@Lambda yeah, the difficulty of puzzles and/or combat can now be toggled from normal to hard at the beginning of a run.
When I saw this thread open up, I thought to myself, cool, I'll wait until it's at least a page before I derail it into a Home thread. Well. I'm going to be honest, you guys, I liked Home better than Off. I made a post about that, though said post is full of spoilers for both Off and Home, so I would pin it as a 'read if you've played both extensively like I have' thing. Don't get me wrong, I loved Off. LOVED it. It's a unique game, it's a GOOD game, it's a fun game to play with fun puzzles and fun battles (though the boss battles were too long, right, that wasn't just me, they took forever but never really made me worried that I would die, except for Sugar) and I was shocked and horrified and crying at the end. Spoiler: endgame spoilers I was so hooked and so into the story by the time I got to Vader Eloha and Hugo, and I was trying to find the story I couldn't quite place together in every single line of incidental battle dialogue, and I'm still not totally sure what happened. I once saw a fan theory that the Batter was somehow, in some sort of allegoric space, trying to destroy a disease that was killing his son, Hugo, and the ghost represented the viruses/cancer cells/ get creative. In the process, his fanatical determination to eradicate the impure ends up destroying the rest of the body, like chemotherapy, but worse, and tears apart the family while he's at it. I don't think that's quite right, but anyway, I end up going with something like that. The Batter is trying to completely eradicate something impure, and in his quest to do so, he loses track of what actually is pure and impure, what has to go and what is just a little mistake that you can let live, and it's all a big commentary on why ruthless purging of the impure is pretty much never the way to go. Honestly, I think the fact that I cried so hard over a story I still don't understand is the charm of the game and speaks to how well-written it is. But anyway, about Home, and why I personally liked it better. Spoiler: No seriously play Home before reading this. I think everyone has a different part, in their playthrough of Off, when they realize the Batter is not trustworthy, and, eventually, decide they are not on his side. (Maybe some people were Battercore until the end, no fault, you do you.) I think the game wanted you to go quite a while before you came to that decision. Maybe not until you saw how he had ruined the world in the second run through of everything. Maybe not until you were faced with the crying Queen and you KNEW something HAD to be wrong, why wasn't the Batter reacting to this? Why was he just continuing to bludgeon his way through wheIS THAT A CHILD?? NO FUCK NO. I think Off depended on you being used to making the protagonist do bad things, kill people you don't want to kill, and just deal with it for the sake of the story. But for me, I was uncertain about the Batter the second I heard him say 'pure' and 'purify.' These are kind of trigger words for me, and I don't really trust people with strong purity narratives. I don't believe in purity outside of chemistry. If someone wants the world to be more pure, I assume they're usually intolerant of something that is actually fine and unwilling to compromise with it. So I was wary from like, two minutes into the game. And I was working against the Batter, at least in my heart, from the second boss battle, when I had to kill Japeth/Alain. Nope. I don't trust this man. I don't trust him, I don't think he is all right in the head, I'm scared of how ruthless he is toward his 'enemies,' I can't believe I just killed a cat without even trying to help him, and I am not on the Batter's side. I didn't expect the game to actually let me leave the Batter, but let me tell you, I jumped on that shit. I hadn't been on his side for about 8/10 of the game, and I was only ever working with him out of necessity beforehand. And then the game ragged on me for working with him and doing bad things with him. Excuse me? I was not-batting for the other team like, twenty hours ago. So I felt a little betrayed because, er, I did not buy his story, and I was not on his side, and if you had let me jump ship earlier, I would have. Anyway. Home was a fix-it game, and it was perfect. It was exactly the fix-it I wanted. I had, personally, ALWAYS been on Pablo's side. I had ALWAYS had a very low opinion of the Batter. I had ALWAYS wanted to help and make good with his 'enemies' and fix the world rather than 'purifying' it. And I had been kind of hurt that the game blamed me for what it wrote. Home let me play the route I had wanted to damn play anyway, and that goes without mentioning the even more involved puzzles, the entire extra area, and the fact the protagonists are FOUR FRENCH CATS. HOLY SHIT. When Pablo faced down the Batter and told him that he was GUILTY, I got an adrenaline rush like no other, because I was keenly aware that this is the game I wanted to play in the FIRST place when it came to Off, or rather, the route that is true to how I felt about Off. Off is a brilliant game and I'm glad that it was what it was; a game about an extremist that the player has to sort through, understand, and eventually decide whether or not they agree with. It's a game with subtle lessons about how you treat your 'enemies' and how you do, and don't, do good. And I am glad it was made the way it is. It was a narrative I had always been interested in: what do you do, what can you do, when the protagonist of the game is someone you, the player, dislike and disagree with? Is there a 'right' thing to do? What CAN you do? Off had to come before Home, obviously, and I'm glad it was as weird and as harsh and as tear-jerking as it was. But it was kind of mean to me, and it really didn't get me. I enjoyed being able to goshdang FIX THINGS much more. There's something to be said about games that aren't mean to the players; Off was, Home wasn't. tl;dr crazy cat lady enjoyed the cat version of the game more than the version that requires you to beat up cats. what a shock.
