beard ひげ @beardalaxy@gameliberty.club

apparently linux mint has/had an installer bug that would install the bootloader into your windows drive if you had one plugged in or something along those lines. so back when my windows install killed itself it took mint with it. greeeaaatttt

Ooooh I just got a great idea for a game jam I was thinking of joining. Should be fun lol.

the worst part about this is that it's for non-binary KIDS.

KIDS.

I'm taking these notes as I play, there's gonna be a lot of them probably.

1. Character models are pretty meh. They have been touched up a lot from the trailers actually, but still not great. James' hair really sticks out color-wise and sometimes looks like it's not part of the scene.
2. Fog is not represented in the reflections, heavily breaking immersion. Fog in general doesn't carry the same weight and atmosphere it does in the original. I think this is partially because the characters always appear to be "in front of the fog" rather than inside of it. There was a notable moment in Angela's cutscene where there was a very clear line between her and the fog, like a halo effect.
3. Voice acting sounds technically "better" but it definitely doesn't have that same dreamlike feel the original did. James' VA is actually pretty accurate, Angela's is definitely in that territory of being "too good" if that makes sense. Angela had a couple added dialogue lines too, not sure how I feel about that.
4. Cutscene animation is a bit stilted. Kind of like when you've got two characters talking to each other during regular gameplay of an RPG.
5. The atmospheric sound is actually really nice. Maybe a little too much going on, but that's an extreme nitpick. I can actually see myself listening to it to sleep, it's very calming which is actually exactly what I want from Silent Hill audio in moments where nothing is happening.
6. There was no shader pre-compilation stage, but it seems like the only stutters here are traversal ones, so that's good. Still wish there weren't any, though.
7. There are lots of options to turn off "modern gameplay" guides, such as interaction icons and the health status vignette. I'm glad to see this. The downside is that, since they are using an over-the-shoulder camera, they've had to mark important things with white cloth, this game's version of "yellow paint." I'll take the white cloth over the yellow paint, absolutely... But it still feels a little cheap when compared to how the original guides you. There are some things like the radio that feel much more natural. Health items and ammo pickups are really hard to see though so I might end up needing to turn this setting back on.
8. The fidelity of the environments is very high. They are really well crafted.
9. There are some weird things going on with the rendering pipeline. Even after turning off any upscaling, motion blur, and anti-aliasing, lots of objects still leave these nasty ghosting artifacts behind them. I'm not a fan of Unreal Engine's render pipeline in general due to weird things like this.
10. The save screens no longer show a static image of James in the background. Instead, it's the model of James looking into the camera wherever he was standing. Kind of a neat idea I suppose, but it lacks the creepiness of the original. To me, it looks a little derpy because it's just an emotionless James model staring back at you, sometimes blinking. Like you're looking at him in a model editor.
11. The combat takes an approach a lot closer to something like The Last of Us. Whether or not that's good or bad will be a matter of opinion probably. For the camera they have gone with, this probably works better than trying to keep the original combat in.
12. The light bar on PS4/PS5 controllers pulses depending on how low your health is, so that's a pretty cool feature if you have one of those controllers. I'm always glad to see features like that taken advantage of.
13. It seems like the game is going to follow the same story beats and overall narrative, but remixed a little bit. Instead of getting the radio in a blocked off tunnel, you instead get it at a house and then the moment with the monster plays out mostly the same. This will help keep things fresh, but I hope it doesn't get taken too far.
14. They added bug monsters in the game the run around and do a little bit of damage to you, but die in one hit. Kind of inconsequential, idk why they're here.
15. There is seemingly no intro movie on the title screen if you wait there. That's actually pretty dumb.
16. An unexpected thing I didn't really think about is how much more impactful certain dialogue is when it is just text on the screen meant to be read versus the character actually speaking. Something about James saying "this makes me feel like someone's groping around inside my skull" hits different when you read it instead of when you hear it.

So that's about 2 hours. Honestly, so far it isn't too bad. It's different enough at this point that I can easily separate it from the original in my head. It's not as good of a game as the original so far, but it's still a pretty good game doing its own thing so I don't mind it too much. Who knows if that will change, but for now I'm decently surprised.