Tanukitsune

Quitter's Club: Don't be ashamed to quit the game.

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I've quit "EAT THEM!", it's a game about monsters destroying cities, so I should love it, but they had to "AAA" it (a.k.a. adding filler because gamers would rather have a terrible long game than a good short one)...

 

They added RACE levels... in a game about monsters destroying cities. Another thing that really sucks about this game is that the only way to get decent monster parts is to get silver and gold metal ratings... which you already need to get these ratings.

 

To make things worse, the game does not explain what each part does, sure they tell you if it does more damage, but each part has it own move set and you won't know what the part does until you make a monster and play a level with it.

 

it's repetitive, frustrating, doesn't explain itself and longer than it needs to be... You're better off playing Rampage, ANY version of it. 

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I'm going to quit Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch just a few hours into it.  It's absolutely beautiful and has great music, but this is baby's first JRPG, lite-mode.  You've got a Microsoft Clippy-like companion who's terrified that you might have to make a decision on your own.  And just in case he's not enough, you pick up a talking stone tablet who will chime in with any guidance that Clippy doesn't have.  You can talk to these two whenever you want, but there isn't any need, as the game makes sure that you've got a giant Gold Star on your map to guide you step-by-step.  At the three hour mark, it felt like I was still in a tutorial.  This for a game where the combat amounts to just mashing X 90 percent of the time.

 

I can't say I expected a ton from the mechanics of it, but I didn't expect the game to have such a low opinion of the capabilities of players.  Maybe the aesthetic and partnership with Studio Ghibli made them think it would have a much wider audience appeal. 

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I'm going to quit Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch just a few hours into it.  

 

I think you're making the right choice. I quit about 20 hours in shortly after it came out. The combat system is simultaneously really simple and immensely frustrating. Later on, they add more characters to your party which you can't control, and they seem to exist only to get themselves killed and waste their mana on unnecessary things. It's a shame, since the art style and overall level of polish made me really want to keep going with it.

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Quit Klei's Eets: Munchies after a good 45 minutes.    The game has some nice sound and some fresh puzzle mechanics, but I couldn't connect with its raison d'etre.  Had a similar vibe to something like Angry Birds or World of Goo, both of which I also couldn't connect with.  Something about the pacing of a puzzle game like this makes it seem like there are 10 billion levels in front of me, and each feels empty of content.  Like they lack a soul.

 

I know they just released an iOS version of the game, which I think it feels more suited to control-wise.  Felt like a well-made game, just not for me!

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I think I'm about to quit on the PC port of Deadly Premonition, it's the worst piece of software bugwise I've played in AGES! I just lost an hour of progress for NO reason... And I had just beaten on the hardest races for me... The mere thought of having to do it again is just too much. Has anybody actually managed to stomach the PC port until the end? :|

 

Was the first chase scene always this horrible? No matter how much I mash left and right York walks SLOW AS HELL... I don't think I can put up with this port anymore.

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I think I'm about to quit on the PC port of Deadly Premonition, it's the worst piece of software bugwise I've played in AGES! I just lost an hour of progress for NO reason... And I had just beaten on the hardest races for me... The mere thought of having to do it again is just too much. Has anybody actually managed to stomach the PC port until the end? :|

 

I bought it on sale, but haven't actually fired it up yet.  That's super disappointing if it's got problems across the board on different hardware.  The console version is one of my fav games ever, and I was hoping the PC version would let me have it for years to come without having to keep a 360 around.

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Quitttttting Eldritch.

 

Got to book 3, and found myself just wanting to sprint through each level.  Realized I was trying to "get the game over with" instead of engaging with the systems, so I figured it was time to quit.
 

I think I just didn't enjoy the world enough.  The audio was suffocating.  Instead of giving me directional information about the whereabouts of enemies, it felt like they were always two feet away.  Sometimes the enemies would be a level up and I'd hear their breathing as if they were on top of me.  Otherwise the world was just a series of enclosed, intricate boxes.  I couldn't tell the difference between my character sighing and breathing and a monster.  Maybe that was on purpose.

 

Something about dying over and over again makes you start to question: OK, so what am I building my skill toward?  Aren't I technically close to the end of this game?  Am I building my skill at something only to have it be over?  Once you get existential about it, it's a pretty clear sign to move on.

 

On to Reus...

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I got Winter Voices in a recent bundle and I'm not sure what I was playing, it's a weird RPG about emotions? You encounter spirits and they basically taunt you and attack you mentally, you have to respond to them and I think pick the wrong choice means you lose hit points?

 

When half the responses are "Run away crying", "NO! NO! NO! This can't be! ", you can understand why the game put me off. This might have made an interesting visual novel, but adding "combat" slows it down unnecessarily. 

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Quitting two today!!

 

First off:  Reus.

