Game Impressions I escaped the water tower after if fell apart and now the ghost girl appears again...What's next?
Sorry, but it absolutely is an exaggeration of what people should expect from the game in terms of length. While somebody certainly could technically take seven hours to finish the game, or ten, or twenty, all of those would involve wandering around and looking at the same things over and over, because there's simply not that much actual distinct content in the game; for most players this will be an experience that is over in roughly two hours. Now, there's nothing necessarily wrong with that, and the game certainly delivers a lot of style and atmosphere while it lasts, but you don't do anybody any favours by deliberately misrepresenting the situation because you're a fan of the game or its developer. I'd actually like to see the people claiming 7-8 hour play times break those times down – if somebody finishes a game in seven hours but was stuck on one puzzle for five of those, that means the expected play time is two hours, not seven. I completed the game in under two hours the first time around without knowing anything about it going in, and in that time I saw everything the game had to offer, all the sightings, mysteries, oddities and non-critical elements. There is literally no way this game will take a player seven or eight hours to finish unless they're deliberately walking in circles, stuck on the bottleneck photograph "puzzle" for hours on end, roleplaying being scared and hiding in corners for minutes at a time, or taking other actions intended to artificially lengthen the experience. The game broken down in non-speedrun form, with generous time allowances made for looking around: Spoiler Getting to the top of the hill while collecting all the notes and seeing everything along the way : 30-45 minutes. Spoiler Dealing with the camp and doctor, and acquiring the crystal : 10-15 minutes. Spoiler Translating the wall : 5 minutes. Spoiler Collecting the items and putting them back in the box : 10-20 minutes. Spoiler Shooting the stones and getting the final key : 10 minutes. Spoiler Climbing the tower and beating the final boss fight : 5 minutes. Total: 70-100 minutes. An actual speedrun would cut that total time by at least half – in fact, I put this post on hold to try it, and it took me 32 minutes, almost all of which was unavoidable travel time. Even if we tack on an extra hour to the non-speedrun total to allow for mucking around, exploring, shooting dolls and generally getting lost, that only brings the game to a little over two and a half hours; I'd love to see where this other five or six hours is supposedly coming from, because the game itself certainly doesn't contain enough puzzles or other content to sustain this.
Well, i wont argue with you. Clearly, your high level deductive and puzzle solving skills is too much for this game. I know for a fact that it took me 7 hours to complete the game my first run through, and UC claimed 8 hrs, and James said he did it in 7, and yours took 2 hrs. With that data, our average time would be 6 hours. Anyone else who finished the game can increase the sample size and we can make more accurate average playtime for the game. But from what we have, 6 hours would be average.
To be honest when I first gave the game out to beta testers I told them it would only take 2-3 hours to complete. I was to shocked when they said it was more like 6-7. I thought what the hell are they doing??? Eventually i was able to watch people play the game and in many ways it was very frustrating. i thought to myself - Why did they miss that note, how could the walk past that and not see it. why did they just drive all the way to the top and not bother looking at anything, why arnt they clicking on the notes? please stop wasting time shooting all the dolls. stop shooting the beds. It was so hard biting my lip i just wanted to scream and tell they how todo it. I was like watching your gran play. You say collecting just the notes should take 30 mins, ive seen people take 3 hours to get all the notes and they loved doing it. Not everybody plays the game like you and me. I don't believe people are "deliberately misrepresenting the situation" when they say 6 hours plus to complete.
That's pretty much the beauty in the game. It's essentially a point & click adventure living in a FPS world. There was no hand holding back in the day, and as weird as solutions were in various games, getting your hands dirty by trying and touching everything was all part of the fun. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the game being a couple of hours long, and it's equally alright for people to take hours upon hours to complete it. Hell, The Secret of Monkey Island can be played through in less than hour if you what to do, and no one's ever complained about it. Who the hell cares? This discussion is being blown out of proportions.
We may disagree on time for completion of Indigo Lake, but it sounds like the concensus is that Indigo Lake is a gem of a game well worth $1.99. It's also much more fun that this sounds as a "walking around a haunted campground simulator." I think completing the game you have to have a objective focused perspective but to enjoy it you have to be willing to mill around. It probably took me a while exploring behind cabins to see if there were some sort of hidden secret or other. Your mileage may vary on the length but the novel first person perspective adventure game vibe and slathered in eerie atmosphere is a nice addition to iOS and one of the few quality horror games.
