Picked this up in the Steam sale and got started. I'm about an hour in. To echo the impressions earlier, the music is great, it feels old-school and retro without being overly so, and I'm not entirely sure what's going on but having fun exploring anyway.

Have you guys played more of this game since this thread sank earlier this year? Any new thoughts?

No?

Game's pretty addicting. I've been playing for 8 hours (under 5 hours on my save file, plenty of deaths and restarts...) and killed two bosses. I like how taking notes and paying attention really helps a lot, but there's a few parts I definitely just lucked through and others where I just feel stumped. There are some puzzles in the first area that I feel like I should be able to complete, but I must be missing something obvious. On the other hand, The Mausoleum of the Giants seemed like it was going to be a huge pain in the ass, but I just kinda found the gem and boss through luck. Never did find the map, though...

I've got to get back to this...maybe for Backlaugust, despite the warnings

@Shadowlink
We should totally play through it together!

@Pokefreak911

Sounds like a plan!

This may very well be the toughest game I've ever played.

I can't remember which episode of the podcast I discussed this during, but.... La-Mulana is an extremely well made game in every regard save one: I would say it's literally impossible to beat without a guide or literally years of trial and error. That's game design so bad that it shouldn't really be sold for money. =\

Just such a shame because, truly, everything else about the game is absolutely superb. Amazing production value and mechanics.

@NinSage
So it's like Metroid 1?

Oh this should be fun! Seeing as I love Metroid 1 and believe it is the mountain of all level design knowledge...NOT.

@Shadowlink
I'm assuming you have the WW version? I have the Steam one.

@NinSage I'm a decent way into the game, and everything I've encountered so far is doable without outside help...if you're willing to fill a notebook with room layouts, map trails, puzzle notes, and lore entries. So many times I see a strange new room and think "wasn't there a riddle about this earlier?" and the answer is somewhere in my notes. Or if it's not, it's on a tablet somewhere that I didn't think was important but clearly was. It's certainly a time commitment, far more than anything else in its genre, but trial and error doesn't apply to anything I've seen, except the bosses and a couple of the nastier traps.

Admittedly, I've looked up two or three things in GameFAQs, but each answer ended up being a face-palmer that I absolutely should not have had trouble with.

@nate38
Now it's starting to sound more like Fez but less obtuse.

Oh boy was Fez obtuse...

@Pokefreak911 La-Mulana is pretty obtuse. But you can get through it if you pay attention and take notes.

But reading through the derailed Nintendo stock thread, this may not be the game for you. It is way harder than any Mega Man game I've played. The bosses are mostly cheaper and you can fight them out of order and be woefully unprepared for whichever one you've stumbled on. I spent over an hour last night fighting a MID-BOSS that would absolutely demolish me if I didn't use a very slow (yet still risky) method that used up all my precious subweapons. I must have hit it at least 50 times before it went down. And then I explored beyond it, expecting a prize, and found nothing and ended up dying and now I have to fight it all over again...

@nate38
Oh well, sounds like fun.
Keep in mind, I have finished Zelda 2. As long as I get ample checkpoints and death isn't a massive set back I will be fine.

Pokefreak911 said:

So it's like Metroid 1?

No, not even close. Metroid 1 you can just sort of wander around and as long as you find new areas, you can keep moving forward. In fact, the only really confusing thing about Metroid 1 is that without a map you can forget where you are in relation to other places. La-Mulana, on the other hand, has the most obtuse puzzles in the world. Move some lever in some room, have no idea what it does, wander around aimlessly, hope you figure out that the lever you moved made some minor, hard to recognize even when you know it is there change in some room in a completely different area...

More accurate might be to say it is the result of creating an entire game out of the infamous part in Castlevania II where you have to equip the right item and kneel in the right place and little to nothing in the game would hint that this is what you should do. Well, the entire game isn't like this, but at least 10 or 15 or so puzzles in the game are.

Anyone coming into this game thinking "but this is how a lot of games used to be!" is going to be in for a shock. I've never in my life played a game that was this purposely obtuse, and I've been playing games since the early 80s.

@nate38 It's always easy in retrospect to say "I should have noticed this / done that / etc.!" after you look up what to do. But most games are built so that you never really even have to get to that point.

Zero said:

@nate38 It's always easy in retrospect to say "I should have noticed this / done that / etc.!" after you look up what to do. But most games are built so that you never really even have to get to that point.

