>Devs revamp their game and almost double it in size then release it as a free update because they wanted it to be closer to their original vision and because they listened to their players
Dare I say based?
>Devs revamp their game and almost double it in size then release it as a free update because they w...
It's bretty good, have a bump
It's wild that there is 0 info online on some of the puzzles and bosses due to lack of popularity so nothing on the wikis, motherfrickers are trying to solve it themselves, just like in the good old days
*sip*
There's been this whole fricking desperate search over the last few days for codes to unlock a secret boss which the devs added last night after the community figured it out. The community being so small and a lot of information so sparse that it really is like back in the day.
>Tags: Souls-like
>stamina nerfed so hard that it is a non-factor, might aswell remove it completely now
>dumbed down Tundra boss
>soulless lack of identity and direction, steals mechanics from other games and throws them all togheter, causing certain stuff to somehwat conflict with eachother from a gameplay design perspective such as PERFECT BLOCK and PARRY, DODGING and SLIDING.
>shitty mix of LE SERIOUS EMOTIONAL STORY and LE FUNNY MINIATURE CHIPMUNG CREATURES (LUMBERKINS)
>shitty REAL LIFE REFERENCES, EY YO BRAH, CHECK OUT MY MIXTAPE BRAH, LE SOI WARS REFERENCE, LE COOKING SHOW REFERENCE etc. etc. etc.
>Pozzed STRONG FEMALE WARRIOR characters everywhere, a story about family without a proper father figure, typical nu-west SOI infused garbage
Nah, Death's Gambit: Afterlife doesn't have what it takes to be part of the 9 best indie games ever made.
>shitty mix of LE SERIOUS EMOTIONAL STORY and LE FUNNY MINIATURE CHIPMUNG CREATURES (LUMBERKINS)
>shitty REAL LIFE REFERENCES, EY YO BRAH, CHECK OUT MY MIXTAPE BRAH, LE SOI WARS REFERENCE, LE COOKING SHOW REFERENCE etc. etc. etc.
Yeah these ones peeved me. I enjoyed the game and have massive respect to the devs for overhauling it for free but it's far from one of the best games of all time, especially in terms of story/narrative.
The Lumberkin are fricking obnoxious and I hate that they're now all over the fricking place.
Also annoying grating le self-aware exposition character in the new end game.
I haven't heard of all of the games in pic, I'll have to check them out.
White Rabbit has other projects they can't announce yet, who knows, maybe their next game will be special. Death's Gambit: Afterlife has its moments for sure, but overall, it lacks cohesion and refinement. I'll keep an eye on White Rabbit and their future project.
Yeah I certainly have high hopes for the devs. They have heart and soul even if some of their ideas aren't the best.
Blasphemous is garbage, no idea why it's on there
Another pleb hard filtered by instant death spikes, lmfao. GitGud.
If you prefer quantity over quality, sure, Those with a more sophisticated taste and higher standards will know why Blasphemous is superior.
I don't think I died to spikes at all, the game just isn't that good if you've played any other metroidvania with decent story/gameplay. It's repetitive with extremely lackluster combat and boring AF puzzles that require 0 thought and just timing.
>I don't think I died to spikes at all
Cope.
>the game just isn't that good if you've played any other metroidvania with decent story/gameplay
Such as? Hollow Knight and Blasphemous are the only good modern metroidvanias. Shitstained was an abomination that ruined the legacy of Iga. As for oldschool Metroidvania, only Dawn of Sorrow, Aria of Sorrow, Symphony of the Night, Order of Ecclesia, Portrait of Ruin and Super Metroid are good, everything else is absolute dogshit and anyone denying that is a moron with no taste.
>It's repetitive
Subjective.
>with extremely lackluster combat
Combat is not the main aspect of a Metroidvania, it is the exploration, world design and powerups. The only Metroidvania with good challenging combat is Hollow Knight.
>and boring AF puzzles that require 0 thought and just timing.
Cope. Go play the autism simulator La-Mulana and 100% without a guide like I did if you want hardcore puzzles and mystery solving. Anything else is baby tier. Hardcore puzzles and mystery solving have no place in a good Metroidvania. Blasphemous side-quest and secrets are excellent for what the game is going for.
Level design is 7/10 at best, all it has going for it unique aesthetics.
Power ups, level design and gameplay are all better in DGA. Complain about the superfluous stuff all you want, and yes it does bring the game down, but it's core Metroidvania elements are better than Blasphemous. I'd even put Blasphemous below every old school Metroidvania you listed as well.
>Level design is 7/10 at best
HAHAHAHAHA, tasteless.
>Power ups, level design and gameplay are all better in DGA.
