I’ve just had a look at the Wikipedia page to get a quick overview, and: ‘The sequel to Atlantis: The Lost Tales, it follows the story of Ten, a mystical being that travels across time to defeat the Bearer of Dark.’ That sounds crazy enough already!
]]>I think the 2nd game as a whole is pretty strange, but the last couple minutes are so… hard to describe. I’m still not sure what was meant to be happening 😂.
]]>Interesting… so, it’s almost as if the second genre should become a kind of mini-game which can be bypassed if the player doesn’t want to join in? That makes sense. I’d give any action sections in an adventure game a go to see if they added to the experience, but I’d really appreciate if it I could skip them when they didn’t sit well with me.
And now I’ve mentioned mini-games… that’s a whole other subject I could rant about. 😆
]]>Ok, even more ‘bizarre’… I must say that I’m now tempted to watch playthroughs of the sequels just to see how weird they get. I’m not sure if anything could be stranger than the weird alien octopus thing at the end. 😆
]]>Thanks for picking up on the sexual harassment and slavery topics – these were things I completely failed to mention when writing this review. As we discussed on Saturday, the treatment of Anna (you were right about her name) was horrible in terms of both character development and situation. I know Atlantis was released in a different era but surely it could have been handled a little more sensitively, even for back then…
You’ve had so much practise with the planetary puzzle now that you’ll get it first time in every speedrun! And I look forward to seeing how to get around that flowerpot section more quickly. 😉
]]>You know, I was having a discussion about this with some friends related to a recent…umm…really bad bit in a different game. Basically a similar sense of “I was playing one game, and then it switched things up on me and I hated it.”
To try and shorten it all, it depends. But mostly the two “genres” should directly mesh well. Players should be led to expect that there will be this kind of switching. If you’re making an adventure game for adventure game players with non-adventure game content, then your players should have some freedom to determine how much of that non-adventure content they engage with.
And maybe most importantly, each sequence should be done well mechanically. Even if we were to theoretically argue that the ‘action’ sequences in Atlantis were actually just part of the standard adventure genre…they can still be so poorly designed and annoying to interact with that it sucks.
Something like the new God of War games technically have puzzles interspersed with the action, but those puzzles are light, short, and mostly optional. Don’t like ’em? Don’t need to do ’em. And you’re taught to expect these puzzles fairly early on and they’re clearly set up as part of the overall gameplay. There’s a lot of work done to integrate them.
But if instead I was asked to stop and read several pages of text and then use that text knowledge to locate a key to open a door? Congrats, the game is ruined.
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