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Casual Playthrough #9 - Mystery Case Files: Dire Grove

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Except for the fact that it required an HO scene to get the mattress, I find it no more convoluted than the logic we find in most Adventures. Find kitchen, note key tags on wall, find maid’s room, open drawers at random, find photo of vase under key tags, find vase, find key.

Why couldn’t we have just found the key when we first found the vase instead of having to go through all that rigmarole?

I think somebody called it “adventure game logic”. I think you have to accept the same type of illogic here as well.

     

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The only “sparkles” I see are more like miniature snowball-storms.
They’re quite a bit more noticeable than the “sparkles” in more recent games.
They only seem to show up to denote hidden object scenes, so I don’t really mind them

I’ve got ‘glints’ on active areas like the manhole cover and the hole in the snow. I find those annoying.

     
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Only thing I can think of is that some of those “glints” will reveal themselves as useful during the CE. They were nothing but red herrings in the SE.

     

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I think the importance of some of those location glints may show up in the tapes.

Regarding the destruction of the bathroom floor, it needed to be repaired anyway.  Smile

     

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rtrooney - 16 May 2015 01:05 PM

I kind of agree. But then there are things in Scratches that work that way as well. When you don’t know what to do, you start wandering and/or revisiting places you’ve been before hoping there might be something new.

I have only played Day 1 in Scratches, and nothing new happened there, thought it might be the case later in the game.

Anyway the problem isn’t that you have to re-explore places because you missed something the first time around, or that you have to revisit a place because something new has happened, or for that matter even that they are reusing HO scenes in general. The problem is that we get absolutely no indication that something new actually has happened somewhere or anywhere.

If there where an active antagonist or just active NPC’s roaming the place, then we would most likely see some cutscene, where we might perhaps see them open a door we previously couldn’t access or something similar, and we would know that we need to revisit the location to see if we can now open the door, or if they dropped something or .. whatever. But here the HO just reappear out of nowhere, giving us an item that previously wasn’t at that location, without any explanation whatsoever.

It isn’t a huge problem, as most of them are in places we would revisit anyway or at least pass close by, and the general rule in AG’s and similar games is of course: If stuck, revisit every location. But it is still bad design IMO.

TimovieMan - 16 May 2015 08:06 PM

I’m also a bit puzzled by the insane game logic that’s been used to get in the manager’s office. So we locate the room above the office, take a sledge hammer to the floor to open a large hole, breaking the water pipes in the process, nearly flood the place before we shut down the water, stuff a mattress through our bulldozed hole so we can jump through and land safely when we could have simply used that sledge hammer to break down the flimsy locked door. Yay for excessive damage? Tongue

Personally I was more annoyed by the fact that I couldn’t just use a normal hammer to make the hole in the floor, it might have taken a bit longer, but it is totally doable. There are quite a few instances like this, where you have to use a specific item on a specific hotspot, even though another item or solution would have worked just as well or perhaps even better. In fact there is one, where I don’t believe the required solution actually would have worked at all, whereas my solution would have worked perfectly.

But that is a common problem in almost all AG or Casuals.


Despite those two annoyances, then I still think that it is an excellent game, with a very good and spooky story, with high production values and with a very high difficulty, which is a plus in my book.

     

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rtrooney - 16 May 2015 08:41 PM

I think somebody called it “adventure game logic”. I think you have to accept the same type of illogic here as well.

I just call it “game logic” as these things happen in all game genres. They just appear to happen more in adventures because adventures often are more linear and dependent on the thought process of the developers.

And don’t get me wrong, I very much accept that the game wants me to enter the manager’s office the convoluted way, and I’m not bothered by it at all (I’ve played enough games to know that these things happen often), but I can also roll my eyes at it when I see a particularly egregious case like this one… Tongue




As an aside, with all this talk about ‘glints’ and ‘sparkles’ and ‘morphing objects’, I tried to check online what the differences were between the SE and the CE, and I read an interesting post in some forum (and found it backed up by the Wiki) that this particular CE was the first one Big Fish did as a form of “let’s see if people are interested in this” experiment.
Must’ve been successful. Cool

     

The truth can’t hurt you, it’s just like the dark: it scares you witless but in time you see things clear and stark. - Elvis Costello
Maybe this time I can be strong, but since I know who I am, I’m probably wrong. Maybe this time I can go far, but thinking about where I’ve been ain’t helping me start. - Michael Kiwanuka

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In my intro to the game (first post) I mentioned that Dire Grove was the first game to have a CE. I called it a dubious distinction.

