I'm thinking about picking up one of these, and basically I'd like to hear people's thoughts on them. And yes, I know they're kinda completely different games, but nyah. :P

So, I'm interested in Inquisitor due to being an RPGer and liking unique settings, but from what I've read it seems like it can be pretty frustrating. My threshold for frustration depends on the game. If there's enough respite and reward from the frustration than I can deal with it, and I'm mostly fine with it if it seems purposeful as part of the design as opposed to just being bad design.

As for La Mulana, I have limited experience with Metroidvania games. I've played a bit of Metroid, played Dark Souls a lot, and a bit of Symphony of The Night. My main concern with this sort of game is a sense of aimlessness. Depending on how it goes, I feel like it could be easy to get bored of it due to a sense of just kind of aimlessly wandering without any real purpose. Connected to that, how's the story?

And yes, I've already read reviews and watched videos and such, but I'd like to hear more of a discussion and just people's opinions.

Cheers! :)

Well, I have both games and I stoped playing both because of frustration.

Buy Hotline Miami instead.

I wrote a (loving, but still fairly critical) review of La Mulana that addresses many of my concerns with it. I wouldn't say that it feels "aimless" - you generally have a good idea where you want to go (that room you haven't been yet), and what you want to do there (get the item/beat the boss/etc). The problem is knowing how to do that - that's where a lot of the more tedious observation, recording, and carefully whacking every brick to see if it's breakable comes in.

So I guess it comes down to what you mean when you say "aimless" - if you mean not having any particular objective, then no, La Mulana usually presents you with at least three or four things you could be doing. But if you lump in "running around a level re-reading all the tablets and trying to figure out how the hell to progress" under "aimless", then yes, be prepared for a lot of that.

La Mulana is one of the most mind-bendingly ingenious puzzle platformers I have ever played. Hints are so goddamn obscure that when you do finally get one figured out, you feel like you just discovered the cure for cancer. It will make you feel like a genius. It will also make you feel like a lost soul. One of the few games that still come out where having pen and paper next to you as you play is a requirement. There's some really difficult platforming, too, though it's mostly due to funky control (think Ghosts n' Goblins and the jump mechanic there). If you fancy yourself a competent gamer, La Mulana is a great way to really test that notion.

I have no real interest in Hotline Miami, but feel free to convince me otherwise. :) Is there some sort of in-game note taking function? I imagine that'd make it much less tedious.

Sort of. There's an item you can find that allows you to record text from tablets, but it can only store ten entries at a time (expandable to 20 after you find an upgrade). It isn't nearly enough. It's not bad for when you're trying to figure out a local puzzle with a lot of hints in that area, but for the larger puzzles that span multiple areas, you just don't have room to store all those obscure hints hidden away in forgotten corners... meaning that if you don't write them down, you'll need to find them again when it finally comes time to solve that puzzle.

For example, in one area late in the game you'll find a tablet that just says "The Place where Annunakki dares not look." This is a reference to a mural you saw ages ago depicting the god Annunakki, but it's in an area that you probably haven't been to in hours and would probably have long since deleted the entry to make room for new ones. So unless you can remember which of the many murals you saw depicts Annunakki, you just have to run around checking all the murals again until you find it.

Edit: I don't want to put you off the game, it really is is a good one. I think that if I'd gone into it with the mindset that it was more of an observe/record/contemplate puzzle game rather than an action/platformer, I would have found it far less frustrating. But finding out six hours in that I really /should/ have been writing down all those cryptic commentaries just made the whole thing more annoying than it needed to be.

There is a freeware version of La Mulana.

La Mulana is really good - one of the best freeware games I've played - but it's VERY hard. The combat isn't all that tough (at least once you've found some powerups), but figuring out how to progress can take a long time, and you're liable to get stuck frequently. If you look at, say, Super Metroid or Symphony of the Night, you'll eventually find your way through the game if you explore everywhere on the map, and being extremely thorough mostly gets you upgrades and powerups. La Mulana is far more cryptic. I hear the remake is a little less obscure, but I'm sure that will only take you so far. I have pages and pages of notes on the game.

I've been playing it off and on for years and still haven't finished it (though I'm close). I had to dig up some help on the internet to solve some of the puzzles. As good as it is, I don't think I'm likely to play it again.

Yeah, that's good to know. The game's alt-tab friendly, I hope? I'd much prefer using a text file vs hand-written notes.

Now c'mon Inquisitor fans, I know you're out there. ;P

La Mulana is a thirty + hour platformer similar to Montezuma's Revenge.

Inquisitor is a whole lot of reading. XD

Inquisitor in my opinion is utter shit, ymmv. Treat those positive reviews with great care.

Care to elaborate?

The game isnt worth elaborating on, it's quite frustrating, looks like shit, combat is shite, story is quite interesting, its a shame they fucked it up with a shit game.

This is just my opinion, its neither wrong nor right, if you buy it, I would love to hear your opinion.

EDIT : Oh, yeah, buy the levitation skill, if you get the game.

It has a well designed world and the actual character creation system is pretty good. The investigations are actually kind of awesome since you really don't know who's telling the truth, making for some fascinating puzzles to figure out who the villains are.

The critical flaw is that it's so. slooooow.

Combat is slow, because you essentially fight a few guys and then wait a minute for your stamina to come back. But much worse is the movement speed, which is based on your speed stat. As an inquisitor, who doesn't really use speed, it takes forever to walk anywhere. I had to cheat my speed stat to the maximum, which made my run speed (which uses stamina) slightly slower than the walk speed in Diablo. It makes it tedious, which is even more frustrating than if it was just bad. A bad story just means I'll probably ignore the game, but an inaccessible good story is just tragic.

I enjoyed it ok with cheat codes. I NEVER EVER would use cheats in 99.999% of games, but I don't think I would have been able to play it any other way.

Hm, I'll keep that in mind.

How's the freeware version of La Mulana, is it significantly different from the paid version?