Child of Light? Side-scrolling RPG, with a young Austrian princess waking up in a fantasy world. Very artsy and oniric, emotional but more on the hopeful side.
I played that long ago (I had a MM1-5 collection on a CD-ROM).
I finished the Clouds of Xeen side without much trouble, I was even surprised when I realized I had found that part's ending (I think, anyway). But I never could do any progress on Darkside... Not sure what I was missing.
Three very different games I actually took notes for :
La Mulana. In the "modern" version you have limited memory space to save some of the many texts you find, but you'll need more than that to solve the puzzles anyway. Good luck trying to scribble the weird pixelated symbols on your notes, too.
I play Shin Megami Tensei games with notes to optimize fusions, when I have a particular demon in mind and I want them to inherit the right skills. Later games let you see fusion results, but only one step ahead.
And then there's spacechem. I love Zachtronics games in general, and all the following ones tend to be progressive in difficulty and let you experiment from a good enough solution to better solutions. As the first, less refined one, spacechem is special. Before long it needs planning and calculations to even get something that works.
I've only played in VR, and the weird part is after a while, the visuals barely register. I'm too focused on the game to notice the crazy shit happening in the background. Like, oh, wait, there are dolphins now... For how long have they been there?
Sound feedback is awesome though.
And I'm a big fan of the co-op 3 player connected game.
I actually never played old Tetris, even though I had a NES and a gameboy. I was kinda late on the Tetris bandwagon.
There's a sort of NES Tetris mode in Tetris Effect. Having played mainly "modern" Tetris, like DS, standard Effect and 99, I just hadn't realized how I'd miss all the little things that were refined around the 90s. No hard drop, no super rotation, completely random block distribution, no hold... Rough.
Weird that a game that looks exactly the same could feel that different.
I think there are exocraft (not spaceship) racing parts in the base elements. Never used them though. The only exocrafts I use are nautilon and minotaur (and that one more as AI than vehicle).
Yeah, the UI definitely takes a while to get used to.
Nowadays I mostly play NMS in VR, and weirdly enough, the VR UI is often a lot better than the gamepad one. Which itself is better than the mouse+keyboard one, I have no idea what they were thinking with that.
Except for spaceship combat, this one is a mess in VR. Just flying around is OK, but dogfighting is horrendous.
Don't expect in-depth gameplay, but in its current state there is a lot of random stuff to do.
Past the initial discovery, this is very much a sandbox "make your own fun" kind of game. If you can you'll enjoy making things, going places, and finding occasional interesting procedural oddities.
Some people need more substance in their games and just find it boring when they start recognizing the patterns, and I can get that.
IMO HZD was not even a good open world game, it doesn't reward (and arguably often punishes) player-initiated exploration. Also it's almost unplayable without the very intrusive HUD, because the stuff you have to find is buried in the very busy background, and they don't use environmental hints much. Except the infamous yellow paint, which is a rather lazy way to do this.
However. Characters and world building are great, and quite unique. And trapping or pinning down machines and exploiting their weaknesses can be satisfying, when it clicks.
It was kind of a curve ball to me, missing some of the stuff I usually consider good game design but making the journey engaging and unique enough that I didn't mind too much.
What good is preserving old cultural products if you can't use them the way they were intended? Oh yeah, we've got that old record of a book/piece of music/movie in our archive. No, nobody can access it, it's not fair for people selling newer ones!
A name I haven't heard in a long time. I would like more crazy (actual) roguelikes. I've tried filling the void with some Shiren mystery dungeon games.
I think the thing that had the most impact on me when I first played Echoes was the screw attack power up, because even if it's a bit limited so it works in 3D, it's still a very fun move.
Though, come on Retro Studios. That move is not the screw attack, it's the actual space jump, which was not supposed to be a single mid-air jump. Screw attack is just the sparkly hurty part of it. Metroid 1 even had screw attack without the space jump!
Not sure I want to buy them again unless I find them ultra cheap at one point. I have bought them twice already, once on GameCube and Wii, and once as trilogy on Wii U.
I am replaying trilogy currently. Echoes may be the one I know the less of the three (I basically know MP1 by heart), but it's great. Most confusing map of the three though.
That game felt so inconsequential it could have been almost anywhere really.
It was a bit obvious they were going for the decline branch, since, well, it's yet another recycling of aLttP's world, and it's precisely the part of their "timeline" where they put all the games that they had no plan to include in a unified timeline.
But beyond that, it has almost no connection to anything else, and the plot is quite generic.
Child of Light? Side-scrolling RPG, with a young Austrian princess waking up in a fantasy world. Very artsy and oniric, emotional but more on the hopeful side.