I have to say that I agree with the longer length estimates. I found all of the notes rather quickly, but still have not found all of the keys (I'm assuming there's at least three since I've found two and can't get into either of the areas that I've found with the "need key" notation.) And I'm not going to read spoilers to find them so I can easily see surpassing 6 hours.
I think 3CRL has proven able to handle an adult conversation, and I for one am grateful for the honest sharing of opinions. TA sans opinions essentially becomes page after page of, "Instabuy," "downloading," "Thanks for the heads-up," "Took x code," "Will this run on x device," and "Is this coming to Android" posts... I take both Appletini and E-P's opinions pretty seriously, but I also note that they are very different players as well as posters, so it's helpful for me when they both weigh in on stuff I'm interested in. As for 3CRL, some people "Talk a good game," while others "Make a good game..." See what I did there? Whether this game takes you an hour or 10, I find it interesting to see games that in many ways really do mimic console experiences steadily making their way onto the iOS, and two of them have come from the same developer... just sayin'. DBC
That's a nonsensical argument. The expected or estimated length of an adventure game isn't based on the raw time it took you personally to finish it, otherwise you could claim that even the shortest adventure actually has a play time of 20-100 hours solely because you got stuck on one puzzle for a week or two. An adventure game's expected length is based on how long it would reasonably take somebody to finish it if they're not getting stuck and are making constant progress. That's not eight hours here, nor anything close to it by the developer's own accounting, it is 2-3 hours so giving people the impression they're settling in for an eight-hour narrative simply sets unrealistic expectations. It took the Cow eight hours to finish the game, but the game doesn't require eight hours to finish. Somebody who gets really stuck might report that it took twenty hours to finish, but it's still not then a twenty-hour game, and people shouldn't pick up the game expecting it to be. You're free to identify that your play time was inflated by getting stuck, but the reality is that somebody who doesn't accidentally miss the note on the pole at the beginning of the game or the third key up at the army camp, or otherwise run around in circles for hours can reasonably expect to finish the game at or just under the two hour mark. And you're right, there's nothing to argue about there, because that's simply the way it is; whether any given individual personally takes one, five, seven, ten, or twenty hours to complete it is actually wholly irrelevant. And this is entirely accurate; somebody who explores the world but doesn't get stuck for hours is likely to take about that long to finish the game. I totally agree with that estimation. Somebody who says the game took them eight hours to complete but conspicuously fails to mention that they were simply stuck not knowing what to do for six of those is deliberately misrepresenting the situation (which isn't to say they're doing it maliciously). The point is that the game isn't of itself an eight-hour affair (and won't be for most people), and it's truly bizarre that people are becoming defensive and upset when I state this. Yes, we get it, it took you eight hours to finish the game, but that doesn't mean the expected length of the actual game itself is eight hours long, it just means you spent six hours wandering around and not progressing in any way. It'd just be nice and a little more honest if people didn't conveniently leave that last bit out when telling other people about the game. It's no different to somebody stating that Game X only took them an hour to finish while deliberately leaving out the fact that they used a walkthrough all the way through the entire game; in both cases it's a misrepresentation that doesn't accurately reflect reality. There's nothing wrong with one player spending longer than another to finish a game, but getting upset when I point out that it doesn't need to take anywhere near that long is an odd reaction. Indigo Lake is relatively short, but it is also a fun and atmospheric game that currently fills a niche in iOS gaming; it doesn't need to be misrepresented by people just because they like it. I like it, would love to see more games like it, and am looking forward to the upcoming Dolls. IL is still not inherently an eight-hour game, though, any more than it is inherently a fifty-hour game. Well, for my part I'm not actually saying that there's anything wrong with the length of the game itself, nor was my earlier description of the game harking back to the classic hand-holding-free adventures a pejorative one. What I have been saying is that if I identify that the game can be finished in 1.5-2 hours if a player doesn't get stuck, in response to somebody saying it took them eight hours, there's no actual argument or disagreement to be had there. That's all this boils down to: if you do explore but don't get stuck, the game will take you around two hours to complete. If you do get stuck, you may well spend two, five, eight, ten, or a hundred hours running around looking for what you missed (most likely the first note, or the third key). That two-hour timeframe is what you should expect going into the game the actual outcome is obviously going to vary according to the individual, but people have the right to have all relevant data available to them before jumping in, which includes accurate info about the game's length. As it stands, I already have people emailing me about the game being "really short", which isn't quite the point I've been making. Absolutely, and I don't think anybody here disputes that, no matter what else might be going on in the thread. I don't even think we've had a single person complaining about the price, which makes a refreshing change. I do hope the developer exerts some self-control and stays away from the "Sale" button for a good long time. ^_^ Finding the third key is probably the single most common issue I've seen raised by people stuck in the game; it is really the only unintuitive part, and is a major roadblock that has caused many people to roam needlessly all over the island for hours looking for it. If the developer adds a hint for this part as he's noted, I foresee the aimless wandering (and individual completion times) dropping sharply, as the rest of the game is pretty straightforward and helpful about telling you what you should be doing next. Once you get the third key, it's pretty much a straight run to the finish line from there.
