LinustheBold: The game needed an outside eye to adjust for tone and bad execution; the errors and inconsistencies in voicing, for example, were egregious, and there's no excuse for that, except that devs - and this game is not alone in this problem - didn't think it was important enough, and squeezed it in between last-minute tasks. Voicing is as important as coding, because it's how a player interacts with the game. It's criminal that so few indie designers understand this. It's like indie film directors who cast bad actors and then wonder why no one takes their movies seriously.
It's criminal that indie games with potential like that don't get more funding. Voice acting costs money, this game had virtually no funding.
LinustheBold: As for puzzles that I found poorly designed, well, I didn't even bother with the bunker puzzle you mention: after a few failed combos I realized that whatever they thought the clue said, it didn't actually say that. It was wildly misleading, so I looked up the answer before I sank too much time into it.
All the hints for the bunker puzzle are right there in the game,even down to the exact order for the sun dial. I'm sorry this didn't bring you any joy, it sucks to get stuck and then you hate the game, I know that story only too well.
LinustheBold: No, the puzzles that come to mind are the combo of ingredients to put in the pot - none is described or demystified anywhere else, making it pure trial and error across a series of possible ingredients, many of which won't even be used - and the gate puzzle, which was ridiculous. A reasonable player could not arrive at the solution from the information given; therefore it's badly designed, by definition. And the puzzle with the fan, which might have been solveable if the elements had been described, but they were not. And the dead-end after Ord acquires change in the bar, which is both trivial and terrible.
It's all about very very basic color mixing, and there are no dead ends as you can always toss the milk out and start anew.
You should have seen the complex and super anal precise color mixing charts I had to do for classes at art school, plus all the batshit binders and pigments involved. Mixing two/three colors together in this game is really as simple as one can make such a color puzzle and I thought it was fun. Kinda reminded me of Kyrandia 2 Hands of Fate with all its potion mixing. Again, I'm sorry you didn't enjoy it and that can't be helped but just because you had trouble it doesn't mean the game is badly designed. Seek blame within yourself first, be a man!
Same for the gate puzzle, you should have seen me curse at it when things didn't make sense to me. In the end I saw that every single, and I mean every one of those riddles makes sense. If only the "shoe box" was more recognizable as what it actually is, that was bad graphic design. But the riddle design is ok, no logic errors there. Your criticism here seems ill founded yet again. Others had no trouble with this. Be a man!
LinustheBold: And the super-complex nonsense in the church, when it is barely even established what our goal is (this was a common problem, I often had no idea what Ord was trying to do, since he rarely communicated it). And the two main puzzles in the ship, one involving being locked in when there was no screen hot-spot nor any indication that Ord could act during the animation, and the immediately ensuing conundrum of where to hide: there's a spot about one pixel wide where you have to click, and the game gives no indication that the strategy is even correct in that location.
I can't remember the church part as problematic, your mission is to infiltrate and do espionage and that's what you do. Also, bit of priest trolling, purely as a means to an end of course :)
As for the hitboxes for the times puzzles, I agree those are tightly mapped but these are situations with very contained options to begin with, after 2-3 failed attempts it should become obvious what the only option is. As for that particular one with the 1 pixel are, well that specific part of that object is rather small but once you realize that's what you need to click on it isn't hard to hit. I absolutely hate times puzzles in p&c adventures and thought these here were moderate, not even remotely aggravating as in many other games.
LinustheBold: On the dragon island, one of the locations you must visit to get the water bottle is so visually removed that I had no idea there was a live spot there: it looked like part of the background. The actions you have to perform once you find it are equally bizarre. None of these puzzles is in itself too hard or too obscure; they are just poorly designed, badly placed and rendered, and absent the clues that a reasonable player would want to make it fun to solve them. Sierra games give you feedback when you're doing the right thing near the right place, because if you don't respond that way then the player will naturally assume, after five or ten or twenty failures, that the strategy is wrong. The protagonists in games of this period constantly remind you of their goals. Here, the designer, who knows how it all turns out, seems to believe that it's all relatively obvious.
Sierra gives you feedback? Yeah, it let's you die, then you knows you're wrong :/
I greatly enjoyed the bottle & dragon puzzle, kinda fairy tales-y and Princess Bride-ish that whole sequence, one of my favorite parts. Great fun I had, and I'm usually jaded and only get lukewarm enthusiam out of games.
Never got stuck due to a pixelhunt in Paradox but I've gotten badly stuck due to pixehunts at least once or multiple times in almost every classical p&c adventure. Runaway sunglasses, I curse you...
LinustheBold: The "clues" in the library, for example, did not read to me as clues - I found the library long before I found the item they were supposed to help with, and had already tried to find a way to apply those details to everything going on long before that item arrived. It's a good idea to supply that information, but the hints come at the wrong time. Again, it's just bad design. That's not where those clues should be. I gather this is mostly a one-man project, but he really needed someone who had not designed the game to work it through with him before the coding was begun. Basically, to sit there and ask him, over and over again, "How would they know that? When did you tell them this? Where did you explain it? How do they know what to do next? If you call this thing a 'hole,' will any ordinary gamer understand that it is the opening into the ventilation pipe that leads into the next room? Why would you think that?" And so forth. My impression from the game and the dev blog is that he really thought these moments were amusing giggly fun, when I found them to be unreasonable obstacles that stopped me from playing the damn game until eventually I wanted to give up and quit.
Again, I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the game while I did. Doesn't mean the game is badly designed. This all sounds angry to me. Your sight is clouded by the dark side. Can't you be a little bit more fair and just say you didn't like it, instead of blasting the work of that one guy who put all his heart and soul into the project. Be a man!
LinustheBold: If this game had been done by Wadjet Eye, I think it would have been delightful. I've gotten stuck from time to time in the Blackwell games, but it's because I was making a mistake, not because they weren't guiding me right. A little break or some other strategies, and I was always able to get back in the saddle. Not here.
I enjoyed The Samaritan Paradox more than I did all The Blackwell games combined, maybe a bit overstated if I also include Deception which was my favorite Blackwell title. Very cool story, just not my kinda gameplay, not enough point & clicky puzzles but that's not what these games aim for, so that's perfectly fine. Resonance and Primordia are of a higher quality than Samaritan Paradox, even Gemini Rue in some regards. However, personally I still enjoyed Samaritan Paradox more, even if I rate those 3 Wadjet published games higher objectively.
LinustheBold: And if you do chase down
Dream Chamber, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.
Will do, thanks again. It's rare finds like that why I check this thread so closely.
