Creston wrote on Aug 3, 2019, 12:50:
Oh it's that one. I got confused with something else. The thing that's always put me off about this game is that twenty minute timeloop thing. It seems like you'd just be repeating the same few minutes over and over and over again, and that really gets on my nerves after just a few playthroughs.
Anyone play this and have any experience with how that actually works?
Ok this is a necro possibly with no chance of being read but this is a very important game.
I gave the timed-run mechanic and cartoony indie graphics a big MEH at first as well but stuck with it and now I consider it one of the best games I've played. I found the game to be fairly non-repetitive though, at least for the first 25 hours or so when you can just go do something else if you are sick of exploring any given planet/area. After that, when you are trying to finish it, you might wonder around certain places looking for clues or trying to fill gaps in your log but I enjoyed that as well.
The solar system is like a little toy, you can see each planet from each location usualy, even if faint or distant, and since you have unlimited fuel you can burn halfway to wherever you are going, and then suicide burn to the surface. The time limit encourages going as fast as you can to maximise exploration which you use to fill out an always sunny style digital rumour diagram which IS persistent between runs and displayed on your ship computer, and lets you know when you have cleared a place out or not. Most trips only have a few minutes of travelling, but others take longer or may involve unimaginable horrors. The locations themsleves are solvable if you have done the groundwork fairly quickly, I almost never had the issue of "god damn it I almost had that!" because I was either following a lead and getting what I needed done, done, or cleaned a place out of narrative and clues long before things reset. Also the reset is actually really awesome, I never got tired of it.
It feels physical and real in a way that NMS struggles with, it's probably misleading to call it a friendly, fly by wire version of Kerbal flight model all in first person, but that's what it feels like. Maybe a little Lunar Flight in there, or Elite but with actual shit to do on the planets you land on other than collecting rocks and scans. It does the walk about-EVA-ship-planetisimals transition thing really well.
The time loop feeds into the story very well. A perfect mix of structure and framing narrative. The only bit you have to repeat is the launch tower lift, but once you get on your ship where you go and how you get there is all up to you. The end is the same as well if you manage to not blow your reactor, drown, impact somehting too fast or burn up in the sun. There are at least 7 or 8 planetary bodies/structures orbiting the sun, once every minute for the close stuff and maybe only once or less for the further out stuff, and most of them have multiple areas, requiring specific piloting or timing (One planet is falling apart into itself, another two transfering matter between each other, so they change a lot depending on when you get there).
You will work out some fast travel stuff, but it's a physical system built into the world and narrative and becomes part of the endgame puzzle solving. The ending is amazing and fucked up at the same time, very Stephen Baxter/Greg Egan deep time shit but I loved it, including a final high stakes run that could be straight out of a movie. No game has done this style of hard sci-fi in FPS this well before as far as I know, though I havn't played them all.
It's super unique. I can't talk highly enough about it. An adventure game without an inventory. A survival game without grinding. A space game that expects you to take the environment seriously without being a prick about it. A story like something out of an early Aurthur C Clarke book. Graphics and sound that seem undercooked at first but are consistantly awe inspiring when they need to be. Brilliant.