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Xprimentyl

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Random Souls question (I know), but I just saw this


And it made me wonder if it's common, if even possible, for an invader, to HELP the player they invade? I know you can just call for help, but was curious if invaders, following "proper invader etiquette" will actually try and help you out with douchebag bosses.
No, typically invaders (red phantoms of ill intent) are there to do everything EXCEPT help the invaded. Not sure if invaders can even damage mobs because in the many times I've been invaded, I've never seen one try. At most, they'll try to kite you into mobs to make beating them that more difficult as they don't aggro mobs like the invaded does. And As far as I can recall, invaders can't enter a fog wall, so can't be in a boss fight with the invaded regardless of their intentions. Not to be mistaken with other "phantoms" that aren't invading, but were summoned into your game to[i/] help and can enter boss fights with the person who summoned them.

I never understood the whole "etiquette" thing with Dark Souls' online play. The community decided at some point that you're supposed to bow or something before initiating combat, but it's like "fuck you, dude; I was playing my game peacefully, and YOU decided to try and fuck my shit up; I owe you no courtesies or formalities. Invasions aren't a gentlemen's duel; they're effectively a breaking and entering, and I'm protecting my shit!
 

happyninja42

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No, typically invaders (red phantoms of ill intent) are there to do everything EXCEPT help the invaded. Not sure if invaders can even damage mobs because in the many times I've been invaded, I've never seen one try. At most, they'll try to kite you into mobs to make beating them that more difficult as they don't aggro mobs like the invaded does. And As far as I can recall, invaders can't enter a fog wall, so can't be in a boss fight with the invaded regardless of their intentions. Not to be mistaken with other "phantoms" that aren't invading, but were summoned into your game to[i/] help and can enter boss fights with the person who summoned them.

I never understood the whole "etiquette" thing with Dark Souls' online play. The community decided at some point that you're supposed to bow or something before initiating combat, but it's like "fuck you, dude; I was playing my game peacefully, and YOU decided to try and fuck my shit up; I owe you no courtesies or formalities. Invasions aren't a gentlemen's duel; they're effectively a breaking and entering, and I'm protecting my shit!
Yeah I know the people you specifically call to help you can...you know...help you :LOL: , I was just curious if it was even mechanically possible for the reds to, perhaps upon seeing your situation, be like "eh, I feel bad for this dude, let me help him clear this area, and then I'll curbstomp him."
 
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NerfedFalcon

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No, typically invaders (red phantoms of ill intent) are there to do everything EXCEPT help the invaded. Not sure if invaders can even damage mobs because in the many times I've been invaded, I've never seen one try. At most, they'll try to kite you into mobs to make beating them that more difficult as they don't aggro mobs like the invaded does. And As far as I can recall, invaders can't enter a fog wall, so can't be in a boss fight with the invaded regardless of their intentions. Not to be mistaken with other "phantoms" that aren't invading, but were summoned into your game to[i/] help and can enter boss fights with the person who summoned them.

I never understood the whole "etiquette" thing with Dark Souls' online play. The community decided at some point that you're supposed to bow or something before initiating combat, but it's like "fuck you, dude; I was playing my game peacefully, and YOU decided to try and fuck my shit up; I owe you no courtesies or formalities. Invasions aren't a gentlemen's duel; they're effectively a breaking and entering, and I'm protecting my shit!
Formality is for duels that you got into intentionally through red summon signs. If you got invaded, then all bets are off; you do whatever it takes to win, even if that means hitting your opponent while they're bowing.
 

NerfedFalcon

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Finished the first disc of Metal Gear Solid; out of all the things about old games that you might miss, switching between discs during gameplay isn't one of mine. Especially since, as usual, the second 'half' only contains about a third of the total content, which is something I didn't really like about Final Fantasy 7 either, that disc 3 basically only contains the final dungeon and a bunch of optional sidequests that it's easy to not realize even exist to begin with, and which take untold hours of grinding to complete.

Well, at least Metal Gear doesn't have a lot of grinding, even if it does have backtracking; you can go to the armory or the offices multiple times to grab more ammo, but since it drops in boss fights if you run out it isn't totally necessary as long as you're either thorough the first time through, or just good enough at sneaking.
 

