Sony: Take you to see the Chinese meteor shower
At the Sony PlayStation China launch in July 2016, the exciting "China Star Plan" was announced: Unreal provided various middleware and software support; Unity opened a PlayStation VR master course; Japanese private equity firm Whiz Partners provided financial support, and with the PS4 gold platform with hundreds of millions of installed capacity worldwide, it seems that a large number of domestic game hope stars are about to rise.
However, success in the cultural and creative industry is by no means so easy, especially for China's game industry, which is not based on a mature industrialized industry chain. From 18 years to the present, we have seen more of a "meteor shower"-like fall from China: some of them have left the scene like "War Intention", "Tiger and Panther Riding" and "Fierce God evil", some are as nameless as "Human Rescue Plan" and "Chinese New Year's Eve: Pisces Jade Pendant", and some are like "Border" carrying many hopes and then falling into tearing. After full calculation, about the second phase of "Shadow Torch City" is already one of the leaders; "Hardcore Mecha" has also achieved decent sales and good ratings, and PSN in Japan has been at the top of the list for several weeks, but in the end, the title of "hardcore" sounds destined to be niche, so we have not heard more news in the follow-up.
In the spring of 2022, "Anno: Mutation" and "Long Dream in the Night" two games from the "Star of China" program have been released, so after "Era: Mutation" regrettably joined the ranks of "meteor shower", how did "Long Dream of The Night" perform?
It's all dreams, what's different about this?
Nightmare-themed games are hard not to think of Little Nightmare, and in fact, the scene of the little boy waking up in front of the TV set in "Long Dream in the Dark Night" is even more convincing of this: in "Little Nightmare", the TV set as a channel for "thin man" to travel to and from different spaces has a different symbolic significance, but -
But in "Long Dreams in the Dark Night", in fact, TV is just TV, which is a microcosm of the poor performance of the narrative core of this work: for linear levels, it actually needs a very deep "internal force" as a support, you need to weaken the UI, weaken the guidance, reduce the "sense of existence" of the system, to make the player as "silent" as possible, but on the other hand, the requirements for environmental narrative and item narrative are higher, and the environment needs to carry psychological hints, emotional guidance, and emotional guidance for the player. The teaching of gameplay and even the role of the plot narrative, obviously "Long Dream of the Dark Night" has not been able to do this, but we can not press the table for the time being, we can talk about it in detail later.
Catch up with me and I'll let you hehehehehe
The good news is that "Long Dreams" and "Little Nightmares" are really not so similar: first of all, the difference is that we have a "golden butterfly" as an auxiliary to the whole process, which is still a good design, on the one hand, it eliminates the loneliness in the adventure, and on the other hand, it greatly reduces the sense of fear. The Golden Butterfly can help us explore the way (right stick), can fly farther with energy (right stick + R2), can find hidden routes (L1), and can also find hidden objects as shown in the following figure - through the hidden route to find the dark passage on the side of the cabinet, and then we can zoom in on the light points on the ground to get hidden collections.
In terms of the theme of the game, Little Nightmare does not emphasize the correspondence with the real world, but retains the possibility of the existence of "other worlds" - this is similar to "The Fantasy Drift of the Young Pi", you can think of this as a real shipwreck experience in the Indian Ocean, you can also think of it as a fantasy story told by "π"; and "Long Dream of the Night" tells you that this is a story about helping teenagers get rid of the nightmare of depression.
In addition to a completely different narrative theme, "Long Dream of the Night" also takes "Little Nightmare" or "Resident Evil" as the "stimulus point" as the focus of the gameplay in terms of gameplay, we are chased by the grandmother in the first chapter, the second chapter is chased by the big eyes, and the middle is also chased by various shadows...
Of course, I think this kind of "peek-a-boo" gameplay is actually quite good, you can hide in the closet to avoid the chase (but you must first get out of sight, otherwise you will be sanctioned by opening the cabinet), you can lurk under the table or in the bushes, you can use some noise to distract the monster's attention, in short, in fact, this chase and stealth gameplay in the first two chapters of the game in the box map design, or quite interesting, a bit like a less weird "Little Nightmare" chase battle enhanced version.
After halfway through, the gameplay began to favor decryption
Although in the first half of the game, we are a bit like the family "playground" in "Two-Person Trip", and the ghost mother who plays the "ghost" and the big-eyed chase, but from the third chapter of the game, the focus of the content begins to be more and more biased towards decryption.
If it is compared with those hardcore games, probably the puzzle solving of "Long Dream of the Night" is not difficult - such as the recently played "tunic", the collection needs to listen to the sound of wind chimes against the stave, and then decode the notes according to the "secret key" hidden in the picture book, the puzzle in "Long Dream of the Night" is far from being so outrageous, it is also acceptable to my rookie, such as the painting on the wall there is a button under the painting that tells you you need to press, then the answer is nearby - just according to the description in the verse, It is easy to solve the puzzle.
