1956 Piss Take.

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I got Momodora: Something something Moon for the Switch, as I said before. It’s fun, but I have some weird gripes about it that are game designed based. Early on it has this weird habit of giving you mixed messages about environmental hazards. It’s rare, but it’s there. Specifically in some places you can go in water and swim, but if you go off screen you die. Which teaches you that water is bad. Avoid water.
Later on you’re presented with water you’re supposed to swim though, but the game has taught you not to go in water. What they should have done is had a random pond, with clear borders, that has a treat at the bottom. The player would then try to get it and learn that the protagonist can breathe underwater & swim, without having to be told, & also know that water hides things you want. The hazardous water returns later in the game, so you get mixed messages about water. I don’t know a lot about game design, but I know you shouldn’t send mixed messages about play unless you illustrate the conditional aspects of the situation. Like, dangerous water is a weird color.
The boundaries of the stages are also a problem because usually the screen will scroll past a visible edge, so you think you can just jump to the next part. Except in some places you can’t. You can’t know for sure unless you check the map, but even then the map lies about hidden secrets. So you have to risk a death just to be sure. It’s a minor issues, but ones that I find more frustrating than other flaws that might be more legitimately criticized. I would still recommend it. It’s not so hard you’ll be ripping your hair out, but it does reward excellence, so if you are really good you’ll get bonus stuff. I don’t have any bonus stuff, but I haven’t hit any kind of skill walls that stopped me playing like I did with Hollow Knight.

26 Comments

Honestly, while I don’t care for Wes’s personality, so far he wouldn’t be that bad. Just sort of undeveloped Reggie without the losing streak or, like, any charm. But his comments about Brooksie were so freaking creepy, I can’t get past it. So I’m gonna have to agree with Thomas. He sucks.

I can’t help but agree with his assessment of how pretty Jo is, and why she’s pretty. But yeah, he could have phrased things a bit more elegantly, and he seems to have a bad case of “trophy-to-be-won” syndrome.

Doesn’t anyone remember what he did last time the gang went ghost hunting? Wes is SO full of SUCK!

Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight.

The “water might or might not be deadly” thing is a problem, albeit one I’ve just resigned myself to in video games at this point. I first recall noticing it way back early on the Super Nintendo, and once you see it you never STOP seeing it.

Personally, I think the bottomless pit is a cliche that needs to just go away in general. If you absolutely NEED the concept, use deadly environmental hazards, like Megaman spikes. They send a much clearer message, especially in games with vertical scrolling.

If you’re gonna have death pits that’s fine, but you gotta stick to it. A lot of games have some deathpits and some that look exactly the same, but you HAVE to jump in to them to advance. Which leads to wanting to jump into every pit just to see what happens.

Consistency is incredibly important. A mix of deadly and not-so-deadly pits is a longstanding frustration of mine, albeit one that I’m resigned to seeing forever and ever until the end of days at this point. I just figure making death pits clearly identifiable as such in all circumstances solves the problem.

But we only intuitively grasp bottomless pits because we grew up with a lot of games inspired by Super Mario Brothers. The design doesn’t communicate danger clearly in the absence of that experience, particularly since fall damage isn’t a thing in most of the games they show up in. I’ve seen new players excitedly jump in to see where the hole goes, and gain naught but a harsh lesson in horizontal scrolling.

Momodora 4’s death pits are exceptionally “interesting” because most Metroid-ish games don’t have bottomless pits. So prior experience will tell you that bottomless pits are safe, and jumping down them is a good idea. I’m curious what rdein was thinking, particularly as the previous Momodoras used spike pits exclusively.

Welcome to “Wow, I write too many words about video games sometimes.”

Dead Cells compounds this problem in the Ramparts level by sometimes having secret rooms/goodies partway down the deadfall and ALSO being procedurally generated so it’s impossible to memorize where the okay pits would be.
Eventually you gain the ability to throw just your head down the pit, which I’ll admit is both a pretty cool ability AND a cool USE for the ability, but it’s still a solution for a problem that should never have occurred.

I keep thinking I want to play DC, but I’m worried it will be too hard/frustrating and I kind of hate the character design… It’s getting so much praise though, and I love platforming.

momodora the explorer

I’m like…90% sure (cus I didn’t read the archive in a really long time) a big problem with Wes is hes a thief. Not that I know if Thomas was just suggesting/trying to prevent Wes from being hired or if there is actual evidence or an event that confirms it for Thomas.

Mike hired Wes on his own initiative. Thomas was upset because Wes is a known thief. I get the impression he’s that guy everyone knows is shady, but no one can explicitly prove.
As they all work for a company that has previously fired literally every person in the entire store over theft issues, Thomas would very much like to not have a known thief on staff.

Reggie’s been involved as Wes scouted out the security so he knew how to not get caught, but Reg didn’t realize that was the conversation he was having.

I feel more sympathy for Thomas here. He didn’t start any of this. Wes went to him. Wes was a jerk about it. Wes got shut down in several ways. Reggie should see that.

Wes may have initiated the encounter, but nothing was forcing Thomas to be a jerk in return. Nor was anything forcing Wes to stay there and keep arguing. At the end of the day, both of them looked bad and didn’t really gain anything of value from the encounter, so I have little sympathy for either of them in this case.

I feel the same about Wes as Thomas. You must be a brilliant storyteller to have me feel this way. You imbue your characters with such emotion.
~ulrich

Also, maybe Thomas found out that Wes called Carol a “cunt” and the fact that Wes has had a shady past as a possible thief in his other jobs, that he is trying to get Wes so upset he quits on his own accord?

Either that or I do not pay attention much and got this all wrong. Meh either way its a nice comic

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