Drathnoxis

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Finished The Sexy Brutale.

It was a lot of fun, while it lasted. It's a bit on the short side at 7 hours, moreso because you're saddled with such an unusual mechanic and the game doesn't really make the most of it, but the story's intriguing, develops entertainingly (your understanding of the central mystery keeps changing in an organic, exciting way) and ultimately wraps up with a satisfying, unexpected twist. Wish there was more to it, but with so many perfectly good games overstaying their welcome, I don't mind.
I'm surprised you found the twist satisfying, because for me it completely ruined the story. To quote myself from 3 years ago.


Groundhog's Day loops are my pet genre. I absolutely love the concept and find it criminally underused in fiction. How excited was I then to find The Sexy Brutale, a well received game consisting of a time loop where you must save 9 individuals from their seemingly inevitable murder. Majora's Mask was an obvious inspiration, as in addition to loops masks also play a large part in the game. The visuals are nice and detailed well enough to make the mansion interesting to explore and the music is very good with audio cues from certain events being audible from anywhere in the mansion at the appropriate times. However, as an execution of the time loop concept, I find this game to be a massive failure.

First I will talk about how the mechanics and how they fail to utilize the time loop concept with minor spoilers, and then I will discuss the story with full spoilers.

The deaths are all isolated to their own little wing of the mansion and the guests almost never interact with each other except those that are saved in pairs. I can think of one occasion where there is a conversation between two guests who are not part of the same puzzle. What kind of lame party is this, anyway? Everybody is off doing their own thing the whole night! In addition, when you solve a puzzle the game jumps to the time that the murder would have occurred, plays a cutscene, and then resets the day. This means that one of the main fascinations of the time loop concept for me is completely absent: "what if I had done things differently?" There is no opportunity to experiment with how changing earlier events affects later events or to play with different permutations of events. In theory saving a guest should have ramifications, they would then be free to interact with other guests, or to get into more trouble later on, or make different options possible, but because nothing that happens in the mansion affects anything else, none of this is ever possible.

The fact that time jumps when you solve the puzzle may be one of the biggest betrayals of the concept in the game. If the focus of your game is that you are working against a rigid schedule of events that all take place after a set amount of real time, the worst thing you can do is to make arbitrary skips in time. It takes away any impact the clock has and makes the world feel fake. Why did I just lose 4 hours? Did my character just stand there the whole time? The only time time should skip is if the player does a voluntary action to forward time, or if the player character is incapacitated somehow. Resetting time early, likewise robs the setting of it's verisimilitude. You can never see the ramifications of your actions, even if you should be able to within the loops rules.


Another major problem is that the puzzles are far too easy. Most people will probably only require one rewind for most puzzles, if even that. I took longer, just because I wanted to follow everyone to hear all the dialogue, but the solutions are trivial right up to the end. There are usually only 2 or 3 items in each area and the interaction points are similarly scant. There simply aren't enough options to be able to be wrong. To make matters worse, there is no final puzzle that brings everything together. The game clearly seems to be building up to one final run where you put it all together and save everyone in one night. Toward the end you get "fast travel," all guest movements are revealed to you, and the mansion FINALLY opens up. Nothing ever comes of it, however. This is a real shame because another fascinating thing about time loops is being able to use your repeated experience to basically become a god and be able to live a perfect day. To use your foreknowledge and practice to know just where to be and what to do to make the impossible possible. But this isn't utilized in the game, in fact, you cannot even attempt it because the game resets after you save a single person.

As an aside, I just want to talk about how awful the "fast travel" system is. You unlock it near the end and it let's you walk into any of the six(I think?) mirrors in the mansion and then you go to the worst hub ever. The hub consists of four rooms with 1 or 2 mirrors each separated by four long hallways, with no indication of which mirror leads to which part of the mansion. So if you want to fast travel, you need to remember where the closest mirror is, run to it, run all around the square hub until you find the mirror you need, then run to where you want to go. Most of the time I found it was just faster to ignore the mirrors and run straight where I needed to be.

