ひげ
Silent Hill f play session #1.5 (spoilers)
Okay so I'm going to just write my thoughts down as they happen here and post when I'm done playing.
The fog seems to get messed up when you move the camera. That probably means it is tied to the camera instead of the game world, which is a little unfortunate. It goes back to its original shape when you stop moving but it is awfully distracting.
OH! You get a little ceremonial dagger that doesn't break but doesn't do much damage. That's at least something. Although... Apparently you can only use it in the "otherworld." The otherworld is kind of interesting, but it's definitely not like the the other SH otherworlds where it is the same exact place you're in but twisted. It's another realm entirely.
The puzzles are pretty interesting so far. I like the item examining system, it's pretty dynamic and actually has a lot of use unlike some games where it's just more for flavor.
The notes are pretty interesting as well, they give a lot of important context to what is going on and allude to more.
There seem to be some lighting bugs where some light sources only spawn in when they are extremely close to the camera. I'm playing at high-very high settings so it's not related to that I don't think. They seem to be static, specifically placed lights.
Had a bit of a stupid encounter with an enemy in a ridiculously tight hallway. They were lying on the floor, obviously alive but not moving, but I couldn't attack. Then they disappeared once I left the room. Then I did something in the next room over and of course then they spawned in that same room. Seemed kind of cheap to just spawn an enemy in that kind of way. At least have it crawl through the window or something.
Speaking of the enemies, they are no slouch BTW. They will follow you to the ends of the earth as long as they can still see/hear you. They will jump up to higher ledges and everything. It does make them feel more dynamic.
Silent Hill f play session #2 (spoilers)
Oh, you can upgrade your base abilities too, nice. Going to have to build up a lot of faith (the currency) in order to do it but that will be good.
At a puzzle with some scarecrow enemies. The enemies are really cool but holy shit the clues for the puzzle are so bad. They give you red herrings like some sort of sick joke. One of them just flat out didn't make sense and I had to figure it out via process of elimination, now my weapon is almost gone because I spent so much of it on killing these stupid things. Not to mention the game randomly spawns more, too. Really frustrating.
There's no 180 turn button. I know it isn't as necessary when a game has full movement and camera control, but it would still be nice to have.
Ooh, the game has the equivalent of fairies in Zelda. Hand mirrors that break. I think there was a very similar thing in Fatal Frame 2, no?
There's this weird bubbles filter over the screen I just noticed. I don't like that... Why do devs insist on putting weird shit over the camera and not giving you the option to turn it off? Stuff like film grain and vignettes.
There's this doll giving me advice but I can't take any of it. I want to follow it, and bad things happen when I don't, but apparently my character is fucking retarded so that the story can move on as intended. The doll seems more like a foreshadowing tool than anything else.
The combat is fine when you're in more open areas. The camera is really close though so when you're in a place that is really cramped, the camera gets even closer and you can't even tell where you're moving. It's REALLY annoying. This is why fixed camera angles are fantastic for this sort of game, the developer can directly control what you can and can't see so they can tailor enemy encounters for it. "Modern camera" shit makes it impossible to set things up this way unless your level design is way more open so you can see the character at the same distance all the time. I would much rather have fixed camera angles, or at the very least a camera that can actually clip through and occlude the geometry. I'm really sick of the copy and pasted modern camera that is shit for stuff like this. I've almost died several times because I dodged into a wall I couldn't see.
The camera in general feels really claustrophobic and not in a good way. As soon as you get into those really tight corridors it becomes more of a burden. If I want to see what's in the next room as I'm going down a tight staircase I really can't because the wall just zooms the camera in on my character's head instead. It's a very good thing I'm playing this on a TV instead of my monitor because you also can't change the FOV and it is quite narrow. Just... Sick of these cameras man.
I think one of the "omamori" (basically equippable upgrades) is broken. It says it enhances the effects of other omamori but it doesn't seem to interact with the one that gives me more HP. That's incredibly unfortunate. That's the whole reason I unlocked a second slot...
