Johnny Novgorod said:
So I played for about an hour last night, and first impressions are...not very good. A personal note on me is that I am hard of hearing, and unfortunately a lot of the story in the first hour of the game is given in these whispers that are supposed to mess with your head while at the same time give you expossition. I can't fucking hear any of it, well I CAN hear it, but I can't make any of it out. Even with headphones it just sounds like a wall of gibberish.
The game starts out with the longest sequence of beautiful but ultimately boring ass scenery. First you take a long boat ride in which you cannot even look around. Then you walk through this forested area to a beach and some cliffs where I think shit is supposed to happen, but again i can't make out any of the whispers that the game is giving me for story.
One interesting thing of note here, the game has absolutely NO HUD. Even walking up to a intractable object for the first time, gave me no button prompt. I had to open the menu to look at the controls to proceed. I dunno if this is good or bad, but it is a thing that happened so take that for what you will.
Anyway I walked along for 20 minutes, climbed some cliffs (again with no prompt on how to use ladders), and made my way to the first "puzzle". Which boiled down to stare at a thing, then stare at another thing. I solved this accidentally. Through that puzzle was another blocked gate, which led to the first combat of the game....finally.
The combat is pretty fucking brutal too. It's fairly simple in this first fight, but damn you hit people with your sword and actually see them get cut up. There is visual damage on their bodies, cuts and wounds from your blows before you finally kill them. It's really REALLLY good looking. Again there is no HUD so you don't see any health bar, stamina bar, or anything like that. When you get hit the screen blurs. Take too much damage and everything just goes darker and darker until you die. Which in this scene forces you to die so you can see what happens.
So you can't open the big gate, and turn around to see two other gates behind you where the game explains that there are basically to big bad bosses through each gate that much be beaten in order to open the big glory gate you originally wanted to get through.
That's as far as I got last night. The game is beautiful and Senua is an interestingly designed character. She doesn't say much but her face and eyes are incredibly expressive (Much better than Kristen Stewart @Johnny Novogorod). If I could hear what was going on, I'm sure I would think the game world was interesting, but I feel like it is poorly delivered. I get what they are trying to do here, but if things don't improve, I'm basically going to be playing in the dark in terms of story.
I don't know if I like not having a UI at all. I'll have to see how it plays out through more gameplay, but I feel subtle button prompts for interactions would have been better than having to open the menu to figure out the controls.
Gotta say, it's a very odd first impression to say the least.
