Pulse

Before you wonder why I don't recommend this game, hear me out. I truly enjoyed this game. The unique asthetics and the design of the world is incredible. The mokos were insanely cute, I loved them to death. The soundtrack was great to listen to. Being able to sense the world form around you in shapes and colors really made me enjoy the game for it's entirety. But therein lies the problem. The game itself is just too short. There is even an achievement for beating the game in half an hour. To me, charging $15 for a game that you can beat in half an hour is just silly. The game is very well made and absolutely stunning to look at, but there just isn't enough replay value or content for me to see that price being justifiable. The demo came out over 2 years ago, so I was expecting at least 3 hours worth of game to explore. Yes there are small orbs to collect, and I do plan on going back and getting 100% of the achievements, but that $15 price is just too much for me. I would see paying half that much at the most. This is the first steam game I have refunded.

DISCLAIMER: I was a Kickstarter backer. Also, this is my personal opinion on the game, based on my personal taste. TL;DR at the bottom. The idea and concept of the game were amazing, but, for me, it failed to deliver. First of all, the game is VERY short: I got the achievement to finish it in less than 30min on my first playthrough. Second, the blind mechanic is quite frustrating: when you walk, there are waves of "sight" that come to the player, symbolising something like a sound echo, but it doesn't linger for very long. Therefore, when you walk, you have something like wave-space-wave-space-wave, and, at least for me, it was horrible to try and assert size and distance of things. Third: if you're going to take out your player's sight, give them hearing. The sound should have played a major part here, with noises that would guide you, and give you a feel of the world around you. Instead, the game relies oddly on visual cues, which feels completely against the idea of it. Fourth, the overly vague story. It gives too many questions, too little answers. Instead of feeling like an interesting mystery, it felt rather pretentious, wanna-be-smart-and-cool-and-mysterious. And fifth, the mokos. Don't get me wrong, they're ABSURDLY cute and loveable, and you just want to hug them and take them home... and then you realise they're actually your tools. You can throw them to the monsters to distract them, or to use their bouncing to find your way around, but you don't [i]want[/i] to do that because it feels like using puppies as throwing stones. At the end, $15 is way too expensive for such a short, flawed experience. TL;DR: Short game, mechanics don't feel cohesive, story is too vague, throwing mokos feels bad.

First off, let me mention that I backed this game on Kickstarter, so take that as you will. I really wish Steam reviews had an option other than thumbs-up or thumbs-down because Pulse is a unique and interesting experience that shows promise. I chose to give it a thumbs-down in the end due to (1) its extremely short length (less than 30 minutes), (2) its weak and confusing story, (3) its poor handling of enemies (the beasts were better utilized in the kickstarter demo than in the full game), and (4) the buggy AI pathing for the (very cute) Mokos. Given the above factors, Pulse struggles to provide enough value for its $15 price point. As it stands, it feels more like a demo than a full game.

Pulse is an interesting idea, and fun to experience. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-VM-TfUwsg You play as a blind girl who visualizes the world through the sounds she hears. The visual effects used to show this off are really cool. Wherever a sound is emanating, a wave of colour will light up the world. Luckily the devs keep the world from being too frustrating to navigate. There are usually a few loud objects in the world which keep small areas visible. Additionally, as you walk around, you leave footprints, which help keep your orientation on where you came from. Although, you might find yourself lost ever now and again, it isn't too hard to navigate the beautiful looking world. Speaking of the beautiful world you don't get to see it much, but the glimpses here and there reveal a simplistic, yet interesting environment. The place is filled with ruins, vegetation, and some cute little critters. These guys are called Mokos. As you pass by them they'll follow you. You can pick them up and toss them around. When they hit surfaces, they make noise, allowing you to see ahead. The game's atmosphere does a really good job and making you feel helpless at times. Loud noises will frighten you, but also light the way. As for the story, it's kind of a mystery at the beginning. You start to get a better feeling of it as you progress through the game, and are talked to by some strange spirit-looking thing. Overall, it's a unique mechanic for a game, which I personally didn't get tired of due to the stuff the devs put in place to prevent you from being totally lost. The game is also not incredibly long. There's even an achievement for beating it in under 30 minutes. Granted, that's probably by speedrunning and not really enjoying the game properly, but it's still something to keep in mind. Still, I think it's a fun little experience!

I'm a Kickstarter backer, and I think the idea had promise that the game doesn't really live up to. I personally found it to be a frustrating experience where I was basically blindly stumbling around in the dark never really sure where I was going or why. Ocassionally the walking was broken up by enemies that I never really figured out how to avoid and first-person jumping bits that I wouldn't have enjoyed even if I could see clearly. There were a few clever gimmicks and the colorful abstract-looking environments could be pretty, but the novelty wore off after a few minutes. There's a story, but it's purposefully vague and didn't ever grab my interest. The only reason I saw the game through to the end was because I knew how short it was from other reviews; I would have preferred it were even shorter. I also ran into some technical issues that I suspect were due to the fact that I played on a Mac. Neither my wired 360 controller or my Dualshock 3 seemed to function correctly. The y-axis on the right stick didn't work, nor did any of the face buttons. However, I'm not sure if the face buttons were meant to do anything as the controls were never explained in the menu or in the game itself. I was stuck on one of the jumping puzzles for several minutes until I went online and found out that there was a sprint key (Shift on the keyboard).

