oueddy

I don't expect to change whether you liked it or not, that's not possible, just explain my thoughts!

If it hadnt had more thrilling and seemingly supernatural thematic elements to it, would there have actually been anything worth playing for? I agree it was a fantastic slice of small town life, but its pacing was pretty darn slow (as you mentioned!) and without something to latch onto, it would have been a struggle to keep going. Did you ever watch or play Deadly Premonition and wish it'd just been about driving round town? What about Virginia or Firewatch (which you mentioned)? There's enough examples of similar mysteries to solve and Virginia used jump cuts and warped imagery to show the experience of an LSD trip that similarly did not 'fit' with the rest of the game.

As has been said by others in spoiler terms, don't take the ending so literally. This was a fantastic game that did a good job at covering the seemingly impossible - the feeling of being in a broken mental state that you cannot fix. Depression quest is the only other game that's done as well. What occurred in the story outside of the 'norm' helped to provide tension and drama to a dying town.

Didn't you read the Eldritch article? The comments on that are painful enough

It made reading the commentry on Gamasutra (thats more interesting than the article itself) all the more surprising

I found the password because I've been playing fez too much and random binary text is hard to just pass up :)

In terms of the challenge, I based my head on the keyboard as few times, finally completed them and then wondered why I do this to myself

As soon as:

1. Anything mentions Anita Sarkeesian or Feminist Frequency or non straight/white/male issues
2. Patrick posts anything

Its not worth reading the comments, for your own sanity as a normal human being.

I posted about this in another thread on these boards, there's another section just after this that acts in the exact same way (humvee..) it was so glaring as forced gameplay that it massively detracts from your enjoyment and immersion

The game was ruined for me because of the difficulty on hard mode, survivor just sounds like glutton for punishment

Finished the game and all I can say is that I rarely had any fun, maybe its the games tone or some poor gameplay decisions. I think when it comes to harrowing story lines, to enjoy and appreciate them you don't want the game to be beating you into the ground over and over with suffocatingly difficult fights at the same time. If I were to review everything but the gameplay I would agree with its consensus scoring, but otherwise I'm just glad I don't have to play it anymore. So disappointing.

I'm really torn on this game because of its tedious stealth gameplay, its detracting me from actually enjoying what is clearly a polished and unique experience.

It may be because of the way I play stealth games or how unforgiving this game is, but there are also some key moments where despite the focus on stealth and avoiding battles, it forces them upon you in a very poorly scripted way. I have come across 2 key moments in the past 2 hours of gameplay that showcase this, possibly minor spoilers:

- Ellie learning to use the rifle - if you stealth kill every single enemy to 'clear a path' for her, the game will keep spawning infinite enemies until you get bored, run out of ammo, or get spotted so she can let off at least one token pot shot to use the rifle for the next cutscene

- You come across the Humvee and a number of guards, you can easily sneak round the whole thing, including the humvee. As soon as you enter the next building, guards will spawn, all enemies will be alerted including the humvee and all will rush your position just so you can start the 'running away' scene from the humvee..

This kind of forced gameplay, especially where it becomes so obvious to someone who enjoys good stealth, is very jarring and I'm either going to have to change how I play the game (which I shouldn't have to do if it were better designed) or lower the difficulty to a point where it doesnt matter. Uncharted had awful stealth and similar issues, but given the difficulty of this game and the stealthy focus it shows up more here.

I've found a number of issues with the resume feature in the latest version of Chrome, but usually only if I leave the video open.

When I want to resume a video or not play all at once:

Progressive - Just leave the browser window open, as long as the cache isn't cleared for the downloaded video you can resume or skip around to your hearts content

Streaming - After around 15-20 mins (still need to test this), either the internal cache gets cleared or whatever is pre-buffered. As a result, the video immediately blanks and starts at the beginning again. If you try to refresh and resume it will start from the beginning. You can get around this by making sure you refresh the page before resuming playback and it almost always restarts at the right point.