But there are probably two points that I am not very satisfied with, the first is that the imagination as the theme of "dreams" is relatively insufficient, such as a key that appears after the wall puzzle is solved, and then used to open the door - for comparison, in the game "AI Dream Archive", we can see the strange dreams in the minds of NPCs: dreams should have more symbolic and counterintuitive scenes, and "Long Dreams in the Dark Night" seems to be too much to restore the real world; the second point is that - The above figure of this circle puzzle as an example, in line with the common sense of thinking is to turn the prompt in the above figure and then go out of the first circle, in fact, the prompt in the above figure has included the puzzle content of five circles... That is, it is much simpler than we thought, but it is not intuitive, and the distance to open the door when running to the outermost circle is too far, which involves the problem of positive feedback and frustration, and we will continue to mention this in a moment.
The large tube is full, and even contains multi-week items
First of all, the most commendable point is that the biggest disadvantage of the style of game "Little Nightmare" is the "fast moving consumer goods" attribute, generally speaking, 8-10 hours is enough to complete the process, and there is no more collection and repeated play value. At this point, "Long Dreams of the Night" provides a huge number of collections (increasing the number of uses of various items, the reconnaissance range and distance of the elves, etc.), which can intuitively increase the player's combat strength in addition to collection. In addition, completing the corresponding achievements can even be exchanged for skins in the "Home" area at the end of each level, so that multi-week eyes probably have a certain existence value.
The separation of level design and narrative expression
But on the other hand, although the spirit of humanistic care that wants to express the concern for depressed children is very valuable, it is a bit off-topic in terms of narrative expression and level design. Although the game contains a large amount of text, information such as the status and diagnosis of the condition is introduced, and the causes are also dissected (parental divorce, abuse by classmates, etc.). However, there are still several problems: (1) the expression of the psychological state of depression, and (2) the fit of the level design and narrative.
In terms of expressing the psychological state of depressed people, "Milk outside a bag of milk" makes a good example, in this game we can see a desperate and sick world through the eyes of depressed people, you will be overwhelmed by fear, you will be swallowed up by despair, your vision will begin to blur, your memory will begin to be confused; you can't think, you are miserable; you start to feel irritable, everything is directed at you You begin to be suspicious and feel that all people are deceiving you; you begin to feel inferior and distressed, you feel that you have become a burden on others; you begin to lose control and involuntarily hurt yourself and the people around you; you know that this is not right, but there is no way, nothing can save you, no one, no medicine, no... In contrast, the description of depression in "Long Dreams in the Dark Night" does not have more imagery, most of which is limited to the description of the text, and some are too superficial.
In contrast, the expression of "Long Dream in the Dark Night" is a bit too superficial, and we may not be able to demand that the production team can truly restore this emotion without the creator's depression, but at least through the level design to complete the consistency with the narrative style can be tried to achieve. Unfortunately, in "Long Dreams in the Dark Night", the setting of the level is more casual like the placement of objects in the environment and the style of visual elements, such as the design of the meaningless, long woods in the "School" level, the maze, park, woods, circus in the third chapter... These make people feel that the levels are more of a kind of gameplay stacking, and abandon the theme of the game, that is, the care of depressed children, such a theme of expression.
Some other minor issues
There are also some small problems that are probably harmless: some relatively long chases or puzzle solving failures have no halfway save point, and the process is zero fault tolerance: the star cluster can be blinded, but it cannot be used in close proximity and must be advanced; a continuous opening step mistake requires a full disk to be repeated; the damage trap in the picture above is also a touch on the dog belt (2-3 injuries will be better).
This design will actually hurt the positive feedback that the player feels, not the difficulty, but rather: for example, in the chase, you did not run away because you do not know what is in front of you (you need to die to try and make mistakes), such as this 45 degrees of overhead view is actually not easy to observe the damage range of the trap, you may be killed in a safe area and so on... So this "zero fault tolerance" is not a game mechanic suitable for frequent use.
Boss, is this melon bag sweet in "Long Dreams in the Dark Night"?
Overall, "Long Dreams of the Night" is still a game with a high degree of completion, which is full of puzzle solving and chase gameplay, and also has a rich collection of content. The theme of caring for adolescent depression that you want to express is not more mature in the level narrative, but it is still worth encouraging. The final finished game, while not a stunning masterpiece, still has a relatively rich game content to enjoy, and in general, if you like the style of "Little Nightmare", then "Long Dreams of the Night" is also worth a try.
Individual rating: 6.5/10