tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5358756148060931320.post3526853692401157181..comments2022-03-01T12:39:36.252-06:00Comments on -phi: Story of the Blanks thoughtsEndasohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13935418125952276226noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5358756148060931320.post-42427188690872498712011-11-05T17:46:31.226-05:002011-11-05T17:46:31.226-05:00(the original post was vague, so fair warning: SPO...(the original post was vague, so fair warning: SPOILERS)<br /><br />finally got around to playing this a little while ago. thanks for the recommendation! you touched on the effects of using a children's show as the starting point for something scary, but man i have an inordinate love for anything that uses old-school sprite art in suspense and horror.<br /><br />it's something the art style can really excel at when done properly; there's that inherent association with childish fun and nostalgia that makes anything upsetting more surprising by comparison, but it makes for an especially unsettling conflict of information in any setting that relies on indirectness, suggestion and the buildup of dread. the way classic style sprites are so simplified and stylized also dovetails perfectly with conspicuous absences of information in a narrative. it's part of why something like rainwood works has such traction.<br /><br />on that note, it's nice to see the creator didn’t take the vulgar approach of grimdark ultragore to make as shocking a contrast to the source material as possible. the darkest things the game actually shows are a skeleton and some corpse-like silhouettes; thoroughly ghastly for the show, naturally, but the odd thing is within the context of horror it's so tame that these characters could almost believably tell it as a ghost story.<br /><br />that said, there was one part that really dampened the experience for me: the last leg of escaping the first part of town after the change happens. there’s that one extremely fast pony guarding the way out and i swear to god it killed me a dozen times before i finally got past. you don't get much time because it can move in such a burst of speed, and since the screen doesn't start scrolling until you're close to the edge you can't really look ahead to see where it is or plan your escape route. each time you die, you return to the start of that section to walk all the way back, go through three dialogues, dodge a slow-moving enemy and do an even slower box-pushing puzzle before you get another crack at the only difficult and skill-based part in the whole game.<br /><br />i'm not sure this was intentionally hard, as opposed to an oversight, but it's not handled well either way. difficult games need to present challenges and punish players for their mistakes right from the start; it's crucial in both establishing the tone of the game and in maintaining consistency so tough parts don't come out of nowhere like they do here.<br /><br />second, and more about horror in general, i feel like the best approach to the genre is to create scary freeform situations the player has to move through or deal with. but when you do depend on heavily scripted events and scenes that unfold the same way every time, there's really nothing that kills any tension faster than repetition. in situations like this actually killing the player seems like the worst thing to do because the threat is so much more potent than actually following through on it. let the player get hurt, knocked down, whatever, but keeping them running scared is the payoff and anything that brings that to a close usually feels anticlimactic or worse.<br /><br />that's a big part of why i rarely replay silent hill 2, why i'm considering putting down nanashi no game, and why the village mob scene early in re4 is distressing every time i play it.sharcnoreply@blogger.com