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Sorry about posting late, right after I set an "at least every three days" deadline for myself; I was sick with a cold for a couple days.
An extended gameplay video was released of NightCry, and...it strikes me that more and more, I'm supporting this game in spite of the material that's being released, rather than because of it. I am sick of zombies hogging practically the whole horror genre; I am sick of Japanese developers being limited to cellphone games; I would like to see a bunch of talented and passionate folks make the best version of the game they want to make. But - and I've mentioned this before - a lot of the stuff coming out of the studio looks rough. NightCry seems sound gameplaywise (though I think they might have made the running mechanic overly complicated), but it's graphically not much more impressive than a PS2 game, and while being killed with a malevolent serving cart is right up there with soda machine death, the scene has staging problems - the blood doesn't look right, it doesn't drip right, it isn't visceral. I don't usually care at all about gore, but it's a small illustration of how the game looks off in places.
And they need a writer to polish the English script. It doesn't have to be Working Designs-flippant (that said, LP commentator: No Spaceballs joke at that perfect opening? Really?). It does need, however, the weird punctuation and stilted phrasings corrected. I almost think that they're not having a native speaker translate, because there are so many weird puncutation artifacts that are obvious holdovers from Japanese conventions that have no real equivalent or just aren't followed in English. A native English speaker wouldn't try to leave those in. I mean, hey, I know very well that learning other languages is extremely difficult, and I'd love to know Japanese like this writer knows English - but scripts are one of those places where lack of polish is extremely easy to detect, particularly in the indie horror market (see any of the recent horror Quick Looks that Drew Scanlon and/or Dan Ryckert have done), and rewriting text is relatively cheap & easy compared to fixes for other game-related problems.
For all the people Project Scissors has on the staff, they needed a good PR rep. I don't think leading the promo blitz with the cheesy Shimizu video was a good idea, and I don't think puzzles with replacing blown fuses and figuring out briefcase combinations are going to light the world on fire. (They did focus a good bit on how you poke around in other people's Twitter & Instagram accounts for clues, which is smart, because it's genuinely original.)
.
An extended gameplay video was released of NightCry, and...it strikes me that more and more, I'm supporting this game in spite of the material that's being released, rather than because of it. I am sick of zombies hogging practically the whole horror genre; I am sick of Japanese developers being limited to cellphone games; I would like to see a bunch of talented and passionate folks make the best version of the game they want to make. But - and I've mentioned this before - a lot of the stuff coming out of the studio looks rough. NightCry seems sound gameplaywise (though I think they might have made the running mechanic overly complicated), but it's graphically not much more impressive than a PS2 game, and while being killed with a malevolent serving cart is right up there with soda machine death, the scene has staging problems - the blood doesn't look right, it doesn't drip right, it isn't visceral. I don't usually care at all about gore, but it's a small illustration of how the game looks off in places.
And they need a writer to polish the English script. It doesn't have to be Working Designs-flippant (that said, LP commentator: No Spaceballs joke at that perfect opening? Really?). It does need, however, the weird punctuation and stilted phrasings corrected. I almost think that they're not having a native speaker translate, because there are so many weird puncutation artifacts that are obvious holdovers from Japanese conventions that have no real equivalent or just aren't followed in English. A native English speaker wouldn't try to leave those in. I mean, hey, I know very well that learning other languages is extremely difficult, and I'd love to know Japanese like this writer knows English - but scripts are one of those places where lack of polish is extremely easy to detect, particularly in the indie horror market (see any of the recent horror Quick Looks that Drew Scanlon and/or Dan Ryckert have done), and rewriting text is relatively cheap & easy compared to fixes for other game-related problems.
For all the people Project Scissors has on the staff, they needed a good PR rep. I don't think leading the promo blitz with the cheesy Shimizu video was a good idea, and I don't think puzzles with replacing blown fuses and figuring out briefcase combinations are going to light the world on fire. (They did focus a good bit on how you poke around in other people's Twitter & Instagram accounts for clues, which is smart, because it's genuinely original.)
.
