Castlevania: Lords of Shadow: Chapter 8 of 12
I just finished chapter 7 of 12 in Castlevania: Lords of Shadow and I’m–surprisingly?–still enjoying it! It’s funny. Some games you play for the storyline, some games you play because each level is interesting or unique, some you play because of creative bosses. Lords of Shadow, while it has a storyline, interesting levels, and creative bosses–I’m playing it totally for the scenery.
Seriously–did I mention that the game is gorgeous? Because it is. Again, I don’t like Castlevania’s aesthetic normally–I don’t know, everything just looks so samey after a while. I can’t tell from screenshots what game I’m playing–they all look the same to me. While Lords of Shadow is going for fairly standard Violent Videogame Realism–it’s not really stylized or anything–everything is just so wonderfully done.
It’s the light, really. I’m a total sucker for games that take place during sunlight–not sure if it’s due to ICO’s influence, or if I was attracted to ICO because of it, but anyway. Surprising for a horror game, most of it takes place in broad daylight. The very first level takes place at night, but then you’re in daylight until about chapter 6 when you enter a vampire castle. It’s a very surprising decision for a gothic horror-themed game, and one I applaud. For the most part you are exploring ruins and forests and cliffsides, and everything is bright and colorful. I’m so glad we’re out of that period of time where everything was brown and muddy–it made for some very very ugly games.
It does lead to a very odd dichotomy though. Because the game has a particular flow, you’re interested in making it to the next part–to the next combat or puzzle or climbing course. But because the game is so pretty, you also want to just hang around and look at stuff. There have been several areas where I’ve stopped just to take in a bit of scenery.
Unfortunately, they did not include a controllable camera. I’m not sure why, and it’s probably the biggest mistake the game makes. Games like this, in many ways, are in a way guided tours or amusement parks. They remind me of the lines at Disneyworld, which rather than being a straightforward velvet rope path are twisting journeys through an environment. If you’re on line for the Tower of Terror and you’re not looking at all the random *stuff* they decorated the place with, you’re doing it wrong–it’s just as much a part of the experience as the ride. So I may be in an elegantly-rendered castle with all this stuff around, but I’m not able to take a look at it at an angle that I want. Dante’s Inferno had the same exact problem–that was my biggest problem with that game too. Fortunately, the camera here is actually pretty decent. You’ve got your “cinematic” angles and your camera placement designed to give the best screenshot, but unlike Resident Evil, they don’t do this at the expense of the player. For the most part, the camera angles *do* give the prettiest view, and they don’t hinder you from playing well. There are a couple of areas where it’s slightly less than optional, but I haven’t had any serious difficulties–this is a case where it genuinely feels that the developers actually do know where to put the camera better than I would.
The storyline is…well, there’s a storyline, I suppose. I have no real idea what’s going on in it, but I haven’t minded its existence. I’ve been taking the cutscenes as a cue to breathe, check an IM, eat a cookie, and just kind of paying half-attention to the plot. Given the game’s linear structure, that doesn’t matter–each area is somewhat self-contained, so as long as you make it through each, you’ll have no problems. I was genuinely nervous, given that Kojima had a hand in it, but so far they’ve been of an okay length.
I do like the way the difficulty seems to work. The game is HARD when it first starts, then you learn the basics of the controls, and it’s easy for a few minutes, then they give you some new abilities, and then it gets REALLY hard, and then you master them, and it’s easy for a while, and then the difficulty just spikes. I am finding this to be an extremely pleasurable structure. I like games that have challenge to them, of course, but I don’t want that challenge to be overwhelming. And I want to feel like I’ve accomplished something from time to time–if the entire game was an uphill battle, it might get frustrating. Here, the game draws a line and forces me to get good enough to cross it; once I do, it draws another line and forces me to work even harder, and it continues that way for a long time, hopefully to the end.
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