It’s interesting. This game definitely creates polarities, which I would categorise as ‘old school gamers’ and ‘casual gamers’.
Old School gamers like me (though I play relatively few games - I just play them to death) come from an era where bugs were commonplace and games were so hard that you expected to die first time round. If you’ve ever been to a show called ‘You Are In a Dark Room…’ you’ll know what I mean. That encapsulates the kind of games we grew up with: “You die! You die! You die! You die! You die!” You pick yourself up again, restart and figure out where you went wrong.
But games have progressed since then. Designers have figured out how to ease you into them and make the difficulty curve something that so subtly holds your hand you don’t even realise you are being hand-held. As a result, players seem now to expect to be able to cruise through a game on the higher difficulties with no problem. On the whole, I think that’s a good thing - games are supposed to be fun, after all. But…
Then you get a title like this, created by an old school designer who doesn’t believe in holding your hand and clearly believes that you should be provided with a wide open sandbox of abilities which you can mix and match to try and solve the problems that the game’s brutal difficulty curve will throw at you.
Quite naturally, casual gamers are horrified. Games aren’t supposed to crucify you, then stomp up and down on your head for good measure! So you get a massive outcry about how impossibly hard the game is.
Meanwhile other gamers are quietly replaying the missions they just lost and figuring out how to win them. They stumble on unforseen combos that ace certain scenarios and publish them online. Now you have a massive outcry about how cheesy the game is.
And then you have the hard core gamers who refuse to win with cheese and keep on grafting and keep on grafting until they find the tactics that work against a particular type of mission. People like you and Voland, who enjoy finding ways to surmount those insurmountable odds.
I’m not saying anyone’s right here, or that anyone’s wrong. I’m just observing what I see as a very interesting dynamic when Old School game design comes up against the modern gaming world, and the quite passionate reactions it seems to evoke.
What I am saying, regardless of what anyone else believes, is that at its core this is a very good game - and if we plug away at it, and point out where and why we believe it’s not quite working properly, it will turn into a brilliant game, hopefully at around the time that a whole new bunch of Steam/GoG users come online.