This still seems to be more of a strength of the console games line-up. Maybe steam has some similar titles... but I don´t buy on steam.

By the way, Hyperlight Drifter indeed sounds quite interesting. Do you know what kind of save-mechanic this game uses?

I like it better too, not least because of the totally different (and quite original) save system which allows you to save whenever and wherever you want to but judges your performance based on how often you resort to it. (I like the atmosphere and exploration in DS just as much as in BoD, but I'm not a fan of DS' bonfire placements and arena boss battles,)

Hmm. I'm 90% sure that it's autosaved based on checkpoints.

My understanding is that Dark Souls was based on Dungeon Crawlers like Ultima Underground. So with that in mind I'd highly recommend Arx Fatalis. There are certainly differences in gameplay but its about fully exploring a place, finding new routes and secrets with dangerous combat.

Isn't Dark Souls notoriously hard or am I thinking of something else?

Your skull?

Ok, I´ve considered buying Hyperlight Drifter, but if the following thread is correct, the game is abandoned on gog by the publisher. The steam version got way more updates.

https://www.gog.com/forum/hyper_light_drifter/changelog

Could somebody confirm this? If it´s true this publisher should be banned from gog.

Definitely not a game I want to buy anymore. (neither on gog nor on steam)


It is kind of hard, but once you know how it´s ment to be played, it becomes much easier.

Dark souls is really, really hard. Not just due to the dreadful port, got all the way through to the Minotaur on the battlements and gave up, it's just not fun. You start, and then die over and over and over, until you level up a couple of times. Then you get into the next area and die and die and die, until you level up enough or cheese your way through a section. By the Minotaur section I was thoroughly fed up with it, and even though I had the hefty bit from above in, I got stuck in the geometry, at which point I erased it permanently. If you enjoy self harm, this is the game for you.

On GOG? Necropolis, maybe, but that ain't very good.

There's aren't very many games like Souls, period. I'd say Nioh, Salt and Sanctuary, and those two bad Deck13 games, Lords of the Fallen and The Surge, are the closest ones out there, and they sure ain't here.

Dark Souls is a game about dying a bunch in order to learn how to not die.

Sounds like instead of learning anything you just tried to brute force your way through stats or cheesing the game. No wonder you found it hard.

People latched on to that, and it got heavily used in the marketing by the publisher, but that actually passes off a wrong idea of the game. The game has challenge because the devs believe it provides a more satisfying experience once you overcome it. If they just wanted to make something hard for the sake of being hard, it'd be much easier, but the result wouldn't be as good.

If you get into the game's frame of mind of playing defensively, being aware of your surroundings, not rushing in and trying to hack n' slash everything as soon as you see it, and if you don't mind dying 2 or 3 times at a boss before you beat it, it's really not that hard.

Now this is the kind of thing I look for in a review! Seriously!

If GameSpot could do a little more of this they wouldn't get made fun of so much.

As far as I could tell there was nothing to "learn". Sure jump down on the big bad to do a big amount of damage that was it, other than repeat over and over. Nobody has yet provided anything in the way of actual strategy on what to do other than keep doing the same thing over and over. The Minotaur demon, is mostly luck, do you get stuck on him or in the geometry, if so you die, no skill, no learning. I mean it's quite obvious to climb up and jump down on him like mario, but half of it is luck due to the terrible engine and the other half is just doing the same thing over and over. I mean there might have been a story, I can't think of it, some kind of dog mechanics to build up various skills or such like, but I just remember repeating over and over to get a skill point which didn't seem to make any difference. Any strategy to defeat beasty, yes one. No do it different ways, use different skills, one and only one way to defeat each and you repeat over and over until you succeed or delete the self harm product.


To be fair I did learn two things, never waste time on a DS game, and secondly never bother with console ports.

I would say the souls games are roughly as hard as resident evil 1. Definitely harder than most games are nowadays, but not arcade shooter level hard.

I'm not having too much trouble with RE 1 save for the fact that I get stuck a lot, running back and forth trying to find keys and crap.

Then you shouldn´t be too overwhelmed with the souls games. You could read something about how "curse" works in each game before you start, just to avoid getting frustrated easily. Aside from that, it´s really just a matter of patience.