Ostatnie recenzje napisane przez użytkownika jason

Some simple puzzles to begin with, followed by some poorly implemented jumping (necessary jumps to platforms at the limit of how high you can jump), some unbearably slow tilting platforms to climb up with a fall into an unintentional scenery trap. Probably less than 20 minutes of game time (knowing what to do) to get to this point.

There are lots of places to get stuck in the scenery, things that you can fall in or climb on but cannot get out of. If you quit it will auto save and when you restart you are still stuck. Alt+F4 or your own backups of previous saves may save you from restarting from the very beginning.

The English translation is terrible, made worse by much of it being read aloud. I cannot say if it made any sense in the original language.

It has a nice art style, an interesting control scheme, some fun puzzle mechanics and a short, dark, abstract story told through collectible memories scattered throughout the game. You need to find them all to unlock the final chapter.

It also has plenty of intensely frustrating parts where your actions and timing have to be perfect or you will die. Checkpoints are always a little further away than you would like.

Most notably, randomness of chapter 2 boss actions and falling debris followed by the completely unintuitive thing you have to do next.

Chapter 4 ends with many rounds of a follow the card game (the dealer isn't cheating, but speed is ridiculous), and the briefest glimpse of a silhouette passing which you have to match with one of four options. You can only get so many wrong before it restarts and it feels like it will never end. This is random, no patterns to learn or clues to be found. You have to be very good at tracking fast movement or very lucky.

Chapter 1 and 3 bosses are easy, chapter X is easy once you figure out how the different fireflies act.

Generally, I found it best played with a controller, but there were a few spots that are much easier with a mouse to guide the firefly to a specific place on screen. Selecting one input method in the options will disable the other, controller is not enabled by default.

I came close to quitting many times. Between the frustrating parts, I liked it. It gets a positive rating, but only just.

Runs perfectly on Linux with Proton. Do not set the in game resolution higher than 1920x1080.

Does not start on Linux when launched from Steam, all you get is a chromium window saying "nw.js".

It does at least start when launched directly from the terminal. You can play the first 10-15 minutes. When you get to the bridge it will stop working, nothing to do but quit.

Does not work with Proton either, only music and a black window.

Vague objectives.
No map or direction indicator.
Often no clear path.
At times you are looking for an unknown location or object that could be anywhere.
No manual saves.
No clear indication of where or when progress is saved.
Occasional annoying fish combat.

Controls can be a bit awkward as you are controlling a mechanised dive suit. Mouse look is limited to what you see through your helmet but doesn't change your direction. You turn left or right instead of strafing. Hold right mouse button to aim a flare, release to fire. Left mouse will cancel the flare and stab at nothing.

Movement is appropriately very slow, accompanied by a soundtrack of endless stomping. When you know where to go it still takes all day to get there. You have a completely unrealistic booster for jumping and go faster for a few seconds at a time.

Including getting lost a few times and struggling to find the thing needed to progress it took about 4 hours to complete, managing to be both short and too long.

Graphics are nothing special. Story not worth spoiling. Soundtrack fits well in the game but is not something you would listen to separately. No replay value.

Performance was good and no issues on Linux with Proton.

A nice relaxing deliberately slow paced and unspoken game for when you need a break from action and/or dialogue.

This is not a game to play if you are looking for a challenge.

The platforming is easy. Death is common, respawn points are never far away. Very few points felt like you needed any real precision once you figured out where not to go. There were very few timing based events, stopping moving things is one of your abilities, most of the time nothing happens unless you make it happen.

Puzzles were fine, nothing particularly outstanding but require a little thought. There are a few object placement puzzles that do require precision, but even then it is mostly a case of nudging the object until you get it in the right spot.

After the first fake ending there are two boss fights that do offer some challenge. The first is not difficult and over quickly but the final fight does require precision and timing not seen previously. I wouldn't say it was particularly hard once I figured out what to do and did it right, it was just not in keeping with the rest of the game. In any other game I probably would have thought it easy.

Everything can be controlled with the keyboard, all of the keys can be remapped. The controls are actually very simple, only a dozen or so keys it total. The configuration menu lists every context sensitive action for a key which makes it look worse than it is. The mouse buttons can also be used but not changed.

For Linux/Proton users, set launch options:
PROTON_FORCE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE=1 %command%

Without it menu text may disappear (it works if you can guess where to click) and it may crash when dying or moving to the next area.

The only other issue was the controller did not work correctly, camera always moves up and left and cannot be unmapped (trigger axis are applied as right stick).

