Zero Punctuation: Stardew Valley & Superhot

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Glad to see I wasn't the only one who thought SuperHot outstayed its welcome after 3 levels. We get, you're kinda sorta' maybe iffy quirky.

You married Leah, didn't you Yahtzee?

Ah, so that's her name. Thanks for letting us know.

Who? I remember hearing he was moving to the States, but was he engaged too?

 

[Nazulu]

Holy Hell! Maybe it's because I got one hour sleep. Maybe it's because I'm worried and paranoid right now. Or maybe it's because I hate coffee, but that was fucking hilarious!

You were on fire in this one mate. Or should I say "Super Hot"

Back Off Sandman!

 

[Darth_Payn]

Glad to see I wasn't the only one who thought SuperHot outstayed its welcome after 3 levels. We get, you're kinda sorta' maybe iffy quirky.

You married Leah, didn't you Yahtzee?

Ah, so that's her name. Thanks for letting us know.

Who? I remember hearing he was moving to the States, but was he engaged too?

I think in the game, he married the first woman he met, just to get it over with.

I guess there's going to be some kind of "metanarrative" schtick in games like these since Undertale. Sounds like a topic for Extra Punctuation.

 

[Marik Bentusi]

I feel like Super Hot may have been kind of a victim of its prototype's own success. The vague version of the full game's plot and the "shoot red dudes in a world with almost no textures" worked fine enough for the scope of the prototype, but both seemed to have been stretched thin for the full release - and even then the campaign ended up being pretty short, even if there's a lot of extras in the package. Overall I got the impression that they didn't want to cock up people's expectations after the prototype got such a good response.

The lack of a more complicated artstyle I can understand given the game's budget, but I think they could have provided more content by providing more challenging adversaries and environments that take advantage of slow mo being a central mechanic, like aiming for small weak spots or executing complicated acrobatics and combos you'd usually never be able to pull off. Part of the cinematic appeal of slow mo is after all showing the audience something too complicated to fully comprehend in real time (unless it's simply being used for dramatic emphasis, which Super Hot can't really go for).

And yeah the story also seemed pretty weak once it got an inch deep. Which tends to be the case with mystery stories once the mystery gets revealed (the blanks always seems spookier in our heads), but in this case in particular it felt like someone liked that type of meta narrative and only managed to copy it at a surface level, like someone citing pretty-sounding poetry when it doesn't actually apply to a situation. Which ultimately made it come across as cleverer than it actually was.



But all that aside, I think the devs' biggest mistake was hiding a BIG chunk of the content in the "Endless" and "Challenges" sections.

I think people would have been waaay more satisfied with Super Hot if the mapping work in those modes had been put towards additional campaign maps and the gameplay variants would have been introduced over the course of the game. Could have fluffed it like Hotline Miami masks, could have done a linear progression and fluffed it as the protagonist's powers fluctuating/the game updating. There were some really fun alternative game modes, but none of them have maps designed to take advantage of them, and there are some pretty cool Endless maps, but you always have to play them in the standard game mode (with optional timers).

 

[Dalisclock]

Glad to see I wasn't the only one who thought SuperHot outstayed its welcome after 3 levels. We get, you're kinda sorta' maybe iffy quirky.

You married Leah, didn't you Yahtzee?

Ah, so that's her name. Thanks for letting us know.

Who? I remember hearing he was moving to the States, but was he engaged too?

I think in the game, he married the first woman he met, just to get it over with.

I guess there's going to be some kind of "metanarrative" schtick in games like these since Undertale. Sounds like a topic for Extra Punctuation.

Well, the first woman who was available, because Robin is the first woman you meet but she's married to Demetrius. You can marry her daughter though.

 

[springheeljack]

Superhot is one of those rare games in which I kind of wish it had no story. I really loved the gameplay and how badass it made you feel. I wasn't into the story though because it was trying real hard to be all meta and it showed

 

[weirdee]

You married Leah, didn't you Yahtzee?

Most people did, according to the message board poll, so I'm guessing it's because it's too hard to track down anybody in the town and they went for the person who happened to be closest and most easily impressed by flowers, salad, and wine.

 

[chadachada123]

Superhot is one of those rare games in which I kind of wish it had no story. I really loved the gameplay and how badass it made you feel. I wasn't into the story though because it was trying real hard to be all meta and it showed

I only just played the prototype just two days ago, and was having an absolute blast. I had been wondering what the story in the full game would be like, if any, and while it's a shame that they apparently didn't keep it as minimalist as possible, so long as I get me an endless mode I think I'll be set.

I'm particularly excited about watching the replay in real time, since that will make epic moments look truly amazing.

 

[springheeljack]

Superhot is one of those rare games in which I kind of wish it had no story. I really loved the gameplay and how badass it made you feel. I wasn't into the story though because it was trying real hard to be all meta and it showed

I only just played the prototype just two days ago, and was having an absolute blast. I had been wondering what the story in the full game would be like, if any, and while it's a shame that they apparently didn't keep it as minimalist as possible, so long as I get me an endless mode I think I'll be set.

I'm particularly excited about watching the replay in real time, since that will make epic moments look truly amazing.

