Re: Salt and Sanctuary

[rynling]

"I’m playing Salt and Sanctuary because I can’t keep playing Ender Lilies on an endless loop," I wrote a week ago.

Guess who is once again playing Ender Lilies?? Ender Lilies is so good. It is so so good. Now that I'm a bit more skilled at playing the game, I'm able to pay more attention to the background art, and I keep noticing new details. This is a hardcore dark fantasy game, so all the details are horrible, but still. I'm also starting to notice new details about the sound design as well. For the rest of my current playthrough, I'm considering turning off the BGM so I can enjoy the ambient sounds, which are like the white-noise nature sounds of the apocalypse.

Surprisingly, I'm still playing Ocean's Heart! I say "surprisingly" because the game was supposed to be short, but it's actually incredibly robust. What an absolute treasure. I think Ocean's Heart has the potential to supplant Link's Awakening as the lo-fi handheld Zelda game I play every summer. Or I could just play both?

Not to be weird or anything, but I love living on the same planet as video games.

Comments

[raisedbymoogles]

would you recommend Ender Lilies for someone with piss poor reflexes looking to get into platformers? I'm trying to branch out from RPGs, and I liked the look of EL when Playframe showcased it a while back.

[rynling]

Ender Lilies is about on par with Hollow Knight in terms of difficulty, meaning that it's extremely difficult. Thankfully, it's more of a Metroidvania than a platformer, meaning that there's never a point at which you're going to have to worry about getting the timing of your jumps correct.

The combat requires decent reflexes, and you'll probably die a lot. The boss fights are especially hellish. What Ender Lilies does well is to incorporate JRPG elements into the action-oriented gameplay. You get EXP from defeating enemies, and (unlike most other Soulslike games) you don't lose this EXP when you die. Leveling up is a great feeling; and, on top of that, the rewards you find through careful exploration can make a huge difference. My own reflexes are laughably bad, but I found that most tricky situations can be navigated through careful strategy and a good choice of special attacks.

Still, Ender Lilies is really difficult. I think it's fair and rewarding, but you have to really want to live in that world and know its story. I love dark fantasy, so it was worth it to me to keep slamming my head against the wall. More than even a Metroidvania, Ender Lilies is a Dark Souls game, and those mid-2010s gamer bros weren't lying when they said git gud.

The flipside to this is that it's entirely possible to git gud. One of the wonders of a fair and well-designed game like Ender Lilies is that it will teach you that your reflexes aren't as bad as you think.

Still, I think a more accessible approach to the Soulslike Metroidvania genre is Momodora Reverie Under The Moonlight: https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/momodora-reverie-under-the-moonlight-switch/

Momodora is inexpensive, beautiful, charming, and relatively short (about six hours), and it also has a non-condescending Easy Mode that makes the game much more chill and enjoyable.

Idk, because everyone is now infected with Dark Souls brainworms, the current trend in platformers and Metroidvanias alike is to make them as difficult and punishing as possible. I really wish that this weren't the case, and that more of these games had adjustable levels of difficulty.

[raisedbymoogles]

...fuck i was afraid you'd say that XD I actually tried Hollow Knight despite my better judgement, thinking that my love for the world/story would pull me through, but I bounced the everloving fuck off when I couldn't get into City of Tears. guess I'll just have to find a LP of Ender Lilies.

.....i uh. also bounced off Momodora on the first boss fight >_> i want to pick it up again at some point, but maybe Metroidvanias/platformers are not correct branch for me to branch out to in general.

[rynling]

DAMN I HEAR YOU.

Literally I had to train myself starting with the Easy Mode of Yoshi's Wooly World. It took me four years and a global pandemic to be able to get into the City of Tears in Hollow Knight.

It actually makes me legit angry that so much of the beautiful art and writing in these games is hidden behind seemingly impassible walls. We shouldn't need people writing National Geographic style articles about these games in order to enjoy them, you know?

[raisedbymoogles]

oh good, not just me XD but no I totally get you. I think hard games have their place in the gaming landscape, but it seems like the world thinks "brutally punishing twitchy-reflex challenges, don't even try it unless you're planning to let it take over your life for the next few years" is the only type of game that matters anymore and it sucks and locks me out of so many experiences.