Illusion Carnival

ЖДУ 2 ГЛАВУ

Доктор Стренж 2

优秀的游戏，令人惊叹的美术效果。虽然目前来说世界观未知内容太多，但是毕竟只是第一章，期待后续发布

好玩，好看，期待第二章

as the description says this game is the first in a series so if you want an entirely complete story you should hold off for now (I myself will probably not replay this game or play its immediate sequel until way down the line) the game is poorly optimized and doesn't do enough to justify the load it places on ones hardware - but it also does make fuller use of the engine than one might suspect from a cursory glance at the steam page a lot of the game is stuff you will have seen in other places before but I think it ultimately comes together in a way that is meaningfully unique and distinct from other games which have been made thus far that said the intro in particular feels like a mishmash of things you might have seen elsewhere before - being dropped into the world of limbo and having two equally untrustworthy characters attempt to get you to do two different things, the main vulnerability being a degredation of ones psyche rather than proper death, semi acknowledgement of the fact that everything is made out of paper comboed with the more superficial aspects being a bit like paper mario, and finally some meta-horror elements at the very beginning that are (in my opinion) way too heavy-handed. (think of the legacy of things like undertale or ddlc) i'm also not sure that the way certain asian stories will have words flash on the screen translates well to other languages because often media that does so will take advantage of the shapes of the characters in isolation of their meaning to also make them look a certain way - which can be hard to translate with a language whos characters don't have their ultimate origins in pictographs. (an exception would be something like house of leaves which was written with english in mind) the gameplay is decent but exists moreso to work in conjunction with the rest of the game to create an overall experience rather than to be the experience on its own. it's a mishmash of bullet hell, stealth, and... whatever you would call simon says - along with some very basic puzzle solving (which oddly works with your mc being a bit of a child and with a lot of the surroundings being things like stuffed toys, flowers, and generally childish things.) a standout moment would be when you are purifying the wheel of fortune and need to perform a series of what seems at first to be a game of simon says with basic instructions like "move right" or "stand next to a box" with the twist being that when the light turns off you need to do the opposite - but the actual twist is that irrespective of what you need to do for the task there is a gradually increasing threat of enemies going after you that you need to evade or purify while also doing the tasks - the end result is a weird mishmash of enemy evasion and light cognitive tasks at the same time another standout moment would be the crossword puzzle puzzle - which I was able to solve with relative ease but I imagine it is probably a bit unfair to those who simply never encountered those or do not know how to do those since it relies on knowledge outside of the game itself (familiarity with crosswords) a lot of the bullet patterns were designed around boxes when it might have been interesting to attempt to make ones for different shaped arenas but having the ability to dash aswell as effectively eliminate some bullets (and even have to do so in the latter case) changes it up slightly from what I might have played in something like undertale or touhou meanwhile someone who plays something like the binding of isaac might be left board. this is also the first entry in the series of games and I expect that the devs are reserving some potential pattern complexity for later entries where they would also have narrative reason for them to be more difficult as far as the writing goes I have to say I did not see the second to last act in the act viewer so take what is said hencefourth with a grain of salt. the writing seems decent enough within the context of this game but there are many unresolved aspects whos quality will depend on how they are followed up on by future entries in the series. I would argue it is a bit childish at points but in most cases it isn't a problem because it ties into the aesthetic of the game itself in a way I described above. at times though one might find some of the things it does to be in the corny-zone where its attempts to be unsettling or imposing do not have the intended effect regarding the game being childish; the main character is somewhere between childish and acting on very base impulses without any thought. if you've seen fan interpretations of the character known as koishi then the character here known as Paper is a bit like that. numerous times the game says paper has no emotion but it's unclear if that is even true or if it is text written by a character in-universe who wants you to think that for some reason - also there's an emotion corresponding to the color black so logically the supposedly emotionless paper should be able to at least feel "black". though black can also be seen as a mixture of all emotions - it's unclear how the future games will follow up with it's color=emotion system of rules. you can also see paper a bit like the main character of hollow knight in that she is a vessel the player inhabits and the characterization of paper is partly dependent on player actions. there's a bit of dialogue implying the appearance of the portions of the world you are privy to were constructed with you (by which I mean paper) and your likely personality in mind therefore some of the childishness fits on that front. as a note of character design having illusia be a moth with fake eyes (a creature that pretends to be a completely different creature for the purposes of deception) is fitting. moths eating cellulose type products (notably shirts but maybe paper?) is something that came to mind while rewatching the intro to the game - the style of the game is paper cutouts but similarly to paper mario there's a weird line between what aspects of that are acknowledged by characters in universe as paper-entities and how much of it is purely meta. it's fun to think though that in the context of this universe an entity that eats paper would just be a devourer of all things also some of the reveals of info pertaining to the Demetria were interesting - hearing her reference horror movies gives a feeling of her being weirdly tied to some sort of normal world in which very wordly things exist (something distinctly absent in limbo) - so a player on their first runthrough will be left wondering about that - and context given in the final act (if true) would answer that to some degree. a leg up these purgatory stories have to me over something entirely in a mindscape like Omori is there's at least some level of idea that the entities other than you are their own things and anything that happens to them isn't simply happening to a flat creation your main character whipped up (but at the same time the game takes place in a carnival of... illusion so it is at the same time doubtful how "real" any of the other entities actually are). on that note for as much doubt as the game bombards you with about the nature of the world a player will pretty quickly cling onto the idea that "I think therefore I am" and that at the very least your main character is probably "real" on some level limbo feels like a more fitting a description of the world than purgatory in the sense that it's unclear if the "goal" for your main character is even real. preemptive apologies to the two creatures at the beginning of the game who tell you never to get lost again because the rails of fate dictate that our beloved paper will inevitably get lost again... I could go on about other things like the magicians as a faction but I think i'll just say: overall I think the game is pretty good but it is probably slightly overrated

美术一绝，看着很爽。音乐恰到好处，氛围烘托到位。故事目前篇幅很短，看不太明白，但无伤大雅。总之，非常值得推荐。