Agreed. It's good to get press, I guess, but that's a sad review, in more than one way. It does take a fair amount of time discussing various aspects of the game at a high level, and I acknowledge it is fair in assessing the artistic merits of the plot progression and side characters, but this review strikes a sour chord with me.
First of all, it's hard for me to make the leap from the introductory assessment that the game is "
a little disappointing"
to a long-time DROD fan, to the concluding judgment that "
you should give this a pass"
. I admit there seems to be a surreal cult hype built around the Next Big Project that makes anything less than perfection feel a bit disappointing, but this doesn't make sense. The review judges several parts of the game content as excellent, yet still you shouldn't play it? I don't get this.
Here on the forum, I'm reading that the general consensus is that the world is beautiful and the puzzle levels themselves are solid and well designed. In my opinion, they also do an excellent job of skirting a fine line between presenting both easy yet challenging game play. DROD has always been first and foremost designed with the goal in mind of presenting the player with some beautiful puzzle-solving experiences. Story, character development, and fetch the pie quests (not trying to knock the excellent Fetch the Pie hold here) have always taken a back seat to puzzle design. DROD:KDD, that got many players, including myself, excited about DROD in the first place, has no in-game plot and no plot resolution. You are some ugly guy, and there is some other ugly guy at the end who you have to fight, but that part has nothing to do with the rest of the game, and it simply serves to present some nice, novel puzzles that feel like a good climax to the puzzle solving. I don't really remember anyone complaining about the lack of plot in KDD, but maybe expectations have just risen so much in the past years. That's not a bad thing, and we'll work to meet those expectations in TSS. Still, I don't buy that a cliche story is sufficient reason to skip playing a game entirely, especially when it's a puzzle game, of all things. How many AAA titles these days don't have a cliche story? And, when previous DROD games were simply about going from L1 to L25, then I'm not clearly understanding how the game becomes more "
ungood"
by putting some incidental reasons along the way. I don't understand why someone would perceive "
you get a key at the end of a level"
makes the game fundamentally worse than "
you take stairs to the next level"
, without any mention of any keys at all, like KDD and JtRH had.
Also, I'm ambivalent that this review seems mostly to be a leveled at the Caravel community, but is written to the gaming community on the TIG forums at large. We know that DROD games have a niche audience, and the development team worked to expand that audience with the more approachable puzzles in this game. Warning new players that the plot and characters are going to be nothing special is one thing I could understand, but recommending players steer clear of a game entirely for this reason seems hyperbole. Also, pointing new players to a better entry point into the franchise, or comparing specific pros and cons to past titles, would have been more useful in a review than simply telling new players that if they're long-time fans of DROD, they shouldn't play it.
Hmm...and, looking at the game length, I've been playing DROD about as long as anyone, but it took me about 20 hours in all to get through all of the content, including Flood Warning. I'd guess that players in general who need only ten hours to play through all of this content are expert at the game, and they have spent months or years playing DROD to get to this level of skill. I can see that an expert who can blow through the game this quickly would (correctly) assess it's shorter than previous titles. This game's point wasn't to be as long as previous titles. New DROD players are not going to want to play 1000+ move rooms that require 15+ minutes each to clear, like in TCB. I don't think it's fair to share an expert's experience with the game to players who've never played DROD before about what they should be expecting from the game. I would have liked to have seen the expert player's view balanced out even more often with something like "
...but if you're new to DROD, you'll get a good sense of the type of puzzle experience this game can offer by trying out this game. The difficulty curve is fairly smooth, and if you have fun solving these puzzles, there are several more challenging DROD titles available."
As we start work on TSS, we will attempt to provide a new, rich set of puzzles and puzzle elements that will challenge the experienced DROD player. We will also work to provide a full and satisfying climax to Beethro's adventures in the Beneath. This is already mapped out to some extent by Erik himself, and it is going to be awesome. I fully expect the dev team is still going to make the quality of the puzzles and game elements the main focus of the offering. If more in the way of satisfying side characters and side-quests is expected, though, then we can of course devote a larger percentage of time to making sure people won't complain about those aspects of the game. Some will still complain about hub areas, while some will complain the game is too linear. We know we can't satisfy both camps at once, but we'll augment the 5.0 game engine to show we're making an honest effort nevertheless. We'll try to work more closely with the community on these aspects during development than we have during work on earlier titles.
____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.
[Last edited by mrimer at 04-10-2012 11:25 PM]