost - making it possible for the player to run through it; I got caught on it and suffered multiple hits trying to run past.

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I'm confused - your saying the notes with numbers on them are a code, and once you understand it you can find a hint in the highlighted number? How does a player with no previous experience in this cypher method decode it?


Edit: So after some googling, I learned about something called the Polybius cypher, which essentially assigns double digit numbers from 1-5 to letters in a system like 11=A, 12=B, 21=F etc. I decoded one message using that cypher to be "five Matthew", which obviously means minute hand at 5. Sorry if I come across like a highly critical ass here, but my point about puzzles not requiring outside knowledge is that outside of someone who has studied Cryptology before and actually heard of this cypher, there is no way I can fathom a player approaching, understanding and solving this puzzle. It's not so much a solution to work out as it is just a knowledge test - if you know this method, it's easy, if you don't, it's impossible. It would be like presenting a puzzle that consists of 5x5 to someone who has never heard of multiplication, they would have no idea what to do. If other comments here hadn't eluded to cryptology, I could have stared at those notes forever and never understood them, simply because there is nothing about a series of double digit numbers that makes my brain go "wait, what if 13 means C?"

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The aesthetics of this, especially the sound design, are really well done but gameplay wise it feels like you took all the worst aspects of the series (particularly Silent Hill 3) and threw them in for some reason:

-Death pits. Just no. It's obnoxious as hell and does nothing but serve to irritate the player, especially when many of them seem to be intentionally obfuscated by the camera angles.

-Bizarre camera angles. Fixed camera and tank controls can work really well, but right now there are quite a few spots in the motel where items you can grab, enemies and pitfalls are difficult to see because of their positioning. There is also this weird tendency to have areas where you traverse a narrow walkway with the camera either very zoomed out so you can't make out where your protagonist is moving, or where the camera angle suddenly changes dramatically halfway across a narrow plank.

-Extremely high damaging enemies on Hard. Yes, I know, it's Hard difficulty for a reason, but having the flying enemies kill the player in 2-3 hits when it takes multiple energy drinks to recover that lost health is silly.

EDIT: Got stuck at the clock puzzle. I have 3 notes which highlight the numbers 43-23-32. I see you stated in another comment that this requires knowledge of cryptography - I think it's an extremely bad idea to expect esoteric outside knowledge from the player when approaching a puzzle, just like with the infamous Shakespeare puzzle in SH3. I have no idea even with a basic understanding of what cryptography is how you are supposed to approach this. You have 3 numbers, seemingly with no relation to each other whatsoever, in a sea of equally unrelated numbers, and from this you are supposed to determine which clock hand to manipulate and what value to set it to. At first I thought it was simply the position of the highlighted number in the text document, which gives a solution roughly around 6:35:35, but this wasn't the case. The other solution I thought of was that the numbers are directly indicating clock hand position, since a clock face goes from 1-60, and the numbers are analogous to Second-Minute-Hand based on which values are higher than the others, for example: 23=Second because it's the lowest, then 32 for Minute, and lastly 43 for hour, which gives us the solution of 8:23:32, but this also was not it. I'm at a total loss as to what else you could expect the player to think here.

There's also a padlock with a 3 letter code, which I have found absolutely nothing relevant for at all, and a book that talks about POW's during the Vietnam War using a system of tapping on the ceiling and pipes to communicate...which also doesn't seem to be relevant to anything at all.