It's worth getting stumped a few times to get a game that consistently makes you feel like Indiana Jones when he realized that only the penitent man will pass. The puzzles ask a lot of you, far more than even most old school adventure games (I'm bringing home a new notepad from work and may even reorganize and redraw my previously taken notes), but I haven't come across anything that has zero or false clues like Castlevania II yet.

And looking back, the things I've looked up weren't even necessary. In one instance I was being embarrassingly stupid (the game was actually pointing me in the right direction with every failure, I just wasn't paying attention). The other I was just being impatient and would have found what I was looking for before long anyway.

Of course, I'm also seeing some info about the Steam version having a few slight adjustments in some of the puzzles as opposed to the WiiWare version. So we may beseeing slightly different clues or something

@Zero

Agreed.

@nate38

What part are you at? Which weapons do you have?

I'm eager to see how you fare the rest of the way =P

@NinSage I have no idea how to tell you what my progress is. I've been playing for 17 hours now according to Steam. I just got the chain whip. And the double jump. I've killed four bosses. I've pretty well mapped out the Graveyard of the Giants and the Moonlight Temple, though not either completely. I've certainly seen a lot more than I expected to from the game, and I feel like I'm still quite a ways from finishing it, based on the areas I've seen but not explored, and others that I can see but not reach.

@nate38 Well, I don't want to argue about it, but when you say "I just wasn't paying attention", does this happen to you a lot in other games? Because I think this game's biggest flaw isn't that you can't solve things, but that it rarely points you in the right direction. So in this sense a lot of stuff you look up in a FAQ will naturally lead to "duh... why didn't I think of that?!" But the reason you didn't, when in other games you might, is because most other games are better at pointing you in the right direction.

@Zero No I do that in other games sometimes too, did it at least a few times in the Oracle games for a recent example. Usually it's like, if I don't get an answer quickly, I start thinking way too hard when the answer is pretty much staring me in the face.

In fact here are the things I looked up:

The puzzle where you have to destroy the tablets in order: in the other room, there's a skeleton that tells you the order very explicitly. So I go into the room and hit the first tablet. Then I try hitting the second tablet and get zapped. WTF MAN I'M DOING IT IN THE RIGHT ORDER. So I tried hitting the other ones and got zapped. Came back and tried again a few times, kept getting zapped, so I quit for the night. The next day at work I decide I'm going to try again, hitting that first tablet then hitting all the others in order, including that first one again. But I then give in to temptation and just GameFAQs it and, silly me, I had to hit the first tablet until it was destroyed, not just tap it once. I would have found it out because I was planning on going through the whole order eventually, but I really should have caught on earlier. That, and when you hit it, it makes that dusty effect that happens on all breakable walls.

And the other thing I looked up was the warp item, because in one of your posts you mentioned it's in the first area. And I had already found a few entrances to other areas so I thought maybe I was doing things out of order. And while it's through a tricky Pac-Man style false wall, the skeleton sitting right in front of it is like "MAN I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS IS A FALSE WALL TOO BAD I DIED." I had already seen other false walls and the warp item was mentioned on a tablet in that room, so I'd like to think that wouldn't have taken long to find.




I may very well end up hitting a wall at some point, and maybe I'm just hopeful because any time I get stuck in La-Mulana thus far, I have like 4 or 5 other things I can explore and hope the answer comes to me later. Seriously, this game is way, way bigger than I thought it would be ten hours ago.

@nate38

That's why I asked what weapon you had, to try to use that as some indication of where you are in this extremely non-linear game. Anyway, keep us posted and keep track of how many times you need GameFAQs =) It was very cool how you posted what it was you had to look up. That was a good example of your point.

Okay yeah it's getting a bit out of hand I think. It's possible that I just haven't been detailed enough with notes and screenshots (so glad I remember Steam does that) because I keep finding that puzzles that incorporate things I dismissed earlier as not worth writing down...but I'm also checking GameFAQs for answers pretty frequently and finding them in what seem to be very strange, disconnected places. Or in the place next to the place that made sense to me. I dunno.

Oh well. It was a fun ride while it lasted, but this game is so long that I think I would have burned out if I'd been sufficiently thorough with the notes anyway. I'll probably end up lazing through the rest with GameFAQs at the ready.