     

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colpet - 16 May 2015 08:57 PM

I’ve got ‘glints’ on active areas like the manhole cover and the hole in the snow. I find those annoying.

I’d agree the “glints” are annoying. They tend to be false alarms—alerting you to objects you won’t be able to interact with until much later in the game—or continuing to “glint” long after the interaction is completed. They’re as bad as sparkly areas in newer games that are just there to look pretty, and will never be interactive. I’d gladly do without them.

rtrooney - 16 May 2015 09:21 PM

Only thing I can think of is that some of those “glints” will reveal themselves as useful during the CE. They were nothing but red herrings in the SE.

I think they’re just as useless in the CE.

     
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I’m in the Manager’s Office. I like playing this game along with Scratches—gives me a chance to contrast the two.

I agree with colpet that the story is very reminiscent of Barrow Hill.

     
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I think Iz also commented on playing both this and Scratches at the same time. I agree that it’s nice that it worked out that way, even if the outcome was a result of two separate votes done by two separate groups of people. Madam Fate reared her ugly head!

     

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rtrooney - 17 May 2015 12:42 PM

In my intro to the game (first post) I mentioned that Dire Grove was the first game to have a CE. I called it a dubious distinction.

Sorry. It must not have registered when I read the OP… Meh


Iznogood - 17 May 2015 05:37 AM

In fact there is one, where I don’t believe the required solution actually would have worked at all, whereas my solution would have worked perfectly.

You tease, you. Grin

Is it grabbing that ladder on the shelves in the background and using it to take down the valve manually instead of swinging a hook at it? Tongue

     

The truth can’t hurt you, it’s just like the dark: it scares you witless but in time you see things clear and stark. - Elvis Costello
Maybe this time I can be strong, but since I know who I am, I’m probably wrong. Maybe this time I can go far, but thinking about where I’ve been ain’t helping me start. - Michael Kiwanuka

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TimovieMan - 18 May 2015 06:33 AM

You tease, you. Grin

Is it grabbing that ladder on the shelves in the background and using it to take down the valve manually instead of swinging a hook at it? Tongue

It could have been if I had actually noticed there was a ladder, before noticing that you could swing the hook. But the one I was thinking of is actually something that we haven’t reached yet, which is why I won’t mention it at all - at least not yet Tongue

     

You have to play the game, to find out why you are playing the game! - eXistenZ

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Becky - 17 May 2015 04:57 PM

I agree with colpet that the story is very reminiscent of Barrow Hill.

Doesn’t remind me of Barrow Hill that much. Sure there is a motel that you have to get into, and brochures you can look at. But Barrow Hill takes place at night, there is no snow, and there are these huge rocks that try to flatten you. Didn’t Barrow Hill also have the occasional scares where something in the darkness moves and startles you? Or maybe I’m confusing it with one of the Dark Fall games. I’m not seeing that kind of subtle buildup of tension in Dire Grove, where even small, insignificant movements can startle you.

     
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The intros are similar—you’re driving in the English countryside, listening to a woman’s voice on the radio. Suddenly your car crashes/stops in a forest near a hotel/motel. It’s clear that people have been here recently, but the place is mostly deserted. Something very strange, related to an ancient artifact, is now haunting the place. You see videos of a young, terrorized woman with long dark hair (on the cellphone in BH, on the Crime Computer in DG). There’s an archaeological dig, reference to ancient rituals and mythological beings, etc.

     

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Becky - 18 May 2015 08:59 PM

The intros are similar—you’re driving in the English countryside, listening to a woman’s voice on the radio. Suddenly your car crashes/stops in a forest near a hotel/motel. It’s clear that people have been here recently, but the place is mostly deserted. Something very strange, related to an ancient artifact, is now haunting the place. You see videos of a young, terrorized woman with long dark hair (on the cellphone in BH, on the Crime Computer in DG). There’s an archaeological dig, reference to ancient rituals and mythological beings, etc.

I guess I see what you mean now. But there are so many Big Fish casual adventure games that start off with you driving a car and listening to the radio, and your car either crashes or breaks down or sometimes you stop on purpose because you were “The Detective” summoned to fix the problem, and you end up in some troubled area, either deserted or with creepy or scared people… I honestly don’t remember exactly how Barrow Hill started, though I remember the gas station and the motel and the lady on the radio.

     

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