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by cgriswald 3383 days ago
I can't tell you how much I enjoyed the relative lack of a tutorial and 'front story'. I've gotten games and then sat on them for months because I knew I'd need a good 45 minutes to even start playing the game and just never had the time or patience. This game was just such a great "pick up and play" experience; and it let's you learn a lot of stuff on your own.

The puzzles are amazing because they feel very natural. The game doesn't go out of its way to prevent you from "cheating" or solving the puzzle however you like. But it also doesn't feel like it was intended for there to be more than one solution. The intended solution is usually clear after the fact (even if you've solved it some other way); and it seems like the solution, but any other solution is also accepted. It feels as if I've really stumbled across this puzzle, and even if I can't figure it out, I can figure SOMETHING out, and that's alright.
1 comments
flgr 3383 days ago
And yet they kinda manage to still teach you things carefully. It feels like in the past they were afraid of making things to subtle, but if you look at the game with an eye of game design (just create a second user on the Switch and restart it from scratch) it's surprising how they still manage to steer you. The whole plateau is a tutorial, but it doesn't jump into your face as much.

And then there's that one annoying motion controlled puzzle with a way to bypass it that a bunch of journalists mentioned in their reviews, and it's as if it was designed with that trick in mind. So that journalists discover it and write about how this game is different.

Which is interesting. Almost like they thought of how to communicate that this game is different and how to best let people notice, and then they came up with that.

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cgriswald 3383 days ago
Agreed. You can definitely feel the 'steering' if you're looking out for it, and there are points later in the game where events happen and it gets a little hand-holdy. But compared to games where a character accosts you immediately, tells you exactly what button to press, then tells you exactly which button to press next, ad naseum (and usually tells me so much I don't retain any of it), it feels like it's not even there.

I think the motion control puzzle was a flub, though. The motion controls sucked. I ended up doing it the "right" way, but at no time did it feel like what I was doing to the controller and what was happening on the screen was correct; but I love that it's possible to find other ways.

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vanderZwan 3382 days ago
> You can definitely feel the 'steering' if you're looking out for it

The implicit steering is one of the things that Nintendo is famous for though. At least among game designers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH2wGpEZVgE

What the video doesn't point out is that if you don't run to the right, the timing of the jump to avoid the Goomba makes you hit that first question mark block by accident.

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