Masks were also a very poorly implemented feature, despite being such a prominent focus. It's nothing like Majora's Mask, where switching between different masks was vital to gameplay, story, and sidequests. Here it's just a wrapping for acquiring new powers and has no impact or relevance beyond that. The mask is just absorbed into your own mask, and that's the end of it. Almost all of the mask powers are contextual button presses to open various forms of barriers to boot.

Okay now it's time to talk about the story so **ENDING SPOILERS**

The end just sucks! It was some sort of dream, hallucination, or metaphor the whole time? What the heck!? I came here for a time loop! There are precious few games that focus on time loops and then they have to go and fall back on hackneyed story convention #4: it was all a dream! I feel betrayed!

The time loop concept doesn't even work with this idea, or it meshes clumsily at best. So Lucas is punishing himself by imagining himself murdering his friends in ways more horrible than they actually died. He is changing their murders slightly from time to time to make himself feel worse. This is not what is represented by a time loop where things happen the same way every day. The time loop establishes something concrete. That at 12:57 Reginald Sixpence will enter the office, he will open the safe at 1:16, and will be murdered by 2 of diamonds at exactly 3:45. It's precise. Fixed. It will happen exactly that way, every cycle, unless the player interferes. There are even the audio cues letting you know that the events are still happening in the other parts of the mansion at their respective times. And this is supposed to be the representation of the imaginings of a madman, torturing himself with fake memories out of guilt? I just can't buy it, it doesn't work like that. Nobody could be so precise.

There was no point to saving anybody, because they were all already dead, and died in a completely different manner than the murders we were preventing. It was pointless on top of the already pointlessness of saving them in a time loop. We are so far removed from the reality of what happened that our actions have no relevance except as some incredibly abstract metaphor. The mask powers were pointless as well.

And what the heck was he thinking? Insurance fraud... WITH DYNAMITE!? "Oh yes, you see it was a complete accident! Everybody in the whole mansion decided to get out for some fresh air and a midnight stroll and then the whole place just EXPLODED. Can't imagine why. Must have been a gas leak. I couldn't have been involved, I was outside too!"
Ridiculous! And I can't imagine what kind of premiums he would be paying on a place like that! The place must be worth over half a billion dollars with all the priceless treasures he had hoarded. How could he possible get something like that insured?

In the end it feels like a bait and switch. I came for a time loop where I stop everybody getting murdered with my time powers, but the game turned into a recurring dream where I give up and accept that they are all already dead. The mechanics were badly implemented for a time loop game, but I guess it doesn't even matter in the end because it wasn't actually one to begin with.


P.S. I'm still intending to get to Grim Grimoire one day, I swear!
 
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Dalisclock

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Yeah I already had enough of the shock arrows before doing that beast, that I didn't need to climb up and gather any first. All the beasts work that way basically. "Gather X number of Y type arrow before assaulting the beast" So, pro tip, just gather up 20+ of all the arrow types and bombs and stuff from shops, and you will be able to just bypass that "Go here to gather Y arrows"


Yes, very irritating.
I didn't know where to get shock arrows(not areas) so I was stuck with running/swimming up the mountain. But yeah, I'll make sure to check that out next time. I need to restock arrows anyway in the near future.
 
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Dalisclock

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No, typically invaders (red phantoms of ill intent) are there to do everything EXCEPT help the invaded. Not sure if invaders can even damage mobs because in the many times I've been invaded, I've never seen one try. At most, they'll try to kite you into mobs to make beating them that more difficult as they don't aggro mobs like the invaded does. And As far as I can recall, invaders can't enter a fog wall, so can't be in a boss fight with the invaded regardless of their intentions. Not to be mistaken with other "phantoms" that aren't invading, but were summoned into your game to[i/] help and can enter boss fights with the person who summoned them.

