Your intrepid heroes trace wires, ring bells, and focus on aesthetics. Pavilion faces the CHAIRQUISITION!
Game: Pavilion
Webzone: store.steampowered.com/app/417150/
Devel: Visiontrick Media
Engine: Unity
Price: 9.99
Wazzat: Pavilion, a fourth-person puzzling adventure, throws you directly into its mysterious world without any text tutorials or beginning explanations. A puzzle game portrayed through exploration and audio-visual imagery.
Mandatory Disclosure: They sent us keys
CHAIRQUISITION:
Makes with the working
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Shiny / Sounds
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- Ever enable “show cursor/touch” on the Androids?
- Because that’s what will distract you from the beautifully drawn levels.
- It shouldn’t but it’s just so damn out of place with the rest of the aesthetic.
- The levels/puzzles are wicked beautiful and hella intricate.
- It has sounds but like Mr. Modo I hate the bells so they were noped with a quickness.
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- Very pretty hand drawn sprites and backgrounds
- The one sore spot is the crappy photoshop-effect-esque cursor you use to ding bells
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- For all my spiels about mechanics, narrative and aesthetics it’s good to see a game which can focus on just the aesthetics and still be functional. I’ll expand on that a bit more later.
- Pavilion’s focus is very clearly on the aesthetics.
- The backdrops, sprites and even the dullard you’re attempting to help navigate the world are very well drawn.
- The background music is subtle but very effective in creating a sort of quasi-theological setting with a healthy dose of atmosphere.
- It’s a game which focuses on the “Show, don’t tell” school of game design and I love that.
- The moment you leave the Main Menu and get in game proper, there’s no more text on screen!
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Control
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- Move, RANG, push/pull, RANG.
- Controlla or directional keys + space.
- You even made this fkr require a controlla on the NVIDIA SHIELD?
- Why not let me directly interact /w the world via gerbil?
- This is either a troll or being stupid on purpose.
- I’m not giving it two Chairs because this artard decision does allow you play this in Big Picture without needing the Areola Controlla.
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- DING
- You control the guy by ringing bells. I want an option to slap the guy upside the head whenever he does something stupid
- Also, to echo my cohosts: Y U NO USE MOUSE FOR CURSOR
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- Controls, in other to not break immersion, need to be spot on.
- And the way to make spot on controls, in a game where your agency as a player is conveyed by a cursor, is to use the tool people are often the most familiar with. Which in the case of cursors, it’s a freakin’ mouse!
- How do you make a game where a player’s only visual representation in-game proper is a cursor and not have mouse control for it?
- The closest you can get to “mouse control” in this game is to grab a Steam Controller, set one of the areolas to “Enhanced Camera Control” or “Joystick Mouse”.
- That way, that areola will behave like a touchpad but still output as though it’s an analog stick.
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FUN
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- If I leave it running in the background I forget about it until don’t and end up solving another puzzle.
- Yeah, we’re getting odd to a bad start.
- I don’t know, it never really clicked with me.
- I found the puzzles more frustrating than challenging.
- More importantly the game doesn’t exactly go out of it’s way to explain why you should bother in the first place.
- This isn’t a fourth-person puzzling adventure nay, it’s a dick God simulator who just so happens to have a raging stiffy for ringing bells.
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- If you caught the stream on Wednesday, you saw a few of the puzzles
- Not so much logic as process of elimination
- I wanna compare this game to a much better artsy puzzle game: The bridge
- The bridge fucks with you. It gives you a couple simple solutions that make you fall into the trap
- You need to think several steps ahead
- This? The main character is an idiot who can’t see things five feet in front of him, and you expect me to guide him to a door.
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- We’ve had puzzle games before which stride the line between simple and simplistic.
- Stephen’s Sausage Roll immediately comes to mind.
- Not just for its simplicity but also for its almost utopic reliance on mechanics.
- SSR eschewed fancy aesthetics and all manner of pre-formed narrative to focus on a very simple set of mechanics.
- And the very basic aesthetics served only to complement those mechanics.
- Everything you needed to solve any given puzzle was ALWAYS on screen the entire time.
- That is how you make a genius puzzle game. You give players the gun and then sit back with some popcorn watching them repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot.
- Pavilion is definitely trying to do something similar, but fails to grasp the “simplicity factor”.
- Yes, the art is very pretty, but if you’re making me scroll through an entire screens-worth of nothing just to so you could put more pretties in and that ends up artificially inflating the difficulty, because I can’t see exactly which bell is going to lead where, you haven’t made a game.
- You’ve made a pretentious piece of masturbatory art. Which explains the whole “fourth person” denominator.
- A very aesthetically pleasing one at that!
- But you failed to grasp the simple concept that, in 2016, a cursor is driven by a mouse
- And in your hubris to show us all your lovely artwork, you’ve artificially padded your game in completely unnecessary ways.
- Maybe it’s just me and my unwavering preference for mechanics over aesthetics and narrative in videogames.
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