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Apr. 10th, 2006 10:22 amFinished Tolti-Aph late last night. Total dedicated play time of six or seven hours. I recommend it. It is an experimental game, and as such falters a bit at certain points, but has more than enough going for it that I was kept enmeshed in it for two solid play-sessions. (Took a break to do work-work and go to a birthday party when I got completely stuck, and when I came back I quickly unstuck myself. This, to me, is a mark of a good adventure game. Or anyway a good relationship with an adventure game.)
I needed no hints to win, but I did not not solve the difficult prologue puzzles in the most elegant fashion -- it is possible to do otherwise due to non-deterministic factors that the game experiments with. Later, due to another unusual feature of the game, I got into a winning state while leaving much of the main map unexplored, and several puzzles not just unsolved but entirely unseen. Since I wasn't clued that a better ending awaited me with more effort, I called it a night. Well, that and it was 3:30 a.m.
While the prologue is damnably hard, I never felt frustrated with it, and looking back I see there's actually a bunch of ways to solve it. I took the most brute-forcey approach, I think. I later figured out a better way, and peeking at a walkthrough I see there's an entirely bloodless approach that I didn't come close to finding.
What I really liked about all this is the way that the prologue is separated from the midgame. You begin the lacking the ability to save (there are perfectly sensible in-game reasons for this), and so everything you do has a sense of impermanence to it. The available map is small and you're quick to slap the restart button as you try different things, dying a lot in the process. Eventually, one way or another, you solve this puzzle and gain the ability to save as well as recover from injury, both of which expand your available exploration range -- one on a meta-game level, and one in-game.
And so it happens that you arrive in the midgame, even though you remain in the same map, and the narrative continuity is seamless; there's no overt chapter-change effects. I'm not sure I've seen this before, and I dig it.
I needed no hints to win, but I did not not solve the difficult prologue puzzles in the most elegant fashion -- it is possible to do otherwise due to non-deterministic factors that the game experiments with. Later, due to another unusual feature of the game, I got into a winning state while leaving much of the main map unexplored, and several puzzles not just unsolved but entirely unseen. Since I wasn't clued that a better ending awaited me with more effort, I called it a night. Well, that and it was 3:30 a.m.
While the prologue is damnably hard, I never felt frustrated with it, and looking back I see there's actually a bunch of ways to solve it. I took the most brute-forcey approach, I think. I later figured out a better way, and peeking at a walkthrough I see there's an entirely bloodless approach that I didn't come close to finding.
What I really liked about all this is the way that the prologue is separated from the midgame. You begin the lacking the ability to save (there are perfectly sensible in-game reasons for this), and so everything you do has a sense of impermanence to it. The available map is small and you're quick to slap the restart button as you try different things, dying a lot in the process. Eventually, one way or another, you solve this puzzle and gain the ability to save as well as recover from injury, both of which expand your available exploration range -- one on a meta-game level, and one in-game.
And so it happens that you arrive in the midgame, even though you remain in the same map, and the narrative continuity is seamless; there's no overt chapter-change effects. I'm not sure I've seen this before, and I dig it.