domain:parrhesia.substack.com
Having tired of Hades 2 for the moment and stirred by mentions of Synthetik and Ruiner downthread, I tried Hell Clock to get my ARPG/top-down action fix. The premise seemed solid enough, and the Curse of the Dead Gods-esque artstyle feels fresh.
About 6 hours in I must surmise it is... not good, i my humble o. In brief, Hell Clock feels distinctly like a game made by someone who really likes ARPGs generally and PoE specifically (with a touch of Hades, ironically), with zero actual understanding of what makes these games work.
Un-briefly:
+ I found the artstyle quite nice, although the levels themselves are fairly barren and the style makes projectile spam really blur together as a side effect.
+ The character controls well and movement is responsive, Hades-tier is the highest praise I can give it. WASD really oughta become the new standard for ARPGs going forward.
+ Voice acting sounds good, although a language I do not understand.
- Its most glaring con is that many game systems were evidently made by someone who does not understand how roguelites/ARPGs and metafaggotry optimization works. Examples galore:
- The levels are static, never changing throughout runs. It actually took me a few runs to nootice because that's like, the most basic expectation for a roguelike, but once I noticed my enjoyment fell off a cliff; I have no idea how you sustain interest in such a game without at least a token effort at procedural generation. This alone is a black mark on the game in general.
- The starting skill variety is far too limited, and more skills only open after beating Act 1 (which took me most of the ~6 hours), at which point your interest may or may not be gone. Mine certainly was.
- Gear is permanent and you do not lose it between runs, but the only things it gives (as of Act 1-2) is flat stat bonuses - HP for body armor, base damage for weapons, movement speed on boots etc. There is no variety, every slot is literally one stat, and the only upgrade is number go up. For an ARPG this is a fatal shortcoming; they even know how to do it, Sanctum relics (your other kind of equipment) are properly random and roll affixes! Maybe this gets better later, but with no actual stash for gear (how?!) I highly doubt it.
- The skill tree contains passives that increase dismantling yield and make upgrading relics/gear cheaper - forever dooming your autism to respec every time you upgrade your shit or clear out your stash if you want to make the most of it. For extra aggravation, the only respec option is to reset your tree entirely instead of deallocating points one by one.
- [cw: autistic rage] Mechanics are extremely hit or miss, due to the limited skill variety you are more or less corralled into a few working builds early on. Bleeding specifically is an outright scam: the mechanic is lifted straight out of Last Epoch so I quickly figured out how to work it, but I noticed I am not doing nearly as much single-target damage as I expected to. Bleeds just didn't seem to stick to bosses despite gazillion small hits per second, and at the Act 1 boss (and after a bit of googling) I finally realized why: bleed damage is unrelated to the hit that applies it, but bleed chance somehow still directly depends on it - bleed chance is greatly reduced the less damage you deal relative to total HP! My only damaging mechanic is directly countered by an affix-less wall of HP, the kind that bleeds are supposed to be good at killing in the first place! Spending literally 15 minutes to plink the boss to death due to my main damage source ceasing to work was the final straw, I alt-f4'd out of the game shortly after.
This actually gave me painful flashbacks so if any mottizen ever makes an ARPG, carve this insight into your psyche: any damage mechanic that can plausibly be played as main DPS must never be entirely negated by things outside the player's control! Leave damage immunities in 2000 where they belong! None of that "500% bleed resistance for undead" muh realism bullshit! Even Chris fucking Wilson Jonathan fucking Rogers, the king of player-hostile game design, figured out this part immediately following PoE2's release!
- The admittedly novel setting of 19th-century Brazilian badlands appears to mostly cash out into incessant glazing of the Canudos, victims of the eponymous massacre. I suppose alt-history is a perfectly cromulent narrative device, but by the time I encountered... checks notes Head-Cutter (in actual, literal hell!) I completely checked out of the narrative, it is impossible to take seriously. This kind of hamfisted political narrative never fails to give me the ick regardless of subject matter; I know nothing about the Canudos but I will be entirely unsurprised if they were actually some sort of horrible militant sect with plenty of chips on their shoulders that required direct gov't intervention to root out.
((Out of curiosity, does somebody know of a game extolling the virtues of jingoistic imperialism and brutal colonisation? Off the top my head I only recall Broforce and New Vegas: Sneering Imperialist edition.))
In short, I did not entirely hate Hell Clock but it wore out its welcome remarkably quickly and I am glad I picked up the uh, extended demo version from the high seas instead of buying it. Just play Tiny Rogues or something instead.
TK-421
2hr ago
Corvos is in the right here. We’ve managed to re-derive the desirability of one legitimate bearer of force in society at a time in just a couple posts - excellent work speedrunning the rise of civilization team.
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
2hr ago
A lottery would be far better than the BS system the US has at the moment. It would also completely destroy the value of the Ivy League as now the people in Harvard aren't on average much (or at all) better than the people going to UPenn, they're just luckier and so the cultural cachet of a Harvard degree goes away almost entirely.
Name one instance where someone on the right engaged in violence or violent rhetoric and Trump offered nothing but a full-throated, unequivocal condemnation. Name one.
How much research did you do before you made this comment?
Corvos
2hr ago
This was actually my suggested solution for solving faculty disputes in my old university. It would be so, so much simpler and more friendly than the backstabbing and politicking that goes on, and everyone's too scrawny to do any real damage.
