Recently I’ve been playing Dyscourse, a survival adventure video game developed and published by Owlchemy. The following are my notes:
There be spoilers ahead, read at your own peril!
Like
- Effective non playable character ‘humanization’
- Text – One character makes a reference to the main players clothes
- Actions – Passing around of water bottles scene
- Warm colorful storybook art style
- Characters reflect ‘character’ through facial expressions, walking style, and speech which conveys the characters emotion
- ‘Torchlight Talk’ mechanic, it makes sense that the fire goes out over time making talking limited
- Time based events with clearly conveyed state e.g combo sequence required to defeat boar
- Color coding for character dialog messages
- Slight shine on wooden planks to attract players attention
- Choice confirmation points that give a player a chance to again consider
- Rewind feature, which allows player to go through the story again and try get the outcome they actually desire
Dislike
- My save file got ‘corrupted’ and I had to restart the whole game again
Improve
- Character Collision – There was no response from pushing around non playable characters. This temporarily broke immersion for me. Two methods I believe can remedy this are:
- Non playable character makes a sound or a dialog message after a certain amount of pushing
- Context sensitive dialog message when pushed near an object
- Story Explorer Tree – Give each ‘situation’ a node in a tree that is visible after the game is complete once. Currently the ‘story space’ of the game is invisible, doing this would hint at ‘possibilities’, and hopefully assist replayability.