Firstly I feel like you just decided to quote mine me. Just carefully stating the opening line of my post is very much a deliberate misrepresentation of what i said. My post clearly stated that pre beta I thought the average person would take 2-3 hours but the next two paragraphs state why I was wrong and that it could be more like 6 hours. You say that a games length can only be measured in the time spent making constant progress?? if this is true then every adventure game would be 1 hour long. Just because people arnt always making progress does not mean there not still enjoying the experience. Its not what your saying its how your saying it! You call forum members and TA staff out for deliberate misrepresentation just because you carn't understand why they took longer than you. I feel this comes across as a bit harsh but its not meant to be Surly the only way to judge a games gameplay time is the average time it took somebody to complete it. Which is what EP was saying.
I realized that I misspoke earlier. I actually have found only one of the keys and it doesn't open either of the two doors I've found. But what's funny is that the one that I did find was at the Army Base (which I believe is the third key) and I found it without using any spoilers. So I must really be clueless not finding the other two yet. I went to the bottom of the hill and went through each of the cabins again and still haven't found them. I did notice, however, that some of the ghosts I saw earlier were no longer present so I'm worried that I may have caused some kind of inbalance in the game by finding the third one first.
The ghosts only appear once so there is no imbalance Spoiler im guessing the key you have found was for the army camp main gate and you have already used it. you now have to solve the next puzzle in the army camp
The first key you find in the game opens Spoiler the gates to the army camp , the second one opens Spoiler the ground floor hallway in the big building , and the third key opens Spoiler the door to the upstairs hallway . You have to collect them in order, so you shouldn't have broken anything. This also means the key you found at the army camp was the second one, not the obscure third one that plagues pretty much everyone.
I looked up the description on the iTunes page and it helped me to save and load game. Therefore I can start playing without it crashing. I'm not jailbroken. Using iOS 6.1.3. I found the left turn on the jeep hard but if you press hard enough it works, maybe I just need more practice. So far, I'm really liking this game. It's an improvement on the Woods, which is excellent also. There is more gameplay, puzzles and definitely scares, I'm still kinda creeped out to play at night. So that's a huge compliment. The game is excellent and a steal at 1.99. I still have to play a lot more but so far, I love it, very creepy game, well done 3 cubes.
I would like to respectfully point out the subjective context of my initial comment and emphasize that they focus only on my own experiences [hence "I"]. I assumed it would be understood that, as with any review/impressions, it can't be guaranteed others will have the same experience (in this case some did, others didn't). I hope there hasn't been an unfortunate idea that my play times or play time of others are universal or definitive of what everyone will experience. I stand by my intial time estimate under the assumption users will take a natural lapse in time to solve puzzles and experience the game but could never have promised anything as definitive as Appletini may have taken from my comments. My apologizes for any miscommunication. Now... if I could only figure out how to open this space hatch when all I've got is blackberry pie and a stapler. I noticed the jeep slowly turning too but chaulked it up to a jeep going 30mph or less on a untraditional and wet road. I think you're noticing the physics engine (often turns are up hill too); it is fun to try to flip the jeep.