Honestly it is not a bad story its just kind of there. The good thing is you can knock it out really fast and get right to the good stuff

 

[Dalisclock]

Does it mean that Yahtzee isn't exactly immune to dating sims then?

I'm reminded of his review of Killer is Dead where the talks about the dating mode there, where you have to(have the option to?) seduce women by thrusting gifts in their faces in between staring at their breasts, and when you success she gives you a power tool, like some kind of bizarre vending machine(I forget exactly how he put it and I can't pull up the video at this moment).

To be fair, gift giving in stardew valley is tricky, because some gifts will be loved and others will just earn you a look of disappointment, and it's totally dependent on the person(unlike the original Harvest moon where you could just shove eggs in people faces until they marry you). The only way to know which gifts will be liked is if someone tells you or you figure it out from Observation(The people who are at the saloon every single night will always thank you if you give them beer).

 

[srpilha]

Superhot is one of those rare games in which I kind of wish it had no story. I really loved the gameplay and how badass it made you feel. I wasn't into the story though because it was trying real hard to be all meta and it showed

I only just played the prototype just two days ago, and was having an absolute blast. I had been wondering what the story in the full game would be like, if any, and while it's a shame that they apparently didn't keep it as minimalist as possible, so long as I get me an endless mode I think I'll be set.

I'm particularly excited about watching the replay in real time, since that will make epic moments look truly amazing.

Honestly it is not a bad story its just kind of there. The good thing is you can knock it out really fast and get right to the good stuff

Agreed. Yahtzee's review of it is actually pretty fair, but I still LOVE that gameplay. Haven't been playing much else since it came out.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

For some reason I thought he would like superhot more.

Me too.

Every time there's this new indie game that everyone trips over themselves to praise, I always think this too. Especially this one, the game looks really unique.

Maybe this is gonna be one those games were the ZP isn't that positive but he still puts it in his Top 5.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

I love it when he does these 2 for ones and mashes up the games in the end credits.

 

[Piorn]

Super Hot was fun, and the challenge mode with the katana added something as well, if only to trick me into playing the game twice in a different way. But yeah, the story came off as, idk, pretentious? We get the "twists and turns" before we even know how the universe works, so everything just falls flat before it even begins. By using the computer screen, i.e. the 4th wall as an explicit element in the game design, it immediately loses the ability to use it effectively, and it just comes off as trying too hard.

And as for stardew valley, yes, 60h so far. send help.
I still don't get why these games insist on the mouse like that, though. Terraria did it as well. When your character is a tiny 1x2 sprite on a screen that's at least 32 squares wide, and you can only interact by using the mouse by clicking on objects one square right besides you, then WHY do devs insist on using the mouse? A mouse can access the entire screen! Either make it so the mouse DOES something at range, or just use the right stick to select the 8 adjacent squares to interact. It makes no sense from a gameplay perspective to have a mouse if you need to stand right next to a thing to operate it in the first place.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

Oops, wrong topic.

 

[sageoftruth]

I tried Superhot for maybe 30-ish minutes, or at least not very long. After the 4th-ish level started making me retry it 50 fucking times and throw me into trial & error and when I finally did clear it then fail some more on the next ones, I immediately asked for and got a refund.

The time-slowing mechanic really doesn't serve the game any when the difficulty comes from constantly running out of bullets and having to memorize all the levels like obnoxious patterns. Makes it feel like a shitty puzzle game with only 1 solution in each moment you spend in a level.

Are we playing the same game? Memorizing the levels is hardly a requirement. When you can dodge bullets and slow down time to a crawl at any time to see who is where are the moment, this game came across as a huge "think on your feet" kind of game rather than the sort where you die for not knowing exactly how the level plays out. Of course, sometimes you need to think a lot more than other times. Thanks to the enemy spawning, you do need to stop and look around pretty frequently to make sure there aren't any bullets headed your way from outside your current field of view. Thankfully, looking doesn't stop the slow motion effect. Still, it came across as being pretty forgiving of mistakes outside of failing to check for enemies on your 6.

I did die quite a bit on my way to finishing the game, but I never felt like it wasn't my fault. If I have any complaints, it was the unbearably pretentious story. Now that I've beaten it and can access any of the levels, I don't plan on playing through the story again.

 

[sageoftruth]

Superhot sounds like it's way too pretentious for it's own good, and the gameplay just looks really bland and unexciting from the Youtube videos i've seen, so it's on my "avoid at all costs" list.

Why is every game, even Call of Duty, "pretentious" nowadays again? I forgot.

I can't speak for the others, but regarding Super Hot, I don't think the game is pretentious, just the story. As Yahtzee put it, the story wasn't nearly as clever as it appeared to think it was, and that's the textbook definition of pretentious. If they scrapped the story and just made it just a series of levels where you shoot red guys, then I'd have no complaints about this game. The fun gameplay probably served to make the story even more jarring, since it made the story interruptions all the more tedious as I waited for the writers to finish "impressing" me with their predictable plot twists so that I could get back to what the game was good at.

 

[InflatableHippo]

"As cat with mouse I toy with thee"

I now demand all current media be spoken in medieval tongue.