Plaaaaayyy Hoooooommmmmeeeee Solve puzzles and fix everything that made you sad in Off with caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaats
if you play home and do hard puzzle difficulty, beware of the chair puzzle, it's a real fun killer, trust me you'll know what i'm talking about
you know reading this i just realized The entire pitchfork waving part of tumblr needs to play/replay OFF. ffs this is exactly what OFF tried to tell people and how was this game so fucking popular on tumblr just two years ago?
-wildly waves arms- Off is, at least in my estimation, a game about being too determined to Get Rid Of All The Bad Things that the extermination becomes a cause in and of itself, the extermination itself becomes what is good, and thus, it's okay to exterminate anything even slightly Bad. It's all very French Revolution. Surely, if we subtract all the bad things, only good things will be left. There are no flaws in this mathematic equation. SO.
i ended up having to ask thejudge for help with that puzzle and am now stuck on the final boss due to the level cap :(
OFF hit my dogmatic mercy and my disgust for pleasure being pain in disguise nerves hard. Things like the mall ended up sickening me a lot. Because look at this consumerism that isn't helping anyone. Look at these theme parks that are just trapping them. Look at them addicted to a food source. Look at this crushing office job with a horrible boss. Those poor, poor miserable people. Clearly the solution was to just mercy kill them because there was nothing to be done. They would just become monsters after all and how could I stand to let people become that? Later on through the game though it became apparent just how monstrous that this viewpoint was and that I hadn't even realized I'd fallen into it until next to everyone was dead. I seem to be a weird person in how I reacted to it in that regard. At least from what I've seen. To me the game is a sort of extreme negative reaction to modern society and how it has trapped us and harms us. And just how that sort of reaction isn't any better than the evils of worldly life. If anything it may even be worse. Basically displaying how quickly one can turn to a sort of cruel nihilism and the awfulness of nihilism.
That was pretty much my feeling on it too, though less well-articulated - and also I have to cop to only figuring that out after the hints started being SERIOUSLY dropped about the Batter. Up until then it felt like a truly corrupted world that I was literally sent to clean out - wrong? Perhaps, though the things I fought seemed very wrong. I played both endings, too.
I'm very, very late to this, but my feeling is that that's only appropriate. Because that wasn't the real choice- the real choice was the fact that you played that far at all. It's similar to Spec Ops: The Line and Undertale's No Mercy route in that the point is that you, the player, could have stopped this at any time, and you kept going because you wanted to see what happened if you did.
I keep reccing Spec Ops: The Line to players of OFF and vice versa but they're technically such different games I can never tell if people will listen to me. I may be weird in that sometimes I like being railroaded! If it serves a purpose. And the purpose in both those cases (and to some extent with Undertale but I think it's thematically a little different) is to make you aware of how easy it is to get caught up in something really nasty if you're too focused on the end goal to pay attention to what's happening on the way. You can get off this ride whenever you want to, but you almost definitely won't because you've started something and you want to know how it ends, no matter how destructive it becomes. (Should I make a Spec Ops: The Line thread? I feel like maybe I should. I love that game so heckin much)
I haven't actually played SO:TL (partially because I am outstandingly bad at shooters), but I've read and heard a fair bit about it. I really should look up an LP at some point. (A personal favorite of mine in terms of "games that exploit their own inherent linearity" is Tales of the Abyss- it's not in the same "how dare you play the game [like this] you douchebag" category as OFF/Undertale/SO:TL, but it's entirely possible to interpret the prewritten predetermined destiny of the world and everyone in it as indistinguishable from the game script. In fact, it's heavily supported by the fact that Spoiler after they Break Destiny, the dialogue subtitles break. )
I am also outstandingly bad at shooters, I watched two playthroughs before attempting one myself but it's a fucking fantastic game. Don't expect anything remarkable in terms of gameplay because it's pretty much designed to behave like a generic cover-based shooter until the story happens, but the story is sooooo worth it.
I mean, from what I understand, that's sort of the point, too. Because the gameplay is kind of generic, if you're playing, you're probably playing for the story. So when the game calls you out at the end, the point isn't likely to be cheapened by "Nah, I didn't care, I just wanted to get back to the AWESOME GAMEPLAY."
