8 | LGG | RESURRECTION GATE
8 | LGG | RESURRECTION GATE
by: Grim Baccaris
Progress:
- I accidentally paused my timer but I think it took me around 50 minutes to reach the end of the demo?
Engagement with Horror Genre:
- This strikes me as essentially a dark fantasy piece (with some steampunk-ish infusions), with the emphasis more on fantasy genre than horror necessarily. This isn’t to say that horror is absent—there’s certainly the body horror of being a lich, the atmosphere of a swamp at night, and the creepiness of encountering something menacing and undead. But it also got me thinking about how, encountering undead creatures in fantasy is a common enough experience that it doesn’t really pack the same punch for me, now that I think about it? An element I thought worked really well to make those encounters more unsettling here was the way that the devourer’s text was formatted, it was jarring to look at in a way that I thought brought some of the “horror” back to dark fantasy kind of setting.
Things I Appreciated:
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The visual presentation is ostentatiously stylish. By that I mean, essentially, any bit of text or background that could have some kind of effect applied to is, has had that done to it. At first, I found this cluttered and overwhelming. Like looking at each individual flourish, I could see the case for it, but taken together, it seemed too much to me. But over time I just… got used to looking at it, and I guess I gave in and accepted the overdramatic visual presentation into my heart. Minimalism is so over.
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I really enjoyed the glimpses of character and worldbuilding, and in particular, I’m excited to have the opportunity to play a game as a lich lord. Since characters like this are usually framed as unsympathetic antagonists, I really enjoy the prospect of getting to be that character and having to deal with some of the grislier challenges that might arise throughout their day. I thought the other characters were interesting too, just, the lich character grabbed me the most.
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Here’s an offbeat music trivia kind of comment: the track that plays in the dirigible (the bell-like tritone section toward the end) is very reminiscent of “Ceremony” from Secret of Mana, which I thought was a cool connection to another game that has a similar magic/technology blend and features a lich lord character. I have no idea if this was intentional, subconscious, or complete coincidence. I mean, tritones are not exactly an uncommon device for creating an unsettling atmosphere. But, it really did send my mind straight to that composition and I liked having that moment of recognition.
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I liked the choice based system and how choices could be made unavailable due to the player character’s personality traits and/or stats. I imagine this will be more satisfying in the full version of the game when the player can actually choose who they play as. The assigned character for the demo is not who I personally would’ve picked so I was slightly annoyed when the choices I wanted were unavailable, but I like the concept in general for adding texture to the playthrough and the stakes of stat distributions.
Miscellaneous Comments:
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I found one font especially difficult to read: the font used for the stat names/descriptions. It’s a stylish font but I wonder if that style is worth the extra mental fatigue of reading it. In its defense, it isn’t used a huge amount.
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I didn’t really like the popup notifications. While I did find the information in one extremely useful (the one that says you can just press the space bar to advance text), I found these made it more difficult for me to focus. There is so much going on visually that adding the motion of popups made it harder for me to anchor myself to the experience of actually reading the text.
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Since this is explicitly a demo, here is a list of random typos/bugs etc. that I encountered while playing, since I figure that’s useful information:
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Inconsistent quotation mark styling: some of them are curved, some of them are straight. (I have the utmost sympathy, I HATE working with quotation marks in Twine because of the ugly-ass uncurved quotation marks that relentlessly propagate themselves when I’m editing
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[img[images/bg/stonesnight2.png] → incorrectly formatted image
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Broken image link → background scenery that tilts when you mouse over it in the first camp area
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“One flickering orange beacons still remains” → “beacon”
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Two options labeled “Ignore the voice” with one crossed out. One of them should be labeled something like “Answer voice” or “Respond to voice” based on the text.
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When I clicked the option “Follow voice,” the title of the card is “Ignore the voice”
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Repair Library: the “repairing” trapezoidal button overlaps with the text of the card
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Portrait window labeled “Laurence” is often empty
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“Besarion meets Lirat’s gaze,” → “Lirat” should be “Laurence” I think
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
- It was honestly just kind of interesting to see the visual aesthetic of, you know, the author of the Twine Grimoire. Several times I was like, hey, I remember reading about that effect a few weeks ago in the Grimoire! So I thought this was a great opportunity for my own purposes to see some of those effects within an actual game context and evaluate what I thought of them. It’s good to see someone using a maximalist approach to visual design that works, so that I can better evaluate my own stylistic choices to make sure that they are what I want, rather than the default result of not even knowing that I could do other things with it.
Memorable Moment:
- When the first text from the devourer showed up with that ominous red formatting.