Worth Playing: 01/17/2014

Sorry about the blocked text on the second game, by the way.

• Titan Souls
• Majesty of Colors
• A Precious Arrow

Thanks for the early upload!

Oooh, souls.

Another great edition of Worth Playing. Love this series Patrick!

Titan Souls strangely remind me of Shadow of the Colossus as well.

Shoot from the top!

I can certainly appreciate Patrick's Souls obsession - from a minute in to Breaking Brad, all I could think about was buying a PS3 to play Demon's (I've only ever beaten Dark Souls).

With that said, I wish he would stop comparing Spelunky to Dark Souls. They really don't have anything in common other than a well hyped difficulty level. If Spelunky was a metroidvania style platformer, with checkpoints and corpse runs, I'd agree. But, nothing about randomly generated levels with single run throughs says Dark Souls. Yes, you should learn from your deaths, but that can be said about the vast majority of games.

Yeah much more Shadow of the Colossus than Dark Souls.

I'm usually not one to complain about endings, but Titan Souls really left me disappointed.

Edit: Though to be fair it's still super impressive for being made in one day.

Pretty fun games this week. Think I'll give all of them a try. Was really pleasantly surprised by Majesty of Colors.

Nice one.

Edit: The end of Titan Souls made me go "oooh....right."

If you past first you become first.

That ending is great. Guess I gotta retry titan souls.

Perfect ragequit!

I would actually be interested in playing SotC where you have just 1 arrow to kill the colossi or just 1 sword stab.

You are so overthinking these games. Sometimes I wonder if you're trying to take Brad's "worst at video games" title away from him. It's still entertaining at least. :)

That ending was kinda perfect.

Titan Souls was the first game I've tried from these features. I'm really glad I tried it, but the ending might as well be out of an indie game text book.

But not enough to bother me seriously. I'm a fan of the creator now. Thanks Patrick

Play it, it takes 10 minutes!

Titan Souls was great, a bit easy, you can beat them all easily by focusing on the horizontal space but both directions are just as simple. That ending was great, overused, but I still haven't stopped enjoying that kind of end.

@thiago123: While the comparison isn't exactly glorious, there are tons in common. Both Souls and Spelunky perform a varied risk reward system that while it does exist in modern gaming isn't often applied or used in big budget games. That is of course death being a positive, as it allows you the freedom to retry, understanding more about enemy patterns and behaviors.

Both games as well employ easy to use but hard to master mechanics that are hidden with tons of depth. Like Dark Souls Spelunky also has a billion easter eggs that you need to go digging around on the internet or randomly find by just pure luck. On top of that both games often varying amounts of play styles and approaches with plausible legitimate options from multiple angles. Again the comparison isn't the best, but Spelunky has more in common with Dark Souls than it does say Mass Effect or Skyrim or Mario, or any other big genre defining AAA title.

While I agree that it's not a direct, 1-1 comparison, I still think it's accurate to say that Dark Souls and Spelunky share a certain design sensibility, in that they require the player to learn a great deal MORE than most modern games do from deaths. The benefits to acquiring knowledge of how to exploit a game's mechanics, in most games nowadays, are relatively minor - yes, you can get really good at them, but there's no real reason to, because there's always an easier way, or a method to blunt the challenge. Neither Dark Souls or Spelunky offer many outs, in that respect. You kind of just have to git gud. And your reward for increasing your knowledge of the games is that they become a WHOLE lot easier.

Just my two cents :)

In Titan Souls, I love how Patrick stays on the path down and to the right to get to the boss every time, even though you can totally just walk straight down for a more direct route.

Patrick, unless I'm way off, I feel like it is painfully obvious that Precious Arrow must allow for a playthrough where you never have to use the arrow. Or at most maybe the final thing in the whole game actually requires it, unlike everything else.

Majesty of Colors looks pretty cool, I'd be really interested in seeing that in something bigger.

I love watching anything Patrick does on the site. He keeps it humorous. Best line of 01/17 - "This was the pacific rim you weren’t told about"