Hell Is Us

• This is not a Soulslike game whatsoever. Combat is very forgiving. It has a few basic Soulslike mechanics (endurance, riposte, dodging, death penalty + respawning mobs if you turn that option on in the difficulty settings) but it is very easy to mash your way to victory and there is far too much healing to take combat seriously. Part of the issue is that the Glyphs are way overpowered; but the basic combat itself is just very easy. For example, I played through the first 2 zones without using any Glyphs even after I had them unlocked. I just didn't need them. Now I have them it has kind of made combat trivial.
• The puzzles are, for me, mixed. There have been a few that rely on deductive reasoning but some of them are just "wander around randomly trying stuff until it works". For me, that's not very rewarding. I think I like the overall puzzle design though. Some of them are just bad. But a few are good. Mixed.
• The world-building is fantastic. It is very gritty and gruesome. There's clearly an NPC that is getting raped by soldiers nightly. There are children being hung. It is brutal. For me, that's a welcome change to the normal "no stakes" worldbuilding in a lot of games. Shit is dark and captures how I think intuitvely about a civial war between ideologies.
• The graphics are amazing. Some of the vistas (the Lake) are just amazing. Wow. I'm getting no issues with frames on either a 4080 or 3090 depending on where I play.
• The audio design is also very good, but I also find it a little underwhelming. The game promises all these audible clues and hints but so far I have only really been impressed by one (a crying baby that gets louder as you approach it). I'm guessing there is more of that later since the devs kept hyping this element.
• I have found I don't enjoy not having a map and quest markers as much as I expected. I guess I'm just too old for that shit now. I'm happy to wander around a few times to find things but, fuck it, if I have something I need to get done and I've already looked for it twice, I'm looking it up online. Nostalgia for the good-old-days of ambiguous questing doesn't quite live up for the hype.
• I am enjoying the game but it is let down by the combat and elevated by the fact that is a new IP in a gruesome world with pretty amazing graphics and no technical problems so far.

jayrebb said:

Talos Drop a link where the discussion is at. Only saw one short mention a few weeks back and no thread.

I'm looking for fresh FOH takes on the game.

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