Alright, first time looking at a walkthrough. This fucking box puzzle makes no sense to me at all. Sweet and tart fruit on a cake, wtf. Okay so apparently I had the right idea but one of the images does NOT look like a fruit man, idk it looks like a leaf and nuts or something not a fruit.
That'll be all for today. I'm actually enjoying this game way more than I thought I would. Camera issues aside, it's been pretty dang good so far. Again... Just really not making me think of Silent Hill. This is 100% its own thing with its own lore and everything.
Silent Hill f play session #4 (spoilers)
This game incorporates the Shattered Memories running sequences in it but in a way that makes way more sense. Your health is draining while all these enemies are chasing you, so you can't just loop around endlessly. There is actually some real urgency.
Again, fighting enemies in tiny ass hallways with a camera like this sucks major ass. It is way more frustrating than it is scary. The enemies don't have to worry about the camera, you do.
Because of the way the camera works, taking on more than one enemy at once is also a massive chore. It is way too close to your character to accommodate having more than one enemy on the screen, and even with just one it often doesn't work because you can barely see them.
With a LOT of the story elements that are playing out, I can't help but wish that there were some actual options to make here that would change story endings. Apparently the game has multiple endings, but there has been literally nothing that would suggest to me that there is anything that alters that unless it is very esoteric. There was one time I went off the beaten path and got rewarded with an item I haven't been able to use yet, so maybe that will lead to something in the future, but a lot of story elements just seem really weirdly forced to be on an "evil" path where I don't trust something that is clearly giving me good advice. Really weird.
There's my first save scum! Yeah, I'm not going to tolerate monsters falling from the ceiling and doing damage to me when they pretty clearly weren't there before. Lame.
We now present you, camera problems: the boss! I love how I was just complaining about how much it sucks fighting two enemies at once and then there is a boss that spawns enemies. Cool.
There was a cool little map design moment where I thought I was going to be going one route but it did something completely different. I can appreciate stuff like that.
There seems to be another bug. The game says that since I chose "story" as my difficulty, going to a shrine will recover my HP. However, it doesn't and has never done that. I thought I had hallucinated that but I just checked the tutorial again and yup, it says that. So... That's cool. The whole game I've never had a health regen spot, just using items. Still haven't died so that's good at least.
YO I GOT A CROWBAR LET'S GO!
I opened up a shortcut but apparently it was... Completely useless lol. Don't know what that was for.
I am starting to get the async shader bug where the screen freaks out in a specific part of the map. Scared the shit out of me, thought my computer was about to fritz out.
Of course, as I say "I haven't died yet" I get hit with an instant kill move from an enemy I didn't know was there right after I unpaused the game xD can't even be mad at that one though lol that's pretty funny actually. It was right next to a checkpoint thankfully.
Man, getting more and more async shader visual bugs. That's a shame man, it's taking me out of the game quite a lot.
Alright this I don't want to spoil but holy shit what the fucking dick licking fuck suck is this holy shit. I'm absolutely gobsmacked. What the hell am I playing??
Again, what the FUCK AM I PLAYING?
WHAT THE FUCK
Aw man, async shit again but this time during combat. As if the camera wasn't bad enough. I swear the camera and this shit are the only things holding this game back.
THIS GAME IS FUCKING INSANE MAN HOLY SHIT
I was right in the middle of a boss battle and the game fucking CRASHED dude what the hell is that shit?? Dumb ass stupid ass... It's time for me to go to bed anyway but fuck.
Silent Hill f play session #5 (spoilers)
Welp, I lost all my text because gameliberty died for a few hours. Basically, fought a boss, did some other shit. Most of it is stuff I've already said.
