For me, Tunic. Well, it’s a bit more complicated. I was burnt out on soulslikes and wanted a break. Saw what I thought was a nice little Zelda clone, as in I was scrolling the Steam store home page and did a double take when I saw the one and only piece of promotional art for the game. That character design looked like it was one floppy green hat away from a lawsuit from Nintendo. Instantly downloaded it upon learning that the instruction manual played a big part in the gameplay.
I have fond memories of game manuals when I was a kid, coming home from not-yet-gamestop with a new game looking at all the concept art, or having my parents read to me from the super mario 3 manual when I was little. Anyway, long story short the game was another soulslike. Set in the ruins of a fallen civilization? Check. Spend currency to level up? Check. Opening up shortcuts to previously visited areas as you progress? Check. Difficult bosses? Check.
Oh, but what’s this? The whole game is in this indecipherable script that you have to decode? Oh baby! I spent way, way way too much time trying to decipher it. I got so obsessed that it was effecting my sleep and I had to uninstall the game for a few weeks. Never ended up solving it.
spoiler
I knew it was an English cipher from the beginning. Nobody ever goes full conlang, as much as I would love that. I got as far as deducing it was phonemic, as the same glyphs kept appearing before cleartext words, which I assumed were “a/an” and “the”, and the way “the” was written made me think it was two glyphs, one for the <th> and one for <e>. The last thing I got before giving up and looking it up online was one of hte ghosts standing next to the well in the village and repeating the same word three times. Of course he’s saying “well well well”.
Anyway, overall the experience was a roller coaster of mild interest to acute dislike shifting to all consuming curiosity and finally to exasperation. I don’t think a game has evoked that many varied reactions from me. The music is also amazing.
They just released an updated version of the first one. Few extra puzzles and some other updates. I bought it recently. Haven’t played it or the 2nd one. (But plan to). But just letting you know. It might be worth checking out.
Thanks!
My biggest complaint with TP2 is that, between the two games, they added forced TAA like so many other games. TAA introduces blurring that drives me into a rage. The original came out before all that and was great, so I’m not super excited to try the modified version, though I might grab it just to support them a little more.
What is TAA. ? I’m not sure what that is. Do you mean motion blurring or depth of field blurring ?
Temporal Anti-Aliasing. It’s a cheap and effective way to get rid of the jagged edges of a rendered image, but temporal effects like TAA and all of the other tools derived from it, like a lot of other AA options and most frame generation techniques, introduce blurring and shadow smearing.
I tried posting a three second clip from TP2 showing it clearly, but Voyager didn’t seem to like it. This post is an extreme example, but you can see it in most modern AAA games. Cyberpunk had it bad (another game I adore).
Ohhhh. Yes. I do know what you are talking about. I just forgot that abbreviation . I think the more modern ant aliasing “type” is called something else. I feel like there are multiple options on a lot of games (on steam at least) ??
Yeah I really don’t like the jagged edges. It’s Pretty common in all switch games. But if the resolution is already low and then you apply a basic blur fix , it just makes the resolution look even lower and a loss of details.
So there are trade offs. And there are more sophisticated ways to resolve the jagged edges that are less destructive to the quality.
I’ve not seen the motion fade effect before ,(the video you sent) but that would give me terrible motion sickness.
I’m not sure if this feature has been updated in the new version of the game. But maybe.
I watched a video about a month ago where a review went into depth on the changes. Made by someone who had played the original. They said it fixed a lot of things players had been complaining about.