Called it, people like you perefer quantity over quality. The combat of Death's Gambit: Afterlife is low quality, you can just walk past enemies... they copy 100 mechanics from all other games, but fail to copy one of the most important element of a good metroidvania that all those games I mentioned before have in common. The world design of Death's Gambit: Afterlife is very weak, it is just big empty space with too many shortcuts, it doesn't feel genuine, the shortcuts are de-valued.
There is nothing to discuss, you are most likely an american, you lack sophistication, you prefer quantity over quality.
>6 paragraphs of pretense waffle
Embarrassed for you tbqh
>claims to be the authority on Metroidvania
>posts read like the Rick and Morty IQ pasta
>le edgy mediocre religion game in his top 9
>lists Super Metroid
>no fusion or zero mission
You dropped this King
>>claims to be the authority on Metroidvania
Never made such a claim, take your meds.
>>posts read like the Rick and Morty IQ pasta
Don't know what you mean exactly, I don't watch amerimutt pozzed "entertainment".
>>le edgy mediocre religion game in his top 9
Edgyness is good, religion is neither good or bad.
>>lists Super Metroid
>>no fusion or zero mission
Metroid is just not a good franchise, the only wortwhile game is Super Metroid for the influence it had and the role it played in the creation of far superior games such as Castlevania games I mentioned and modern Metroidvanias. The only 2D Metroid worth playing and replaying Super Metroid.
>You dropped this King
I only care about function, I don't wear nonsense for fashion, I am not a woman, I am a true man. My height and my muscles are my "fashion".
What about Environmental Station Alpha?
Praised by nerds and geeks. Vomit induscing garbage, but not as bad as Salt & Shittuary or Shitstained.
You know you're as pretentious as the devs you're criticising right?
Le funny quips aside , it's better than Blasphemous
What's II and Moonrider? The only thing I can find for Moonrider is some free Beat Saber knock off.
II:
Moonrider:
https://twitter.com/days_danilo/status/1354860120220569600
That animation is tight as frick but they could certainly have afforded to actually show some stuff from the DLC. The only new things I'm seeing are the big snake and the priestess with the flaming staff.
Shilling this until it gets the attention it deserves
Everything is too small.
Everything is the same fricking color.
No, thanks. I'll pass.
>game is pretty standard medieval souls-like
>suddenly, robots, ray guns, cosmic wizards and lovecraftian omega flowey
i'm so perplexed by the fact that no one talks about this online when discussing this game. whenever somebody reccomanded you undertale or doki doki (before everybody learned everything about them) they would always do it while all giddy because they're dying to talk about the twists and meta shit but they don't want to ruin it for you, and discussion of the games is always centered around those twists and meta shit and how suprising the completely blind players found them. death's gambit though? yeah bro that's just another one of those 2d soulslikes like salt and sanctuary and blasphemous, nothin' special to see here.
why aren't more people talking about how fricking strange the back half of this game is?
Because there is no coherency or direction to Death's Gambit: Afterlife, not in gameplay, not in gamedesign, not in world design, not in the story nor theme. Listen to the podcasts and interviews with the developers, they are massive fanboys of Soulsborne, Sekiro, Hollow Knight, Blasphemous, World of Warcraft, Castlevania etc. and they jus threw in elements from all those games they liked, they had no true vision, it is not genuine and the game reflects that, there is nothing to talk about.
As for Salt & Shittuary, never ever put that abomination anywhere near far superior games such as Blasphemous. Blasphemous is amazing. Death's Gambit: Afterlife is okay. Salt & Shittuary is absolute dogshit, just like Shitstained.
I had more fun with salt than blasphemous personally.
>they jus threw in elements from all those games they liked, they had no true vision, it is not genuine and the game reflects that
seems about right. sometimes i'll have random thoughts abou mashing things from different games like "bro what if an isometric rpg had the combat of underrail AND the social stats and internal conversations of disco elysium" only to realize moments later that that's a dumb idea and the final game would be a bloated mess, unless the devs are exceptionally skilled anyway. i guess the death's gambit devs wanted to mash a bunch of shit together with no ryhme or reason and didn't have that 3-seconds-later realization.
>why aren't more people talking about how fricking strange the back half of this game is?
The game is about killing immortals, it's not really suprising there's shit like robots & cosmic wizards when they're different aspects on the concept of immortality.
It's implied various previous civilizations were destroyed by a handful of immortals hoarding immortality
I think the genre mixing in Death's Gambit actually takes away from the setting by making it feel inconsistent. It doesn't really add any depth.
In something like Undertale the meta aspects make you look back on the game and go 'oh I get it now'. In something like Darkest Dungeon or Bloodborne, it seems like basic gothic fantasy at first but in the later game you can tell how the Lovecraft influence kind of underpins the rest of the fantasy stuff.
