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Have recently completed it, and enjoyed it immensely. Note there may be SPOILERS here for others reading this.

Love the even more intense Giger-esqe artwork this time through.

In a number of places I actually managed to solve puzzles due to trial and error/logic, before I got a section that would have given me a clue to that very puzzle (and thereby made it zero trial and error), but I consider it a positive that it's possible to solve puzzles before you find the hint/clue/solution for it.

It was kind of weird in some cases actually obtaining something before I actually had a logical need for it, but again I'd much rather the game allow that rather than only display an interaction after you actually need it (mainly because in this case I usually don't think of visiting places that didn't already have something I could interact with). I also didn't even think to weigh the jars, despite weighing the beans at the time I grabbed them (so that was on me for not realising the obvious connection there) - that puzzle was relatively simple to work out using trial and error though (but definitely a plus that there was a better way).

The one tiny thing (and hence the title of this post) that bothered me a little bit was the zoom. When fully zoomed out, it's often not possible to explore everything because for some reason when zoomed out the area you can move in seems to be more restricted, and furthermore in some cases this leads to those green description points being unreachable/unclickable.

It's not a massive deal since I spent a lot of time zoomed in to see the detail, which brings me to the opposite point - many times I wished we could zoom in just a LITTLE bit more, to see more of the detail. Despite the (as usual) very impressive visuals, I found that for most of the game, the text descriptions were describing things in much greater detail than I could actually see, or describing details I couldn't quite see. Which is really weird for a game from you guys, since I never felt that way with Stasis or Beautiful Desolation (both min and max zoom felt mostly about right in those).

Anyway, minor gripe. I'll likely play it again at some point (possibly soon), since I only got about half the deaths this time - most of the deaths this time around seem much more obvious, so it almost felt like I was purposefully getting my characters killed just to see what would happen (OK that's pretty much exactly what I did some of the time, but still - seemed less surprising than some of them in Stasis. But at least they were included this time (was definitely missing them in BD), which is definitely a plus!).
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squid830: Have recently completed it, and enjoyed it immensely. Note there may be SPOILERS here for others reading this.

Love the even more intense Giger-esqe artwork this time through.

In a number of places I actually managed to solve puzzles due to trial and error/logic, before I got a section that would have given me a clue to that very puzzle (and thereby made it zero trial and error), but I consider it a positive that it's possible to solve puzzles before you find the hint/clue/solution for it.

It was kind of weird in some cases actually obtaining something before I actually had a logical need for it, but again I'd much rather the game allow that rather than only display an interaction after you actually need it (mainly because in this case I usually don't think of visiting places that didn't already have something I could interact with). I also didn't even think to weigh the jars, despite weighing the beans at the time I grabbed them (so that was on me for not realising the obvious connection there) - that puzzle was relatively simple to work out using trial and error though (but definitely a plus that there was a better way).

The one tiny thing (and hence the title of this post) that bothered me a little bit was the zoom. When fully zoomed out, it's often not possible to explore everything because for some reason when zoomed out the area you can move in seems to be more restricted, and furthermore in some cases this leads to those green description points being unreachable/unclickable.

It's not a massive deal since I spent a lot of time zoomed in to see the detail, which brings me to the opposite point - many times I wished we could zoom in just a LITTLE bit more, to see more of the detail. Despite the (as usual) very impressive visuals, I found that for most of the game, the text descriptions were describing things in much greater detail than I could actually see, or describing details I couldn't quite see. Which is really weird for a game from you guys, since I never felt that way with Stasis or Beautiful Desolation (both min and max zoom felt mostly about right in those).

Anyway, minor gripe. I'll likely play it again at some point (possibly soon), since I only got about half the deaths this time - most of the deaths this time around seem much more obvious, so it almost felt like I was purposefully getting my characters killed just to see what would happen (OK that's pretty much exactly what I did some of the time, but still - seemed less surprising than some of them in Stasis. But at least they were included this time (was definitely missing them in BD), which is definitely a plus!).
Hey squid! I appreciate the kind words and thanks for playing.