Illogical puzzles that no sane person would solve without a walkthrough.

Lots of in game text to read, none of it in a pleasant font.

Often freezes during loading transitions, which are frequent. Save before opening a door.

Text does not scale with resolution and it does not remember resolution setting from previous run.

No stupid DRM on Linux, no achievements either if you care about that sort of thing.

Short version: boring game, no save points, progress stopping bugs, not worth your time.

Bought as the only good(-ish) looking game in a USD 1.50 bundle.
Played for a bit, gave up, uninstalled, instantly forgotten.
Six months later, key revoked by the developer for no good reason.
One day after that a new key was issued.

With that drama out of the way, and as I couldn’t remember a single thing about the game anyway, time to start from the beginning and write a review of the game itself.

Start game, check controls, WASD, F, Shift, Mouse. Cannot be remapped.

Chapter 1: The World’s Dimmest Flashlight.

Turn up the in game gamma.

You are standing in a dark bedroom, with a loud ticking grandfather clock. Surely no one could sleep with that noise.

Find a light switch, prompt to press E, which wasn’t one of the keys mentioned in the menu. Click sound from switch, nothing happens. Was that the wrong key? Do the lights not work? Don’t know. With the gamma turned up you can see well enough.

With absolutely no explanation for where you are, who you are or what you are supposed to be doing, you have nothing better to do than look around the room, find a few things to interact with then make your way out do the same with the the rest of the house.

The first chapter is almost entirely walking slowly from one end of the house to other to pick something up, going back to use it, then back again to interact with something new that has appeared. It is mostly standard fare of things moving or doors opening mixed with logical and obvious tool/object interaction. I’m sure we have all cleaned a mirror with paint thinner. Throw in a few sound effects and an attempt at a jump scare to rid yourself of the walking simulator tag.

Towards the end of the chapter, you reach the room where you pick up the eye glass, pay special attention to the cutscene narration which does not match anything you just did. Get locked in. Unlock the door, short cutscene showing the door opening…

Get stuck inside the open door unable to move. Annoying, okay, exit and restart from last checkpoint.

There were no checkpoints. Or any way to save.

Start again from beginning of chapter 1. This time knowing what to do, it doesn’t take long. Second time round I don’t get stuck in the door.

Once again, nothing to do but go back through the house to interact with the new thing. Screen goes black for long enough to think the game has crashed before continuing with a brief cutscene and you are somewhere new, outside in the rain looking at a gate and a clearly different house to where you started. It is hard to see with the rain-on-window effect. Pick up two notes and interact with the only other thing there. End of chapter 1.

Obvious load screen

Chapter 2: Out in the woods

As before, see a thing, need a thing, go the only way you can to get a thing, come back with thing, use thing, take thing, go the only way you can.

Go everywhere, interact with everything, take the coin, read the notes, pick up the crowbar from inside the car, musical cue, not scared of a girl.

Use crowbar on gate covering the steps. Nothing happens.

Watching someone else’s play through on youtube, did everything they did, gate still does not open.

Cannot progress. Don’t care. Uninstalled. Probably where I gave up first time.

This is one of those times when I'm not sure I am playing the same game as everyone else.

The story is absolute garbage from start to finish. Writer sees his wife drown, maybe she isn't dead, weird stuff happens, stupid people do stupid things, writer presses the reset button, they all live happily ever after, except for the writer.

The gameplay is tedious and repetitive - encounter a mob of enemies, shine a flashlight at one for a few seconds then shoot a few times, repeat until they are all gone. Expect more of the same for the next 10 hours or so. Occasionally, instead of human shaped objects you are attacked by machinery, birds, flying barrels, refrigerators and other junk that happens to be there for no good reason.

I let the end credits run as I considered what went wrong with my week that I kept playing to the end. Twenty minutes later, the end credits were still running. I think I was expecting something good to happen, it never did.

Notable issues with Linux/Proton that I made no attempt to fix:
Does not run at 4K, crashes with out of video memory error, OK at 1080p with everything turned up.
Grass texture is not transparent and has short draw distance, noticeable detail
pop in on some scenery, rock walls and such.
Minor illumination issues, flashlight may make the ground dark when standing near a lamppost.
Occasional random crash, but you are never far from a checkpoint.

Add -noblur to launch options to turn off motion blur.

In Dreary Hallway Simulator 2017 (or >observer_ if you insist) you play as an old man who enters a building looking for his long lost son only to get locked in and spend the next few hours trying to find his way back out.

