Recently I’ve been on a retro gaming binge - things like SimCity 3000 and Titanic: Adventure out of time (the latter of which I learnt is now old enough that someone has managed to emulate it within the browser
However I decided to also try something … new? If you could call it that - but Lies of P which, to say it’s inspired by FromSoft would be an understatement, is exactly the kind of game I enjoy. It’s challenging yet very rewarding.
The main thing that bothers me though is the strange fantastical naming of attributes. Things like “motivity” and “technique”. I’m not sure whether it was intentional, but by naming these things so different to things like “strength” and “dexterity” it actually brings it even closer to games like Bloodborne and Dark Souls. I am constantly mapping the names of each to their FromSoft counterparts. “Oh, Advance, you must mean Intelligence”.
After I finish it the plan is to move onto Half-Life 2. It’s been a good decade since I played it last (forever grateful for those huge iMacs at university that let you install whatever on them!) and I’d love to take a critical eye to some of the mechanics and core loops involved in that.