Nocto And The Ray Of Light

I got my copy through the steam curation (thank you, you could not have picked a better person) [i]Nocto And The Ray Of Light[/i] uses reskinned models, many identical sound effects, similar physics and NPC characters from Zera: Myths Awaken. After they were caught doing so with [i]Lotzo and the Ray of Light[/i], they further modified the look of the character and the world to make it less obvious, but many artifacts and many of the same character models remain in the game. One thing to note, I don't know if everything in Zera was made from scratch, that is a question for the original developer, but even playing the Nocto for a few minutes, you can clearly see that there are too many similarities with models, physics, sound effects and everything else (except the hub design). So even if they were using the same assets, this game reskinned parts of Zera, that much is very apparent. Something I find very funny, Zera uses a very unorthodox button for interaction (mouse 2 followed by space), and so is Nocto. Lol, at least change those bad controls if you going to steal their game. [b]You can try and support the original game here: [/b] https://cyreides.itch.io/zerama I thought about just declining the copy given that I was aware of the fact months prior, but I felt it would be more productive to take a look at both games, and see if we can find more similarities after they reskinned the game twice. Nocto actually plays pretty well, about the same as any PS1 collectathon, although it's mostly because Zera played pretty well, and it just feels like the same game with different landscaping and maybe some movement modification. [h1]Some evidence of a reskinned character: [/h1] a) ZERA is a bat-like creature and she uses what appears to be an echolocation for an attack which looks like white circles spreading in a cone. Nocto is not a bat, but still uses the same white sound cone, it seems they blurred their shape, but it still looks like 2 waves of white circles. https://discord.com/channels/242692301401489410/242692301401489410/1542181661607854170 (I left image here, you might have to join discord to actually view it) (The sound effect for an attack is the same, higher volume) (The sound effect for getting bumped into the walls is the same) (The sound effect for the air spin is the same) b) They somewhat edited the original Zera model, Zera walks upright but sprints on 4 limbs, Nocto is always on 4. However, Zera had a very distinct arc when she jumps and sorta nose dives, which remains with Nocto. Also they are both followed by a little flying character, but that is a little more generic. c) One of the levels uses the same song from the Zera trailer, I am not sure how often the soundtrack overlaps across the game. d) While some locations like the hub were reworked, some in-hub levels appear to be mostly the same. [h1] Some personal notes on the situation: [/h1] With Zera already being a tribute to Spyro and a few other PS1 platformers, there is a fine line between inspiration and just taking a work of a developer and remodeling some parts of it, which is what Nocto here is doing. It's okay to have the same mechanics, it's okay to have similar animations (many games have similar Mario or Simon sprite) for nostalgia, but you don't just use a game from another developer as a baseline for everything you making. This particular publisher/developer is a bit curious as I have run into them with their 100% reskin of Alone in the Dark. The sad thing is, while there are many zero effort asset flips and scams on steam, these guys are putting some effort into their antics and actually seem to have some ability to add or modify physics in a game. Even occasionally responded to criticism with updates, like a nice lag fix they did for Macabre. [b]Anyway:[/b] Support the original game please. It's "pay what you want" at the moment, not $8-14. [code]Niche, obscure and underrated games: http://store.steampowered.com/curator/31294838-Hidden-Gem-Discovery/ [/code]