The shader issues have gotten really bad. The game is either stuttering or doing that weird screen glitch like all the time now and it is getting in the way of my immersion. There are some pretty serious story cutscenes that were totally ruined by it. Not sure what's going on there but I can only imagine it is a mix of Unreal 5 shenanigans, developers not implementing their shaders properly, and NVIDIA not releasing game ready drivers for this one for some reason. I turned down the resolution significantly (1620p Quality DLSS to 1080p Balanced DLSS) and it smoothed things out, so maybe it really just gets really heavy later on in the game for some reason. I was having no problems like this before, and they started actually after the game crashed so something appears to be wrong. Where I'm at right now is as high as it'll go before it starts to stutter again.
Also, I'm noticing a bit of an unfortunate pattern with the puzzles. For the most part, it is all about running around and finding something then slotting it in to something else with a ridiculously easy riddle. There were a couple really good puzzles in the school section, but most everything else has been pretty lackluster to be honest. Not once have I had to combine any items, and the game moves at a pretty breakneck pace so the thing you need to solve a puzzle is pretty much always right around the corner.
Oh man I really fucking hate it when there are several enemies on screen in a tight room. I really do not know who thought this shit was such a great idea.
One such puzzle that I'm talking about just occurred. Go to three places, get the three thingies, put the thingies in the holes and bam. That's like the fifth time. Difference is that this time the actual riddle made no sense for the places I was supposed to put them into. I never would have found that out on my own.
Finally had a moment where all my weapons broke and would you look at that... It just spawned two extra weapons for me. In other words... The durability system is completely useless and they had no idea how to balance it but they had to have an analog for ammo somehow. I know plenty of survival horror games will drop ammo for you if you need it but very sparingly. That's the whole point of having a melee weapon that doesn't break... You can always fall back on it. The durability system is dumb.
Ah and right after that fight I get another weapon, so I'm back up to 3 again. Yeah, utterly useless system.
The game just LOVES spawning these fat fuck monsters with one or two more. This is borderline unbearable seriously. The gameplay does not facilitate having this kind of situation. Again, it's not scary, it's just really fucking annoying.
SIX! SIX FUCKING ENEMIES IN ONE SMALL ROOM! WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? Dude are there even any Dark Souls combat encounters with 6 enemies? They're not all one type either, there are 4 different enemy types in here all doing different moves at the same time. I would not be surprised if this is where my first death is. This is fucked up.
Okay I didn't die but seriously, that was like a gangbang. Got stun locked five or six times. Not fun at all, fuck that shit.
So the stutters still aren't gone. Helped, but not gone. I don't give a fuck how good a game looks man, if your game can't run at 1080p balanced dlss on a 2080ti you've done something horribly wrong. I'm only in high graphics settings too. This shit is getting ridiculous. Games aren't held back by hardware anymore, it's other shit. Such a bummer too because the game is pretty good, it's just this shit and the camera that are absolutely abysmal.
Okay so I beat the game but I know there are multiple endings. This one was... Definitely interesting. You apparently have to play the game two more times to fully understand what's going on. I might end up doing that, maybe with a little bit of cheating... But I'm also going to just look up the endings on YouTube.
The story in general is your pretty typical weird psycho Japanese shit. I can tell what it is going for but uh... Where the fuck does silent hill play into this? Lol. It seriously should have been its own title entirely.
Anyway, I'll look up those alternate endings and then write a review.
Silent Hill f play session #3 (spoilers)
These scarecrow enemies suck ass man, they only have one move you can counter and they very rarely use it. When they do, the timing is extremely tight. You can use your sanity points to expose more opportunities for counters, but I'm stubborn af and don't want to use the sanity system at all lol.
There was a puzzle that actually required me to write down things with a pen and paper. That's a huge win. It took me quite a few tries to get it right too even after decoding the cypher. Good stuff.
The game does a great job of guiding you around areas with enemies. You always know you're on the right track if you find one.
Although, I do really wish there were more moments where you weren't fighting enemies. Something I like about Silent Hill is that there are extended periods of time without any enemies. Just going around a place trying to find a way to the next area. There might be one or two really simple enemies, but they're pushovers. That's something that the remake missed out on a bit too... Just way too many enemies all over the place.