Universal Monument Valley - (by ustwo)

It implies ambivalence to something.

 

Thank you

 

Agreed, Whale Trail is a shadow of its former self, but this game deserves to be judged on its own merits. Nice to see that someone is able to say that without laying into him for no reason though lol

 

Hi guys.
I LOVE monument valley. It is a masterpiece!
I am curious about the whale trail backlash: what changed in whale trail is it just more heavily monetised than it was in previous versions?

 

hi mate it is a noise in English used like 'boff' is in French. a way of saying 'it did not do anything for me'

 

Obvious Escher homage, but the Fez influence is clear. The art and production values are exceptional, the game itself (like Fez) really leverages the magic of isometric illusions. While this won't suck hours out of me, it's definitely a showpiece.

 

Now I get it, thank you for the translation.

 

In all honesty the Whale Trail release wasn't the most successful in the world and fell well below what we were expecting. We did have a dedicated fan base, but we were struggling to acquire new players. We continued to work on new levels for four months in the hope of gaining more interest, but again this wasn't having the desired effect.

We found one of the main reasons for the game not doing as well as expected was the average play lengths people were having per run. We were tracking some people having runs of up to three hours, which tells us immediately that the game was too easy and not "snackable" enough for a game designed around being mobile.

We made the decision to completely repurpose the game to add in RPG like mechanics and stats, unlockables and new levels to make the game more enticing and add depth. Scaling up the difficulty to create a game in which having a run of a few minutes was an achievement. We genuinely believe we made a better game.

In order to make the transition for existing players as painless as possible we gave every one of those players a ton of currency worth more than the original paid price. This way they could buy any of the new content and boost their statistics.

Apologies for the wall of text but I know a few people in this thread asked similar questions.

 

Ok bought played and finished. My twopenneth for anyone's that's interested:

1. It's short. A lot shorter than I expected even given the reviews and comments I'd seen.

2. The last level/chapter felt very anti climatic given the two or three that had gone before. In fact it was slightly disappointing.

3. Given it told a story from start to finish I can't see any replay value in it.

4. I didn't like the way it went back to the chapter select screen after finishing one. I would have preferred some other way of linking them up. Not sure what tho....

Very good game, I'm glad I took the plunge and picked it up and I hope it does really well but I can certainly see a few people feeling short changed at the length of it especially if they're not even expecting it to be shorter than an average game.

A solid 4/5 from me

 

Ace, thanks for clearing that up. Sounds fair enough to me. Trying to improve the circumstances of an already released game is very difficult (a position I find myself in right now as it goes).

Cheers!
Jake

 

It's not really a word. It's a sound people make when they're not impressed.

 

This is not true. I bought the game on launch, didn't delete it before upgrading but never got any free currency. These things never go perfectly. I don't think there's anything you can do about that, but, just FYI.

I loved the original Whale Trail. Was GOTY material for me. The fact that you say that you think the freemium version is a better game makes me think that we have very different ideas about what makes a great game.

Thanks for answering questions about it though. That's appreciated!

 

US Store

 

What a nice experience!

 

Same here, was going to write something similar but this just nails it.

 

Me thinks we'll have new content at some point in the future.