adkm1979 wrote:

So, I finally finished this… this literally soporific mess. I was genuinely nodding off with the pad in my hand for the last two characters.

As somebody has already pointed out, don’t make countless references to ‘all of the birds dying’, and ‘birds falling out of the sky’, and litter the ground with avian carcasses, then have birdsong everywhere that you go.

Don’t needlessly introduce changes in the time of day if your night skybox is a pig of a flat texture and your engine chuggs at a spluttering, stuttering frame rate every time you move the sun.

Don’t have a game heavily reliant on voice acting, and employ only those types of Radio Actors who like to show of their Acting with every syllable. Fuck me, they’re fucking awful. Spectacularly, despite all the Actorly voices, I only ever recognised two of them without the constant refering to each other by name. One of them because he was in Bread, and the other because she was American.

Don’t make your only gameplay mechanic a) pointless , b) motion controlled, or c) stubborn.

Don’t refuse to give your player a map then make so many of your in-game maps so difficult to read. Don’t, amazingly, make pretty much all of the maps in the top-half of the game world lie flat, so they’re even harder to read.

Don’t make your player move at a snail's pace then put them in a world with no obvious route to follow to find everything first time.

Don’t apparently introduce a visual indicator where ajar doors can be opened and closed ones can’t, only to occasionally have ajar doors stuck and closed ones openable.

Don’t allow a door to open into an area where there is nothing to find, and nothing to do. Especially don’t do this when that initial door leads to an area where all the other doors you’ve coded shut have no lock on them, making their inability to open nonsensical.

Don’t have a mechanic of hearing telephone calls if you don’t have some sort of telephone interaction animation.

Don’t allow pretty physics of walking through a sheet hanging on a line if a) the pristine sheet appears to suddenly then be covered in grubby lines, and b) it makes it obvious that in this entire valley, nobody has clothes hanging out to dry, but nearly everyone has white sheets hanging out to dry.

Don’t have the pissy, floaty camera which gives you no sense of existing in this world bob laughably over some footballs, but crash into an invisible wall at some tyres lying flat on a sheet. Don't also have it bob dismayingly over flimsy plastic picnic chairs, and unrealistically over styles.

Just fucking don’t.

I wanted to like this. I liked the early eighties look, I liked the feeling, at times, of a populated world suddenly emptied. But, in my often flawed opinion, there’s little point in making a world so pretty if player interaction with it is so devoid of feeling. The fact that, for example, swings swing and drying sheets flap over you only draws more attention to the fact that everything else is welded tight.

I know it’s the same in many other fps, but more than ever I did not feel I was a physical presence in this world. The sound of the footsteps (which seem totally out of sync with the rate of movement) suggests I’m controlling someone left behind. A physical person. These occasional interactions reinforced the idea, but everything else just fails completely. Maybe it wouldn’t fit with what they were trying to do (whatever that may be) but I spent the whole time wanting this to be third-person, and for there to be animations to back up the interactions.

I’ve often said that what’s important for me in whether or not a game looks good is a sense of solidity. I don’t get any of that with EGttR, so it’s prettiness counts for very little. It’s incredibly pretty, as long as you don’t move or do anything. And that makes the already paltry level of interactivity even more pointless.

A pointless waste of time.