I never understood the whole "etiquette" thing with Dark Souls' online play. The community decided at some point that you're supposed to bow or something before initiating combat, but it's like "fuck you, dude; I was playing my game peacefully, and YOU decided to try and fuck my shit up; I owe you no courtesies or formalities. Invasions aren't a gentlemen's duel; they're effectively a breaking and entering, and I'm protecting my shit!
I've seen videos of red phantoms actually waving and dropping items for the hell of it, then leaving. However, I don't assume this to be the norm at all and I'm normally really to kill or run back to the bonfire the moment I see "Invader" side. In DS2 I got irritated by constant invasions one time and kept killing my net connection just as the invader was about to get close to me, just to annoy them. Because fuck'em.

And I've actually seen people complain in reddit threads and the like about people being "mean" to them while they're invading, because apparently people are supposed to just fucking enjoy it or something. Interestingly, a lot of those people(AKA Griefers) also want to hang out in DS2, because DS3 is apparently to hard to pull of successful invasions in or something. Which is fine because I'm never planning on playing DS2 again but I will eventually do DS3 again someday.
 

Chupathingy

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I've seen videos of red phantoms actually waving and dropping items for the hell of it, then leaving. However, I don't assume this to be the norm at all and I'm normally really to kill or run back to the bonfire the moment I see "Invader" side. In DS2 I got irritated by constant invasions one time and kept killing my net connection just as the invader was about to get close to me, just to annoy them. Because fuck'em.
I once had a dude invade me, drop off 20 copies of Gwyn's soul along with a bunch of level 15 weapons, and then leave.
 
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NerfedFalcon

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I once had a dude invade me, drop off 20 copies of Gwyn's soul along with a bunch of level 15 weapons, and then leave.
It only really works if you do it from far enough away from the host that they don't have time to get the wrong idea and attack you.
 

XsjadoBlayde

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I never understood the whole "etiquette" thing with Dark Souls' online play. The community decided at some point that you're supposed to bow or something before initiating combat, but it's like "fuck you, dude; I was playing my game peacefully, and YOU decided to try and fuck my shit up; I owe you no courtesies or formalities. Invasions aren't a gentlemen's duel; they're effectively a breaking and entering, and I'm protecting my shit!
I like to give ppl the benefit of the doubt and stand completely still to see what they do first when they invade. If they bow, then it's met with the same. If they attack, well, that's just rude and deserves a little bit of a quick dodge roll to retaliatory murder. Though once I pretended to be a vase for as long as possible. But that was only to test an item, honest!
 

gorfias

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The kids got me the Oculus Quest 2 for Father's Day. It is crazy fun and easy to use. I'm having problem with the PC app which would allow me to use it with some 30 VR games I have on PC already, but ITMT, I have a number of apps on the headset already, including The Climb 2:
 
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hanselthecaretaker

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I'm surprised you found the twist satisfying, because for me it completely ruined the story. To quote myself from 3 years ago.


Groundhog's Day loops are my pet genre. I absolutely love the concept and find it criminally underused in fiction. How excited was I then to find The Sexy Brutale, a well received game consisting of a time loop where you must save 9 individuals from their seemingly inevitable murder. Majora's Mask was an obvious inspiration, as in addition to loops masks also play a large part in the game. The visuals are nice and detailed well enough to make the mansion interesting to explore and the music is very good with audio cues from certain events being audible from anywhere in the mansion at the appropriate times. However, as an execution of the time loop concept, I find this game to be a massive failure.

First I will talk about how the mechanics and how they fail to utilize the time loop concept with minor spoilers, and then I will discuss the story with full spoilers.

The deaths are all isolated to their own little wing of the mansion and the guests almost never interact with each other except those that are saved in pairs. I can think of one occasion where there is a conversation between two guests who are not part of the same puzzle. What kind of lame party is this, anyway? Everybody is off doing their own thing the whole night! In addition, when you solve a puzzle the game jumps to the time that the murder would have occurred, plays a cutscene, and then resets the day. This means that one of the main fascinations of the time loop concept for me is completely absent: "what if I had done things differently?" There is no opportunity to experiment with how changing earlier events affects later events or to play with different permutations of events. In theory saving a guest should have ramifications, they would then be free to interact with other guests, or to get into more trouble later on, or make different options possible, but because nothing that happens in the mansion affects anything else, none of this is ever possible.