 

Played through the tutorial to get a sense of the three eras.  Took me maybe 45 minutes?  Controls felt sluggish, and it didn't feel well optimized for Mac (thankfully The Swapper showed that some games are actually optimized well for the OS).

 

It became apparent that the game was interested in having me memorize symbiotic relationships for putting down fruit/animals on the world.  This fruit goes with that fruit and then they make "Happiness" for the townspeople.  Those kinds of spreadsheet systems are fun for me when it's not the main component of play.  They also work when they're at least somewhat self-apparent, which they mostly weren't in Reus.  The whole UI was just tough to parse.

 

Next on the chopping block:  Beatbuddy: Tale of the Guardians

 

I'm a music nerd, so I tend to come into music games with a lot of trepidation.  No one makes much of a profit from the music I love, so I don't hold out hope that a music game would touch that world (at least for the time being).

 

So Beatbuddy is a 2d underwater corridor puzzler.  Played two 20 minute sessions of the game and really don't want to go back.  The art looks pretty good, but it felt like a mish-mash of styles that never came together.  The music on the first level reminded me of the Avalanches, so it felt like a throwback to the early aughts, but not necessarily something oozing atmosphere and place.  It all felt rather antiseptic.

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Quitting The Last of Us. I was enjoying the storytelling and exploration elements of the game, but I just don't find the combat in this game to be very fun.

 

Truth be told, I stopped playing weeks ago with every intention of coming back to it, but now that we've had some time apart I think we're better off this way.

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I sometimes feel like I'm the only person who found The Last of Us' combat to be immensely rewarding and fun to play, even if I had to restart an encounter three times or more. I played through on hard, and it felt like exactly the kind of challenge I wanted. It had a much more open, adaptable approach to third-person stealth than we've seen since probably Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory.

 

I never got tired of bottling an enemy from behind cover, rushing him and braining him with a lead pipe before sniping his buddies in the square below.

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I sometimes feel like I'm the only person who found The Last of Us' combat to be immensely rewarding and fun to play, even if I had to restart an encounter three times or more. I played through on hard, and it felt like exactly the kind of challenge I wanted. It had a much more open, adaptable approach to third-person stealth than we've seen since probably Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory.

 

I never got tired of bottling an enemy from behind cover, rushing him and braining him with a lead pipe before sniping his buddies in the square below.

 

No, you're not alone.  One of my best friends loved the combat in TLoU, to the point that he restarted the game on Hard as soon as he finished it on Normal and completed it again right away.  He and I usually have very similar tastes in games, but that was one where we really diverged. 

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Quitting The Swapper!

 

Really enjoyable for the first two hours, then I got to the gate asking for at least 20 more orbs and I knew it was over.  I loved the environment and general mood of the game, but the puzzles just didn't quite mesh.  They felt justified, but they were so puzzle-y that they always broke the fourth wall.

 

The endings (on youtube) were great.  Still very effective even though I only played through 50% of the game, which then made me think they had jammed a whole bunch more puzzles and not much more story, so I feel zero guilt joining the Quitters Club on this one. :D

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Quitting The Swapper!

 

Really enjoyable for the first two hours, then I got to the gate asking for at least 20 more orbs and I knew it was over.  I loved the environment and general mood of the game, but the puzzles just didn't quite mesh.  They felt justified, but they were so puzzle-y that they always broke the fourth wall.

 

The endings (on youtube) were great.  Still very effective even though I only played through 50% of the game, which then made me think they had jammed a whole bunch more puzzles and not much more story, so I feel zero guilt joining the Quitters Club on this one. :D

 

I'm sort of confused - were you not aware it's a puzzle game? (Perfectly acceptable if that's not your thing, but the devs describe it as an "atmospheric puzzle platformer")

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Good question.  I knew it was a puzzle game.  Walking through a door into an area, having to take in all the elements in the environment, then problem-solve my way through is enjoyable for me if it's broken up with other types of gameplay or more thoroughly integrated into the narrative.  If it's being told I need to collect x amount of orbs, then wandering around and finding singular rooms with an orb at the end of each, it feels like it's abstractly gating the narrative and puts the focus solely on the puzzles and thus divorces the atmosphere from the puzzle platformer.

 

I knew that it was supposed to take around 5 hours.  I was somewhere at the half-way point, and they had just ratcheted up the complexity by introducing the gravity mechanics.  Instead of feeling excited by the challenge I knew that things would only get harder and the flow of the game would most likely grind to a halt with each new puzzle room I entered.  Also, the puzzles were just starting to get finicky in a way that once solved didn't give me much satisfaction (more trial and error, less "aha!").

 

And as a side note I don't think it really matters what kind of a game it's described as.  The best of the best transcends genre and style.  This one just didn't do it for me. :D

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I did not find what I saw of either the plot or the puzzles/gameplay compelling on the Swapper, to the point that I quit about an hour in. It all felt rather purposeless.

