Kieron Gillen defends MrRobot :)

[Poo Bear]

MrRobot tried to marry adventure + physical puzzles + turn based battles. I should have realised really that this would split the audience as it's human nature to prefer one of those things over all the others. So you get people saying "I love the story, but hate everything else" and "I love puzzles but hate everything else" or "I love turn based battles but hate everything else".

So why did I do it? Being an indie means the freedom to do what you love and after working as a games developer for sooo many years I ended up loving almost everything in gaming from the days of the ZX81 right up to the X360. I find the way genres organically emerge and segregate one "type" of game from another to be intriguing. I always want to smash those genres and make hybrids - probably not smart from a financial point of view.

Kieron Gillen is a pretty cool professional games journalist who has long championed indie games of all kinds. So I thought it was quite funny to see him step into a forum post containing a fair bit of MrRobot knocking to jump to our defence.


"It seems to be a game that's being troubled by cultural borders. It just cheerfully marries a light Japanese RPG combat game to a 80s-esque British Isometric Puzzle-platformer ala Head over Heels*.

It does both perfectly fine, but by demanding an audience dig both, it's seemingly alienating a good chunk of the audience.

(Which one reason Action/Strategy games never do as well as people hope. Sacrifice needs you to love too many things for anyone except the most broad-of-taste to really fall for it.)

And yeah, this is totally me trying to say "It's not a problem with the game - it's a problem with your limited taste and lack of broad-schooling in games" without saying anything that offensive. But I'm having trouble, because that's exactly what I mean. I suspect Moonpod were a little foolish in not realising that, but I'm glad they went and did it anyway. It's a lovely homage to a lot of lovely things.

SpoofyChop's solution is a fun one though. [all rooms have two solutions, one is to hack and teleport through, the other involves a physical puzzle]

KG

*Which you probably don't know if you're a Yank. For a translation to Brit, in terms of cultural importance in that particular scene, imagine the word 'Mario'".

[icarus]

I'm definitely in the "Love the story hate the gameplay crowd"

It's a well made game from a company I like, Nice graphics, nice story, ect. But Puzzles aren't my thing, Nether is JRPG combat.
I will say that you guys managed to make those less painfull.