The fact that time jumps when you solve the puzzle may be one of the biggest betrayals of the concept in the game. If the focus of your game is that you are working against a rigid schedule of events that all take place after a set amount of real time, the worst thing you can do is to make arbitrary skips in time. It takes away any impact the clock has and makes the world feel fake. Why did I just lose 4 hours? Did my character just stand there the whole time? The only time time should skip is if the player does a voluntary action to forward time, or if the player character is incapacitated somehow. Resetting time early, likewise robs the setting of it's verisimilitude. You can never see the ramifications of your actions, even if you should be able to within the loops rules.


Another major problem is that the puzzles are far too easy. Most people will probably only require one rewind for most puzzles, if even that. I took longer, just because I wanted to follow everyone to hear all the dialogue, but the solutions are trivial right up to the end. There are usually only 2 or 3 items in each area and the interaction points are similarly scant. There simply aren't enough options to be able to be wrong. To make matters worse, there is no final puzzle that brings everything together. The game clearly seems to be building up to one final run where you put it all together and save everyone in one night. Toward the end you get "fast travel," all guest movements are revealed to you, and the mansion FINALLY opens up. Nothing ever comes of it, however. This is a real shame because another fascinating thing about time loops is being able to use your repeated experience to basically become a god and be able to live a perfect day. To use your foreknowledge and practice to know just where to be and what to do to make the impossible possible. But this isn't utilized in the game, in fact, you cannot even attempt it because the game resets after you save a single person.

As an aside, I just want to talk about how awful the "fast travel" system is. You unlock it near the end and it let's you walk into any of the six(I think?) mirrors in the mansion and then you go to the worst hub ever. The hub consists of four rooms with 1 or 2 mirrors each separated by four long hallways, with no indication of which mirror leads to which part of the mansion. So if you want to fast travel, you need to remember where the closest mirror is, run to it, run all around the square hub until you find the mirror you need, then run to where you want to go. Most of the time I found it was just faster to ignore the mirrors and run straight where I needed to be.

Masks were also a very poorly implemented feature, despite being such a prominent focus. It's nothing like Majora's Mask, where switching between different masks was vital to gameplay, story, and sidequests. Here it's just a wrapping for acquiring new powers and has no impact or relevance beyond that. The mask is just absorbed into your own mask, and that's the end of it. Almost all of the mask powers are contextual button presses to open various forms of barriers to boot.

Okay now it's time to talk about the story so **ENDING SPOILERS**

The end just sucks! It was some sort of dream, hallucination, or metaphor the whole time? What the heck!? I came here for a time loop! There are precious few games that focus on time loops and then they have to go and fall back on hackneyed story convention #4: it was all a dream! I feel betrayed!

The time loop concept doesn't even work with this idea, or it meshes clumsily at best. So Lucas is punishing himself by imagining himself murdering his friends in ways more horrible than they actually died. He is changing their murders slightly from time to time to make himself feel worse. This is not what is represented by a time loop where things happen the same way every day. The time loop establishes something concrete. That at 12:57 Reginald Sixpence will enter the office, he will open the safe at 1:16, and will be murdered by 2 of diamonds at exactly 3:45. It's precise. Fixed. It will happen exactly that way, every cycle, unless the player interferes. There are even the audio cues letting you know that the events are still happening in the other parts of the mansion at their respective times. And this is supposed to be the representation of the imaginings of a madman, torturing himself with fake memories out of guilt? I just can't buy it, it doesn't work like that. Nobody could be so precise.

There was no point to saving anybody, because they were all already dead, and died in a completely different manner than the murders we were preventing. It was pointless on top of the already pointlessness of saving them in a time loop. We are so far removed from the reality of what happened that our actions have no relevance except as some incredibly abstract metaphor. The mask powers were pointless as well.

And what the heck was he thinking? Insurance fraud... WITH DYNAMITE!? "Oh yes, you see it was a complete accident! Everybody in the whole mansion decided to get out for some fresh air and a midnight stroll and then the whole place just EXPLODED. Can't imagine why. Must have been a gas leak. I couldn't have been involved, I was outside too!"
Ridiculous! And I can't imagine what kind of premiums he would be paying on a place like that! The place must be worth over half a billion dollars with all the priceless treasures he had hoarded. How could he possible get something like that insured?

