I got to Room 46 after 19 hours.
What do I get for that? A cutscene, wherein the missing mystery lady recites here Red Prince poem. You see, she was your mother all along, and you were the Red Prince, but now you're the Blueprints. How fun, a reveal and a pun.
This means nothing to me, I don't know anything about any of these people except vague af stuff. All I know is they're rich aristocrats, and maybe the mother is some kind of dissident in hiding or something like that, which probably means she's a lib. I want to say these characters surely must suck, except that in order to suck, they would have to have some personality first.
It's great when you get to the (or rather, an) ending of your mystery game, and it answers nothing, but hints vaguely at more mysteries, none of which I care about. Instead I get cringe. Why would I want to continue? It didn't pay off this time, surely next time will be another Sherlock-ass non-reveal about non-characters.
Doesn't help that the game isn't that interesting mechanically. You probably solve about half a unique puzzle per hour. Meanwhile you're replaying and redoing the same shit over and over, thanks to the roguelite structure of the game. It's mostly resource management; the core mechanic is you pick a room, there's resources in there that could help you open more doors and make more rooms, until you run out of resources/doors and have to start over. This is fine and somewhat interesting, except pretty soon you're spending most of the time looking for the same old trinkets in rooms you've already seen many times, so the interesting bits are but a fraction of the playtime.
There are worse games, but still weird to me how much praise that game got.
Recommended to play instead: Obra Dinn (mystery), Into the Breach (puzzle roguelike)
Ok I don't have to.
After 19 hours of playtime, they're hitting me with bad poetry, which I do not have the context to understand (through no fault of my own), about people I know next to nothing about, which explains nothing about what's going on, despite the fact that I supposedly just solved some mystery. I'm not even big on story in games, but please, I do crave some validation, this is bad writing and I have a right to be pissed off, am I not?
I mean, it is entirely and only your fault because you stopped playing after getting information in a non-chronological order and got salty about that for some reason lmao. The story is not told, but found and is entirely based on when you find said story. They obviously can't built a story arch or whatever with that
You also hate the movie memento? Do prequels break your mind?
You got information about the bigger mystery by solving a smaller one, yeah. And again, you stopped playing, so why be surprised that you don't have all the info yet?
You reached the credits, not the end of the game
Could have fooled me.
pissed off? No. I don't think so.
Listen, i actually don't even give much of a shit about britain like monarchists squabbling over territory and realms, but crashing out over the plot info being given to you in not a predetermined order, but in the order of you finding said info, is weird.
Are mysteries much better if they do not explain anything along the way? I don't think so. They could reveal something interesting at some point (when you roll credits for example), and still hint at further mysteries later. What they revealed (your character being her son), isn't any of the questions I had.
You seem to think that me expecting some kind of resolution at all for ostensibly beating the game is unreasonable and laughable. It is not, it's bad writing that they cannot manage that. Lots of games are non-linear and have multiple endings, and they resolve to some degree or another. And most games, even the ones with the most barebones story, manage to have characters with some personality, this game does not after 19 hours of playing it.
On a personal note, I thought we were having a fun discussion up to this point, but apparently I'm the one crashing out.
Uncovering and piecing together the story from the various bits and pieces scattered around is part of the game, that doesn’t make it bad writing it just doesn’t appear to be something you want to engage with.
Am I unreasonable for expecting that I would be able to receive some significant piece of the puzzle from beating the game? The thing that the game tells me to do?
The second time you get to that room you can actually explore it and there’s stuff in there that leads to the later puzzles iirc
100 hours in and i am still doing shit in that room and there is still at least one more puzzle in there that i haven't done yet