"With his arms outstretched
With his arms outstretched
With his arms outstretched?"
GYBE - Mladic
A Machine for Pigs reminded me I never played the expansion for The Dark Descent, Justine, so I reinstalled for a bit just to give it a whirl. I can appreciate the very rare, almost unique setup of a female wrongdoer, but aside from that it mostly annoyed me. Unclear success/failure conditions, forced "hardcore mode" with no save files, aborted functionality (the lamp) a late-mission action sequence designed to force a restart, there's little to like. Granted the emphasis is on your puzzles. The first depends on the old observation that gamers never look up, the linking sequence and third are barely puzzles, mostly just blind, mad dashes against a timer of indeterminate length (to force restarts) but the middle challenge obviously took up more development time investment. I suppose if you don't want spoilers you can try it yourself, but it's not really worth the trouble.
You explore some rooms and find four slides to view with a projector and select two. A journal entry feeds you some vague hints about each slide with more or less negative connotations for our heroine, a non-repeatable voiceover and various paintings on the walls supply the rest of their context: specifically a crucifixion and adoration of the magi.
But the hints and correlation are so vague as to yield little answer.
Slide with open arms = crucifixion? I guess that's a bad one?
Standing to the right = magi looking to the right at Jesus?
Figure with the sword = presumably a Roman soldier? Journal half-confirms it's bad, but couldn't see it in the paintings.
Kneeling = worship or repentance? I guess that's supposed to sound positive?
But then you're still left with the question of how to give the two slides to the captive you must free, and apparently it matters which goes in the top or bottom slot. Based on what information? Are we going chronologically from top to bottom or bottom to top? Why?
So I gave up and cheated via a walkthrough, which just bluntly told me the answer without explanation. And so did the next walkthrough, and the next, and I get the feeling nobody actually knows the rationale behind this blurry bit of shadow puppetry. One walkthrough just brute-forced it fourteen years ago and everyone else copied the winning moves without giving a shit.
What the point? Justine's completion time is officially cited at 30mins. If you're playing honestly, it takes you half an hour just to search all the rooms for this one puzzle and slot slides, pulling down books from shelves, checking for levers, monkeying with the light-box, squinting at paintings, etc. It reminds me of all the idiots calling Tyranny a twenty-hour game. Yes, if you don't actually give a shit what you're doing, read nothing, invest no attention in the world or characters or plot or exploration and simply copy stats and quest solutions off a cheat-sheet to min-max and nuke your way through the boss fights, you can reduce most anything to a CliffsNotes insult to itself. Except if all you want is a gratuitous feeling of success, you don't need to buy a video game. Jacking off's Free To Play!
Speedrunning is not playing.
I give developers a lot of shit for padding campaigns with timesinks to drag out those "hours played" quotes for marketing purposes, but must admit they're partly forced to do so by the retarded trash buying ostensible challenges just to cheat their way through with cookie-cutter builds, wiki solutions and speed-speed-speed-speeeeeeedrunz! And then complain the game was too short. Justine is a middlin'-bad puzzle/horror routine, but did any of its buyers even notice? What incentive do devs have to improve elements their customers will ignore anyway?
No comments:
Post a Comment