In Death's Gambit it's just kind of there. Garde Tum (the sci-fi area) just doesn't mesh at all with anything else in the game. 'Super advanced progenitors' is a pretty common idea in fiction but in Death's Gambit there's no real understanding of how that society degraded into the more medieval shit everywhere else. There's nothing which really makes it clear how their technology fits in with the otherwise magic dependent setting. Even their nomenclature with stuff like doctors and security guards and AIs just doesn't feel like something which belongs in the past. A good ancient advanced society in vidya is the Dwemer in Elder Scrolls as there's an understanding of how they interacted with their primitive neighbours, the effect they still have on the world and their Mesopotamian trappings and weird gobbledyasiatic science make them feel like something that belongs in the past despite their otherwise sci-fi tech.
The cosmic stuff fails to hit home because the galaxy mage screeching about cosmic insignificance is just blatantly untrue when all these super powerful god entities are right there and active in his back garden. He and the other mages are apparently in charge of keeping reality stable and they're all there on the same planet but he's still got the balls to say 'bro it doesn't matter'?
In the original iteration of the game, Ylnoth and Thalamus just come completely out of nowhere and are then never mentioned again. It's just 'hey dude you like Lovecraft?' for one level and then nothing after that.
>Thalamus just come completely out of nowhere and are then never mentioned again. It's just 'hey dude you like Lovecraft?' for one level and then nothing after that.
another thing that really threw me for a loop about thalamus is that the whole underwater sequence with him ends as suddenly as it starts, you beat him and you're immediately kicked back to where you fought endless. no resolution, just "okie i'll go back to what i was doing".
Now Afterlife definitely improves on this by tying some of these elements more thoroughly into the story: Thalamus is now the big bad who's been manipulating things from the start: he's fricking with you throughout the game, he rused Garde Tum and they were the ones who made the Source of Immortality, he's behind Endless thinking she needs to make everyone immortal and your visit to Ylnoth now kind of has a place in the story. But, there's still a lot of inconsistency and jank in the setting, with its inability to decide as to whether or not mortal actions mean shit, there being all these Gods who are touted as being from other dimensions and far beyond you but are still utterly fixated on everything that happens in the game and the fourth wall breaks with 'the Observer' which miss a lot of the time. The idea of 'the Exiled Gods' is introduced but beyond Thalamus they're all a big nothing burger waiting for a later DLC to give them anything of substance. It's Lovecraft aesthetics poked into gaps in the narrative but none of the actual horror or worldbuilding that actually made Lovecraft interesting.
In some places it's even made worse, with the Chamber of Migration doubling down on the Garde Tum sci-fi stuff, having an annoying quirky self-aware girl AI do a bunch of plot exposition, another Lovecraft rip-off boss just kind of thrown in and even a fricking SCP section.
As much as I love DG, it is incredibly cluttered. Yeah, sure it takes a lot of cues from Metroid, but having an entire sci-fi level and a thinly veiled Samus Aran boss fight were moronic choices. yeah, yeah, you can say it was a previous civilization, but it still feels masturbatory. I can just picture the devs patting themselves on the back for Not-Samus.
I didn't mind the cosmic mage, though. Wizards are perfectly in line with a medieval fantasy, and using a character to touch on the triviality of human life in the grand scheme is a good thematic beat in a game all about life and death.
I loved Salt & Sanctuary, though. It's got all kinds of jank, but I'm amazed a two-person team was able to turn out something so coherent.
Origa is especially dumb because she really does come out of fricking nowhere. At least her presence prepares you for some more sci-fi stuff in Garde Tum but the first time she appears it's just like
>wait why the frick am I fighting a robot with a sniper rifle and a light saber
Even her plot role doesn't make any sense. She hates immortality so she has a hard-on for the Bulwark who defends Aldwynn from would-be immortals, except that the Bulwark was more of a filtration system and the idea was that wothy people *would* get past him to become immortal. She defends the Source of Immortality instead of just sniping it from five miles away and dealing with the problem.
Yeah I think it's dumb but it seems like the devs were having a great time just putting all the stuff they like into their very own video game with childish glee. It has sovl even if it lacks style.
She was pretty half-baked, yeah.
I get the sense that the character was meant to convey that even the Immortals don't enjoy their immortality anymore (if they ever did), but it came across in such a weird, backward way for the reasons you highlighted.
as much as i've been shitting on the back half in this thread it's actually what made me love this game in a so bad it's good way. a descent into madness that feels less like the devs are winking at the camera and more like the devs snorted a bunch of crack and just coded whatever came to them is something i've never experienced before or since in a game and it was really fricking entertaining. the enemy placement in the last few areas looking like something out a mario maker level only made it all the more perplexing.