I’ve picked this back up after a lull, and I find the general opinion on it to be correct. It’s a pretty well done game, admittedly a Breath of the Wild clone with a ‘Clash of the Titans’ cosplay outfit on, but that doesn’t stop it being very pretty, very well made, and it does have it’s own.. character, for want of a better term. Generally, I like it a lot.
But I’m never going to finish it. In fact, after tonight, I’m probably never going to play it again. Here’s why.
As some on here know, I was diagnosed with cancer a couple of years ago. It was, thankfully, successfully treated, but not without a cost. Chemotherapy broke my nervous system somewhat. One of the side effects is I have a loss of sensitivity and some stiffness in my fingers and toes. This means for example I can’t walk very far because I have terrible balance - I can’t feel the contact between the soles of my feet and the ground so I can’t do the second by second corrections everyone learns to do to stay upright when they’re a toddler. There are other things as well but the sum of it all is in fact not that bad - I get on with life, although I am classified as disabled by the NHS and get a certain amount of support.
In gaming terms what this means is a) sometimes I can’t actually tell whether I’m holding a button down or not unless I look and b) I can’t always do things with exact timing because the signal from my brain to my finger to push the button sometimes takes bit longer to arrive. So I’m no ‘twitch gamer’, not that I ever was anyway. I stick to the kinds of games which are more about brains than speed, and I do things like set combat to ‘cinematic’ or similar when there’s an option to. Again, I get by OK generally.
Now, Fenyx. Fenyx has it’s vaults (puzzle dungeons to the rest of us). One of those Vaults I called ’Aphrodite’s Bewilderment’. It’s the one where you have to stack wooden crates on top of each other and use them to jump to the next platform from, then use the ‘telekinesis’ power to drag the crates after you so you can use them again etc. etc.
And I simply cannot complete it. Not because I can’t figure out what crate goes where or what the path is, but because there are a couple of places where the jumps are spaced so you have to be fairly good with the timing of the ‘double jump then glide’ move to get across them. And my fingers simply don’t have the ability to do that accurately enough. I have just spent literally an hour doing the following, repeatedly.
Place crate B on top of crate A
Climb to top of stack of crates
Jump off stack of crates
Fail to do double jump glide with enough accuracy, so instead reaching the next platform, face plant into the side of it an insultingly small distance too low below the edge, such that Fenyx could easily grab the ledge but somehow decides not to.
Fall a long way into the void and die
Respawn, goto 10.
I have literally done that, over and over, maybe 100 times and maybe done it successfully twice. which is just adding insult to injury because if you then fail the next jump which is similar, it doesn’t put you back to the start of that jump, it puts you back to the start of this jump, because that’s where the save point is. It is as close as I have ever gotten to actually smashing a controller in frustration and anger.
The actual frustrating thing? I’ve already got the thing I went into the vault for. I have the tear of Aphrodite that was hidden in there. This section is after that, but before you reach the exit.
The really frustrating thing? if you quit the vault before the end, you get none of the stuff you found inside it. I can’t exit the vault and keep the tear of Aphrodite without getting past this jump.
The really actually frustrating thing? You have to get the tear of Aphrodite out of the vault to move the story on.
I cannot get any further in this game without completing this jump. And I cannot complete this jump because the tolerance on it is beyond what I am now consistently capable of. That’s what it boils down to.
Is this kind of thing not part of QA? How in 2020 or later, can they make a game with a blocker like this? Does someone not sit down and think “OK, say we have people who just aren’t that dextrous, how do we provide them with a bypass or get out for this stuff if they need it and they’re smart enough to see it?”
This has left me… frustrated and disheartened. Throughout my treatment and since, games have been a respite, a place where my situation didn’t matter. And yet, suddenly, it’s put my disability front and centre. Here’s game effectively saying ’Sorry, you’re just not up to this game. Sucks to be you’. And it didn’t even need to be this way.
Thanks. No, really. I’ll call you again sometime, Fenyx.