Lizzardspawn
2hr ago
All it takes is for a populist upstart to sweep the 2028 Dem primary by steamrolling the wokescolds and pro-Israel donors.
The democrats are doing their darndest to not make that happen. Their progressive wing has dug in and doubles down. I wonder if it will manage to cost them third presidency in a row.
DelendaEst
2hr ago
I will be fine with rearresting all of the Jan 6 people once about 100,000 BLM rioters have been arrested, tried, and sat in jail for as long as the median J6 rioter did before being pardoned. Until then every time someone on the left brings it up all I hear is "rules for thee, but not for me."
And I really do mean it, I will be fine with that. I do not support the J6 people and do want them punished, all rioters should be. But while the feds under Biden spend years making sure every one of them was punished other dems have turned an intentional blind eye to their own thugs, a pattern that persists in DAs refusing to charge lefties who punch pro-lifers on camera. I want rioters punished, but I will not accept ONLY right wing protestors being punished. Pardoning them was wrong, accepting second class status is worse.
So I agree, be the change you want to see. You guys put 10,000 heads on spikes is a good first step.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2hr ago
Circle of equals! All the legislators form a circle, and the two have to fight it out bare handed until one submits.
Corvos
2hr ago
I'm old fashioned in many ways, but this reasoning seems so weird to me.
A: Threatens to kill B and his family.
B: Right. Tomorrow, at dawn, I'm going to give you the opportunity to kill me.
Very manly, yes, but not very helpful unless you're sure A is an abject coward. Hire somebody who knows how to use a telescopic sight or put a horse's head in his bed or something.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
2hr ago
This is a verbatim quote from one of the screenshots:
“You were talking about hopping jennifer Gilbert’s children would die”
JAY JONES: “Yes, I’ve told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy”
The meaning could not be more clear. This is all from one screenshot, so these messages were not presented out of order, unless you think the screenshot was fabricated.
gattsuru
2hr ago
Most people are lurkers and not posters to begin with. What exactly is the threat model for a lurker reading some chud website like TheMotte dot org?
Botond173
2hr ago
Anyone care to explain why he switched bin Laden with Pol Pot of all people in his texts from the original?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2hr ago
I do not believe that they are thinking of a totally impartial judge and jury coming to the conclusion that their opponent has indeed committed the crime they are accusing them of beyond any reasonable doubt.
I have never considered it to be taken any other way? The truth is, the MAGA masses honestly, earnestly believe that these people have committed high crimes and treason, which a fair and unbiased trial would reveal the full details of, resulting in an inevitable and just execution that even the Blue Tribe would agree is just. Are they right? Likely not. But I have never doubted that this is what they earnestly believe.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3hr ago
These post-ers who pop up again after two years always have me scratching my head. Like what's been on your mind since 2023?
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3hr ago
Name one instance where someone on the right engaged in violence or violent rhetoric and Trump offered nothing but a full-throated, unequivocal condemnation. Name one.
Looking forward to this, great post.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3hr ago
The Internet use patterns that 90% of young men want to keep private involve cooming rather than intellectual heresy.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3hr ago
Why does everyone keep saying he’d like to murder them?
Even the phone call, which we somehow only got secondhand, says he was hoping her children would die.
Again, awful, but a different vibe.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3hr ago
First of all, why aren't you at your post?
Second, you're getting reasonable responses to what I'd consider an overgenerous appraisal of Jones, but let me back up a bit and ask about your lady friend who wants to stockpile bombs. What the fuck? Obviously you may have been using hyperbole or making a joke ot whatever, but if you're serious, what gives here? She knows something about bombs, does she?
daguerrean
3hr ago
They will hate you because you tell them the truth. Is this and the recent Kirk reactions an escalation by the Democrats in that it goes further than anything I can name from Republicans? Yes. But that’s how these endless tit-for-tat escalations work. Each new unprecedented devilry becomes justifications for a new hitherto unprecedented norm violation by the other side, and back and forth.
These new escalations are in fact escalations, and should be recognized and denounced as such, but we shouldn’t use them to excuse further norm violations by our side and we should acknowledge our side’s role in the escalation chain
That isn't true at all. You can do granular enough tests if you want, some countries do, and barring that you can have a lottery, which some countries do, mine among them.
The lottery has not really been a meaningful thing here (at the very top level) for about a decade though now since they increased the number of spots at the medical programmes and also made the test slightly more granular.
I don't see why America couldn't do one of those things. I personally think the runaway competition for those university spots is extremely toxic and would bound the competition for like the top 1-2% (for the top bracket) or so and then have a lottery for them. Picking the lucky seems preferable to torturing your children for some zero-sum competition with no societal gain.
Because the trio of a criminal, violent illegal alien, and teenaged religious extremist murdered me and used me as a skinsuit.
Yeah, this was the real shocker. No jokes, no exaggeration, this is where the rhetoric has led. As best as I can tell, this is the very edge of the verbal Overton window in deep blue spaces. I have zero concern that she has actually begun to do so, could or would in the near future, and I'd definitely be aware before things got to that point. This is the very front line in the shit testing AOR.
It's possible I've been unclear in some post but that doesn't mean I condone these statements or the general atmosphere of acceptability of wishing for harm, I'm merely a traveler reporting my experiences. Data mines are different from other types of mines because you have to fill them up first, all I've got are a couple pebbles.
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