In the end it feels like a bait and switch. I came for a time loop where I stop everybody getting murdered with my time powers, but the game turned into a recurring dream where I give up and accept that they are all already dead. The mechanics were badly implemented for a time loop game, but I guess it doesn't even matter in the end because it wasn't actually one to begin with.


P.S. I'm still intending to get to Grim Grimoire one day, I swear!
My question is, do they ever explain the reasoning behind the name?
 

happyninja42

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I didn't know where to get shock areas so I was stuck with running/swimming up the mountain. But yeah, I'll make sure to check that out next time. I need to restock arrows anyway in the near future.
You can usually find the various arrow types in shops, scattered about. IIRC it can be a bit random, and they might only sell a handful, but i would just buy them and hang onto them. I'm trying to remember if there was a mob that would drop them consistently, but I honestly can't recall.
 

Dalisclock

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You can usually find the various arrow types in shops, scattered about. IIRC it can be a bit random, and they might only sell a handful, but i would just buy them and hang onto them. I'm trying to remember if there was a mob that would drop them consistently, but I honestly can't recall.
I'd bought other arrows in shops prior to that but hadn't seen any shock arrows for sale. Granted, the Zora city is one of the first regions I've really explored other then Kakariko village and the area(Heteno) where you find the science lab where the totally not a 10 year old scientist helps you unlock the camera and detector on the slate. I think the Zora mention not being able to touch the shock arrows or something so I guess that explains why you can't just buy them there(and to make you do the quest).

I have a feeling once I find more towns this will be a lot easier.
 
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Drathnoxis

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My question is, do they ever explain the reasoning behind the name?
It's the name of the casino the game takes place in. I don't think they ever say why it's called that in game. Probably the reason is the creators aren't native English speakers and they thought it sounded cool.
 
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Drathnoxis

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Despite my last posts on the game I'm still playing Noita. I finished a 21 hour run where I broke the game in half. I had over 10 million health and 100 million gold, my wand slowed the game down every time I fired it and killed an 11 orb final boss that has over 100k health in 2 hits. I did actually save scum 2 times because I got a little cocky and wanted to see if I was able to kill squidward a little earlier than I should have and died, twice. If I would have waited a little longer before taking him on I would have had a completely legit run, no problem.

It was a lot of fun actually being able to screw around with spells and just explore for a change without being paranoid about every new spell killing me and the new enemies around the next corner. I don't think I'll do any more long runs of the game though, I'm satisfied now. I think I want to try some more normal runs before I move on to something else. Still need a legit win with no save scums.
 

Johnny Novgorod

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Replaying Hollow Knight. Love this game.

It's the name of the casino the game takes place in. I don't think they ever say why it's called that in game. Probably the reason is the creators aren't native English speakers and they thought it sounded cool.
It's an English game though. Cavalier Studios (UK) hired Tequila Works (Spain) to work on the art assets well into the development of the game.
 

Worgen

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Whatever, just wash your hands.
Playing Horizon Zero Dawn at long last. Visually stunning game, but I'm feeling a little bummed out by the gameplay. So much vital gameplay elements stuck behind the skill tree. I mean seriously, you need to unlock the stealth takedown??? That makes no fucking sense. I know I just need to tough it out, but as someone who likes to do every side quest the moment I get it, it feels like the game is slowing me down with its bullshit.
Horizon is one of those games that I want to like but I just cant really get into. I got like 20 hours in and just left it. Something about the gameplay loop just bored me.

Right now I'm playing Ender Lilies, its really good.

And Battlefleet Gothic 2, I played a demo of it or the first one awhile back and never really got into it, but I'm enjoying it a lot more now.
 

Dalisclock

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Right now I'm playing Ender Lilies, its really good.
Please let us know how you feel when you're ready to talk about that. I've had my eye on that for a long time, mostly because I love the art style but also because it reminds me of Salt and Sanctuary. I've heard it's more of a Metroidvania then a Soulslike(and I'm fine with that) but still it looks interesting.