Gaming Blog
High On Life - Visually Exhausting Donnerstag, den 15. Dezember 2022 um 14:23 Uhr
I'm commenting on this from my perspective as a game designer, trying to make Supraworld awesome. The Supra games and this have a lot of similarities so I'm spending even more attention than normally to learn what works well and what doesn't.
High on life would almost qualify as a metroidvania but it's not really ability gated but story gated. Therefore it's actually super linear and you only follow waypoints. Overall the game's mostly a funny coating for a very shallow game underneath, just like their previous 'Trover Saves the Universe' game, which it feels very similar to.
Humor: I had some fun playing it and it made me chuckle several times. There are lots of funny and creative ideas in there, but really only in the narration and the looks, certainly not in the gameplay. Sometimes I also feel the Justin Roiland humor of "I'll just babble around with my 2 voices and break the 4th wall all the time" gets old for me. Meta humor is amazing when you don't expect it. In my memory Mel Brooks was the first to do 4th wall breaking stuff all the time in his movies in the 80s and 90s and it was amazing. The thing is, it's nothing new to me anymore and especially from Roiland it's very much expected now. That made it often feel cheap to me. But there were little great moments now and then.
Clarity: My main takeaways from a game maker standpoint are about the visual clarity of the game... where it is a great guide on how NOT to do stuff. I feel reaffirmed about a lot of stuff I'm trying to do in my games.
It is visually very rich. That will help sell the game and maybe help world building. But from a gameplay perspective it's hard to see what's going on. The screen is filled to the brim with clutter. Even every pointless wall has lines, cables, panels, slits. There are devices and stuff everywhere you look. Everything is glowing in bright colors like "hey look at me, I'm important". But actually 98% is just pointless geometry. The few meaningful things are also glowing but you won't notice. Every scene you look at is so overwhelming because it's so full of stuff, it's exhausting! When you press T the game shows you where you need to go and it oulines important things... features you only need to compensate for bigger mistakes you made.
The main lessons for me are the following: - Don't use the same/similar assets across the whole world or even in multiple areas in the same region. Everything blends into one and nothing stands out, you dunno where you are. Especially the jungle world is a total mess to me. But also urban areas feel messy because there are so many buildings that all look the same. - Keep saturation and brightness low for things that don't need special attention. Bring 'em up for meaningful things only! - No pointless stuff absolutely everywhere (crates, containers, boxes, tires, cages...) - Right angles help me to orient myself. It might look more boring, but if paths go off in all kinds of angles, I find it even harder to find my way in this world. At 90 degrees my brain can manage it much better. - Use details only where you need them. In this game you can't even see where cluttered floor geometry ends and an important gameplay object starts because it all visually blends.
Combat, Exploration: I kinda enjoyed finding the secret chests but their placement is mostly really boring, like the "walk around a corner and there it is". There are also many many places where you need to get very high on top of things to find the chests. And the game is showing you the middle finger many times there with invisible walls blocking off things you should clearly reach. The game has a lot of problems taking its geometry seriously, where the gameplay geometry does not equal the visual geometry. It's by far not as bad as Psychonauts 2 though. I know the out-of-bounds struggle I had in Supraland so I totally understand, but I think for Supraworld it will be possible to be 100% accurate with geometry visuals vs gameplay.
Back to the chests: There was no anticipation about their content it's 10% upgrades I don't really need and 90% contain money I can spend on upgrades I barely need. I played on "normal" skill and combat was trivial but all exploration serves the purpose of making combat easier, besides 3 upgrades that help traversal. Might just be me, but all combat felt annoying. I was only hoping for it to be over every single time. The enemies mostly all felt the same and when new enemies were added they were kinda the same as the previous ones. It doesn't matter which gun you use. You have so many options to make your life easier in combat, and all options are valid for every enemy. I perfectly know the struggle of making exploration rewarding and combat not annoying. I don't have all the answers there but I have a plan for Supraworld that I'm excited about and we'll see how it turns out.
Puzzles: There were very few and they are barely worth mentioning really as they explain themselves. I remember one single "aha" moment with a mechanism I did not expect.
Overall I'd say "play it, there is fun to be had" but it's no glowing must-play recommendation. But the game sure is glowing everywhere all the time. |
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