No Mutants Allowed

That is such a trash take. I bet you like playing Outwards too, don't ya?

"i did not pay enough attention to the game to the point that i missed the same clue six times in a row but this is the games fault"

And how exactly am I supposed to know that this random neon bullshit is any different than any other random neon bullshit? I looked at the panel, saw that it was glitching numbers, killed the CPU nodes then I didn't look at the panel, because why would I?

As with any other random neon bullshit in the game, if I walk up to it, see it can't be interacted with, then I'll just ignore it for efficiency of time. Art direction matters and when the art direction keeps telling me that random neon bullshit is just that, random neon bullshit, then I accept that and move on.

So I never even noticed that the numbers had stopped, and even if I did notice that the numbers had stopped what am I supposed to do about that exactly? "Oh a random number, clearly this is a part of a code for way later that is a mandatory part of the story and not just a side objective, I should write this down!"

And ok, let's say someone DIDN'T know that they should pay attention to the panels and see that they stopped on a number and then write it down, now they're being punished with shitty backtracking, shitty elevators and a shitty map that isn't informative about which room is which? Yeah that's great design.

There are a bunch of other moments in the game where it is dogshit at explaining what you're supposed to do or informing the player. One of the worst ones is when you're in cyberspace and you unlock something, if you're in combat and trying not to die then you might miss that little tiny popup of text...

...and if you do you either gotta reload and do it all over again or finish it not knowing what the hell you just unlocked.

When you remake a game you shouldn't do a 1:1 remake. Old games aren't perfect and sometimes they need a bit of touching up upon and this kinda dogshit "oh we're not gonna hold your hand" is just that, dogshit.

This kinda thing should be for optional goodies, great stuff that you will miss out on but are not necessary to progress the game. Like the chess game. But making it mandatory for the progression of the main game and then punishing players for not knowing that THIS neon bullshit was actually important is bad game design.

Also I failed to mention here that I don't think that the backtracking couldn't work. If they had repopulated the levels with new enemies, locked certain doors, added new radiation and bio leaks and made it more difficult to get to health pods then going back through earlier

levels could have been fun and exciting. I've already looted them, already solved the puzzles, already got the map nailed down so it's not like I have to go at a super slow pace anymore. It'd be a more combat centric portion of the game. Which could be skipped entirely if you had just written the numbers down to begin with.

So writing the numbers down means you can kinda speedrun that portion of the game but if you don't write those numbers down you'll get new challenges as you re-progress through earlier levels!

But they didn't do that. It's just boring empty levels with nothing in them and it just feels like an unfair punishment because of bad game design on their part.

Smart move, GM.

There is no point in the game where numbers on a monitor don't matter. At best you can point to the red herring combinations on executive level but even then one of those is the correct combination. So calling a telegraphed monitor with a number on it, a mechanic the game uses several times, "random neon bullshit" is just trying to justify your own anger about not paying attention

poop take

lol

Hmmm something seems fishy here. . .