You are not just any old man, you are a cop, a neural detective, which is not as interesting as it sounds. You will walk slowly through a dimly-lit dilapidated apartment building, knocking on many doors and speaking with unseen residents through their door intercoms.

Use your detective powers to make such startling revelations as red liquid on the floor near a body is blood, or that a body is missing some important part. If you have played any of the Batman Arkham games you will have seen all of this before, done better.

There is no fighting or combat of any kind, the are a few obligatory monsters to avoid, as long as you don't walk up to them you should be okay. I can't tell if they are supposed to be dumb or if the game AI isn't up to the task of chasing you.

The graphical glitches and anomalies supposedly a result of your characters augmentations get old after 5 minutes then quickly become annoying. They get even more intense if you don't take your medication or when connected to the minds of other characters. If graphics were like this in any other game I would call it a buggy mess. Maybe it is. I can't tell bad design choices from bugs in this game. Chromatic aberration is particularly bad (can apparently be turned off in the appropriate .ini file, also depth of field), motion blur can be turned off in the menu.

More bad game design can be found in the dialogue choices, you have to look directly at the option, but the option may move as you look around, your crosshair is a single white pixel that is often impossible to see.

The game suffers from negative mouse acceleration and what feels like variable sensitivity, which may be deliberate to reflect your character's mental state, once again I can't tell intent from bug. There are also a few occasions where unless you have a very wide desk and long arms you will need to pick up the mouse to move it any further. Not a major issue but virtually every other game seems to have figured out by now that circular motions should be circular.

Sound can be very directional at times, particularly noticeable if you are using headphones, loud things off to one side are often not heard at all in the other ear.

The story ends with the blandest sort of heard it all before last page of a science fiction short story some teenager wrote for school homework. With a load of nonsense filler to meet the minimum word count, or in this case to justify the game that went before it.

At no time did I ever feel uncertain where I was supposed to go or what I was supposed to be doing. Usually a sense of direction and purpose is a good thing but everything being so clearly signposted and story progression being so linear does not fit well with the insanity and bleeding of reality and dream state that is supposed to be happening.

But by far, the worst thing about this game is Rutger Hauer. Every time he speaks it is impossible to not hear an old man with glasses sitting comfortably in a well lit room speaking into a microphone reading from a script that he has not learned. Better writing, direction and post production could have helped. Voice acting and sound production of other characters is better.

If you run Linux with more than one monitor the game will be unplayable until all but one is disabled. The menus will work but as soon as you begin the game you will have a jittery desktop cursor in the middle of the screen and will not be able to interact with anything other than the escape key, the mouse does work in the pause menu. With all additional monitors disabled the game is playable.

Kona is all about the location, exploring, finding things to photograph and read. Discovering what happened to the residents of the village.

When you are outside the game does a good job of directing you to points of interest without actually telling you where to go. I was about half way through before I remembered I had a map. The map shows your current location and direction you are facing as well as where you left the car and other places you know about. If you still manage to get lost you can follow your own tracks in the snow to go back the way you came.

You can enter peoples homes and cabins (some are locked, but spare keys are always nearby), search through their drawers and cupboards, take their things, read their diaries, look for clues as to who they were and what happened to them.

Your findings are automatically summarised in your journal, which I would suggest you not read, it feels like some of the detective work is taken away and done for you and all you've been doing is walking around picking things up.

The journal does serve as a way of tracking progress with placeholders for things you don't yet know giving you some indication of where you should go. You do not need to complete everything before you can finish the game. Once you have reached the end of the story you cannot go back and look for anything you may have missed without starting a new game.

The survival aspect is mostly limited to staying warm, campfire sites are scattered around and most buildings have a stove. Heat sources also serve as save points and stay burning once alight. You have med kits and painkillers, also cigarettes which were still healthy in the 1970s.

There are some encounters with wolves which you can feed, scare, kill, run away from or try to avoid them altogether.

There is one puzzle (with the wheels and wires) which I managed to solve by accident that looking at it afterwards didn't make a whole lot of sense. I recommend solving that puzzle to get the snowmobile key if only because I can't think of any other game I've played recently where you get to drive a snowmobile.

In the end, the story was a bit thin and the ending was disappointing. It felt like there was a rush to tie it up and give the player reason to leave the area. But I had fun getting there.

Notable bugs:
Same full screen bug that many Unity games have on Linux, with same solution.
Resolution is set to 1920x1080 by default and does not scale to fit the screen, use the keyboard to navigate the menu and increase resolution.
At one point the game stopped translating documents into English, after a save quit and reload the translations returned.