I loved the idea of Pulse. That love didn’t last long at all. The game runs at between 10-22 fps for me. I tried changing the graphics settings from glorious all the way down to good but the fps didn’t change one bit. The game doesn’t look nearly good enough to justify such performance. The gameplay itself is not bad at times but I found that often I was staring at mostly a black screen. I’m not sure if this was a glitch or if this was part of the game. After falling and drowing a few times because of not being able to tell where I was going I quickly said to hell with this. The music itself is very well done and calming but the rest of the game is a mess. I played Pulse on Linux. I tried copies from Humble Store and Steam, both version 1.01, but both ahd the same framerate issues. I tried both Solus and Manjaro as well as different versions of Mesa and kernels but nothing got the game running well. Alt-Tab also didn’t work. There was just the one graphic option aside from resolution. You also can’t remap keys at all or even view what the key maps are. My CPU usage never got above 32% and my total system usage for RAM never got above 2.3GB so it wasn’t either of those causing the issue. The game used 3734MB of disk space. I’m not sure which engine was used. I don’t recommend Pulse at any price. I paid $1.12 CAD and can’t even say it is worth that. It had a great concept but was just poorly executed. My Score: 3/10 My System: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 18.3.3 | Manjaro Mate | Kernel 4.20.11-1-MANJARO

If I have to describe Pulse with a single word, I would use unique . Yes, because it is simply a game unique and ingenious. Use Eva, a simple girl losing her sight has developed and improved the sense of sound, from a fantasy world! In short Pulse is a game that should be experienced, so my advice is to try it without thinking twice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxfyxKa3lF0 [h1] (Below is the Italian full review) [/h1] Viaggia con Eva, una giovane ragazza che ha perso la vista in età precoce, sviluppando così una capacità unica.. ovvero riuscire a vedere il mondo attraverso i suoni. Con questa questa capacità e con l'aiuto degli spiriti della foresta, Eva esplora sentieri proibiti.. cercando di scoprire la verità su quello che sta succedendo al mondo. [h1] Feature:[/h1] - Un'esperienza in prima persona unica, scopri segreti e terre nascoste con l'aiuto dei suoni. - Stile visivo semplicemente unico in un mondo del tutto "trasparente" - Spiriti della foresta più che adorabili, che ti aiutano nel cammino - Bella colonna sonora, composta da Joel Corelitz di Waveplant Studios http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=540775146 [h1] Parere Personale:[/h1] Se devo descrivere Pulse con una sola parola , utilizzerei UNICO. Si, perché è semplicemente un gioco unico e geniale. Utilizzare Eva, una semplice ragazza che perdendo la vista ha sviluppato e migliorato il senso del suono, il tutto arrochito da un mondo fantasioso e simpatiche creature! Insomma Pulse è un gioco che va vissuto, quindi il mio consiglio è quello di provarlo senza pensarci due volte.

I bought the game because the idea was interesting and I liked the graphics. However, this game failed to deliver. Graphics are great, the music is nice and the spirits are adorable, but the story and some of the game mechanics won't make any sense. Making a blind girl do parkour? Really? The story also went from interesting to way too dark and confusing. The price is too high for a game this short IMO. In the end, even though I found it on sale, I don't think it was worth the 4€ I paid for. I ended up uninstalling it without finishing the game, it just wasn't fun to play.

Pulse is a first person exploration game in which players take on the role of Eva, a girl without sight, who experiences the world around her through echolocation. This is presented to players as waves of visibility that ripple across an otherwise unseen world in response to Eva's footsteps, animal sounds, wind, crackling fires and tossing around noisy creatures known as Mokos. The effect can be disorienting sometimes, but I think that might be a valuable part of the experience. Needing to stop and listen or make intentional noise to get your bearings feels right. The effect is at its best when a moving environmental sound, such as a gust of wind blowing through a gulley, reveals a large portion of the environment ahead, but very little of it at once, leaving a mental impression of the space that players must keep track of/assemble in their minds. As the game opens, players find Eva on a pier at the foot of what I imagine to be a volcano. An encounter with some kind of spirit in the form of an abstract crow reveals that Eva has run away to go on a rite of passage that her people had never allowed. By experiencing the world differently to the sighted members of her tribe, Eva is able to "see" past the things that inspired her people's legends and rituals to the heart of an existential threat to her world. Sadly, my playthrough was slightly diminished by shader bugs in the Linux version, which cause animals like birds and beetles to be rendered black, and for geometry faces to flicker black randomly. It's not impossible to overlook, but it did make things a touch awkward sometimes. On the whole, I enjoyed Pulse's presentation, and the light puzzles it pops in to supplement the challenges of navigating spaces with limited visibility are welcome. The story is, for the most part, well written and decently presented for what it is. I get the impression that Pulse isn't likely to be accessible to sight-impaired players, and there's something about the notion of telling stories that can't be reasonably experienced by the kinds of people represented within that makes me uneasy. I don't see anything specifically problematic within Pulse, but more generally speaking, that disconnect feels like it leaves a significant opportunity for poor representation to go unnoticed. Regardless, I found Pulse to be an enjoyable, short-but-sweet experience and I'm happy to have backed it on Kickstarter. [i]This was originally written as part of a [url=http://cheesetalks.net/gamesRoundup2016.php]retrospective[/url] on games I finished in 2016.[/i]

[table] [tr] [th][h1] My Playthrough [/h1][/th] [th]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCd-rIw--1M[/th] [/tr] [tr] [td][h1]The Review[/h1][/td] [td]A game that has an interesting idea but terrible execution. The blind mechanics is not interesting or fun as they tried to sell it. Your blindness is just a excuse to hide the ugly graphics. The game is a walking sim where you don't know where you are going. They try to have a deep story but when you really think about it the story makes no sense. Only pro about this game is it is short so you don't have to suffer this game for long.[/td] [/tr] [/table]