The closest game in my mind is Waking Mars, which did a good enough job with the plot to keep me playing what is probably a less interesting game from a mechanical/puzzle standpoint.

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I never found any of the puzzles particularly challenging. There were a few that stumped me for a bit, but only in a walk-away-and-come-back-to-solve-it-instantly kind of way. I also think I suck at puzzles. But maybe I don't!

 

And as a side note I don't think it really matters what kind of a game it's described as.  The best of the best transcends genre and style.

Also I have to contest this very strongly. What a weird thing to say! No matter how good a game something might be, if it's a genre that I'm not too interested in, it's going to turn me off. It could be the greatest racing sim game of all time, and I'm still not going to jump in.

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You're right, I was trying to be brief and it came off polemical.  Let me clarify:  I do my best to be constantly open-minded and try new things, especially now that I'm old and set in my ways.  So you'll never find me dismissing ANY genre or style of experience entirely.  I may not like polenta, but I'll always be ready to have that one bite of polenta that totally "blows me away" (ign.com) and convinces me that polenta is worthwhile for human consumption.

 

It's worth noting though, that we find patterns and certain kinds of experiences will almost always be uninteresting or ineffective to us as individuals.  I also fall in the racing sims not being something that I can foresee ever enjoying camp, but I find value in attempting to like something that sounds unappealing at the outset.

 

I interpreted the original question as implying:  You're complaining that there are too many puzzles in your puzzle game, did you not realize what you were getting yourself into?

 

Which I then tried to show that I did know, and that I found the puzzles themselves to not be satisfying and their integration into the game world to be problematic.

 

But then I wanted to raise the point (and admittedly horribly articulated it) that EVEN IF I didn't like puzzle games, it's still worthwhile to try the thing out.  Because then I can walk away from the experience having the knowledge about what I experienced and can match it up against what others experience and marvel at how differently we all experience the world around us.  And that's a great thing.

 

"The best of the best..." sentence ends up being way too open-ended to be meaningful, and I apologize for writing it.  :D

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Good question.  I knew it was a puzzle game.  Walking through a door into an area, having to take in all the elements in the environment, then problem-solve my way through is enjoyable for me if it's broken up with other types of gameplay or more thoroughly integrated into the narrative.  If it's being told I need to collect x amount of orbs, then wandering around and finding singular rooms with an orb at the end of each, it feels like it's abstractly gating the narrative and puts the focus solely on the puzzles and thus divorces the atmosphere from the puzzle platformer.

 

I knew that it was supposed to take around 5 hours.  I was somewhere at the half-way point, and they had just ratcheted up the complexity by introducing the gravity mechanics.  Instead of feeling excited by the challenge I knew that things would only get harder and the flow of the game would most likely grind to a halt with each new puzzle room I entered.  Also, the puzzles were just starting to get finicky in a way that once solved didn't give me much satisfaction (more trial and error, less "aha!").

 

And as a side note I don't think it really matters what kind of a game it's described as.  The best of the best transcends genre and style.  This one just didn't do it for me. :D

 

 

That's cool. I definitely felt some frustration over puzzles feeling a little too much like fiddly trial and error toward the end. I was pulled through I think because I played it in 1/2 - 1 hour chunks over a few days, which cut down on the frustration, and because I read a lot of philosophy in college and was happy that the game referenced Dennett and Chalmers, the former being probably my favorite living philosopher. But, clearly, not for everyone.

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I can't believe I'm quitting Mercenary Kings, a game I Kickstarted... then again, I only Kickstarted it because of the artist they hired... and it looked like Metal Slug, more like Metal SLOG! OH HO HO!

 

Seriously, the game is pretty fast paced, but the crafting and grinding for materials is bogging the game down... also, they should have hired the artist to create more scenarios, I think all missions take place in like 3 maps, but they look almost the same.

 

I could have played the beta and given some feedback, but I doubt they'd remove the crafting from the game.

 

At first I thought, "Oh, it's just a handful of items to craft, OK, that's a pain, but doable!", then I beat the first boss and reached the next ranks which unlocked more parts and when I looks at how much stuff there was too craft? Nope, specially if the scenery never changes at all. :|

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Good question.  I knew it was a puzzle game.  Walking through a door into an area, having to take in all the elements in the environment, then problem-solve my way through is enjoyable for me if it's broken up with other types of gameplay or more thoroughly integrated into the narrative.  If it's being told I need to collect x amount of orbs, then wandering around and finding singular rooms with an orb at the end of each, it feels like it's abstractly gating the narrative and puts the focus solely on the puzzles and thus divorces the atmosphere from the puzzle platformer.

It is a bit artificial, but I think it's structured like that so that people don't quit because they're stuck on a particular puzzle. You always have several ones to choose from. I do see where you're coming from though, I don't think the game is as good as the sum of its parts, all of which are fantastic taken on their own. Though like Twig said I think you can blaze through too many of the puzzles a bit too quickly.

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