It is always a compromise concerning zoom and image resolution. We had to carefully balance the memory usage of the background images so we were limited in the size of the images representing the backgrounds. We are going to quadruple the images on the next game. Remember that Bone Totem's backgrounds are 8 times larger than the original stasis!

The deaths with the 'use on self' are more of a bonus (so we didnt make them a central feature) and not really integrated into the story as they were in STASIS. John had good reason to use them while our new characters have everything to live for.
Post edited June 06, 2023 by THEBROTHERHOOD
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squid830: Have recently completed it, and enjoyed it immensely. Note there may be SPOILERS here for others reading this.

Love the even more intense Giger-esqe artwork this time through.

In a number of places I actually managed to solve puzzles due to trial and error/logic, before I got a section that would have given me a clue to that very puzzle (and thereby made it zero trial and error), but I consider it a positive that it's possible to solve puzzles before you find the hint/clue/solution for it.

It was kind of weird in some cases actually obtaining something before I actually had a logical need for it, but again I'd much rather the game allow that rather than only display an interaction after you actually need it (mainly because in this case I usually don't think of visiting places that didn't already have something I could interact with). I also didn't even think to weigh the jars, despite weighing the beans at the time I grabbed them (so that was on me for not realising the obvious connection there) - that puzzle was relatively simple to work out using trial and error though (but definitely a plus that there was a better way).

The one tiny thing (and hence the title of this post) that bothered me a little bit was the zoom. When fully zoomed out, it's often not possible to explore everything because for some reason when zoomed out the area you can move in seems to be more restricted, and furthermore in some cases this leads to those green description points being unreachable/unclickable.

It's not a massive deal since I spent a lot of time zoomed in to see the detail, which brings me to the opposite point - many times I wished we could zoom in just a LITTLE bit more, to see more of the detail. Despite the (as usual) very impressive visuals, I found that for most of the game, the text descriptions were describing things in much greater detail than I could actually see, or describing details I couldn't quite see. Which is really weird for a game from you guys, since I never felt that way with Stasis or Beautiful Desolation (both min and max zoom felt mostly about right in those).

Anyway, minor gripe. I'll likely play it again at some point (possibly soon), since I only got about half the deaths this time - most of the deaths this time around seem much more obvious, so it almost felt like I was purposefully getting my characters killed just to see what would happen (OK that's pretty much exactly what I did some of the time, but still - seemed less surprising than some of them in Stasis. But at least they were included this time (was definitely missing them in BD), which is definitely a plus!).
avatar
THEBROTHERHOOD: Hey squid! I appreciate the kind words and thanks for playing.

It is always a compromise concerning zoom and image resolution. We had to carefully balance the memory usage of the background images so we were limited in the size of the images representing the backgrounds. We are going to quadruple the images on the next game. Remember that Bone Totem's backgrounds are 8 times larger than the original stasis!

The deaths with the 'use on self' are more of a bonus (so we didnt make them a central feature) and not really integrated into the story as they were in STASIS. John had good reason to use them while our new characters have everything to live for.
I can appreciate size limits, but there were some scenes in particular that seemed to limit the zoom in more than others. So while I could zoom in really close in some scenes, in others the zoom didn't go that far - I guess because the background was larger and so needs to zoom out more? So this seems more a case of a min/max zoom being applied to all scenes, but the actual min-max zoom window seems to shift (so if I throw random numbers around, one scene might have 10x-5x zoom, while another has 5x-1x, or something like that).

So you're saying we can't zoom into the larger scenes as much as the smaller ones, due to this increasing memory usage too much? Sounds like this needs an uber-enhanced edition re-release in a few years with max zoom! ;)

I understand the need to compromise, but personally I would have preferred to have consistent zoom levels across the whole game, even if that meant some scenes would need to be split into multiple smaller ones. But it's a small gripe.

It did probably make it harder to find the videos, but I think these are incredibly difficult to find anyway. Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever actually clicked on one of the video tapes because I saw it - so far every one I've found (and I've only found 3!) has been by complete accident. That's one way to make them really well hidden I guess!