I am playing Horizon Zero Dawn and haven’t gotten to the first main event, but it gives me this feeling like if I upgrade all my equipment now it might be for nothing. I know that is not the case, I looked it up, but what are some games that are the worst offenders? One I can think of is Aerith in the original FF7.
LISA The Painful has a large cast of characters, some of which are much stronger than others, and like most RPGs, you gain experience and level up by fighting.
However, several times in the game you are forced to make extremely hard choices, up to and including sacrificing the characters in your party (they permanently die). At another point you play Russian roulette by picking a party member to put the gun to their head and pull the trigger. Bad RNG? They’re dead and gone forever.
If you don’t know these events are coming up, you can very easily lose your favorite party/characters forever, and it’s almost assured the ones you use are your strongest, since they’re the ones you’re using in your party.
They don’t call it “The Painful” for no reason.
As perfectly brutal as the mechanics can be, it doesn’t even begin to broach how emotionally devastating the story is.
It’s hilarious and somewhat hopeful, but in the end that is just to keep you hooked until it could rip your soul to shreds in its final act.
I’ve never played a game that hated the player as much as this one, and it’s one my favorite games I’ve ever played.
I’ve quit games that I really liked when I was forced into that type of situation.
The Game: Character A dies horribly or his son is eviscerated. You have ten seconds to decide… Me: [censored] that, I’ll choose option C, no one dies, after all the only way to win some games is to stop playing them
This game sounds absolutely awful.
No no, the game you’re thinking of is called Pathologic. Just like the worst game ever to play, but really brilliant in its storytelling.
LISA does so much to make you hate that game. But its so good no one does
Yeah it’s so good in its… bad writing, bad gameplay, bad execution, and otherwise failure to execute on the basics of game design. Truly unhatable.
I looked it up on Xbox and found both LISA the painful and LISA the joyful. Is it worth playing both or what’s the deal with that? I kinda want to play painful based on your description tho hah
If we’re talking about LISA the Painful, going along the same sort of vibe, I think Fear and Hunger is also worth a mention here. Some of the best gear you can get can become suddenly unusable because you lose a literal cointoss, and then your arm is gone. Some endings can get blocked off because of some bad luck, making you lose a character permanently, not to mention the insane lethality and hard choices you’ll be peppered with constantly.
Great game, it’s up there with LISA the Painful for games that I think actively hate you.
Such an awful, awful, brilliant game. I love hate it.
Best soundtrack haha