Sunday, March 23, 2014

Jumping when the time is right

Pandora's Tower's automatic jumping is terrible. I'm finding that more and more often when I run to the edge of a ledge to jump, Aeron just drops down hangs from the edge instead.

This disparity in expectations and actual happenings is starting to show me the game's stitches. It's starting to look like you can only jump when the game lets you jump. That is, when you're directly across from something to which you can jump.

Hemming players in like this makes the game feel restrictive. Not because there are platforms from which you'd want to jump where you simply can't, but because the game's jumping mechanic takes away your freedom to consider that option.

And yet, having Aeron jump automatically only when two edges are aligned across a gap has saved me from certain doom in a few instances. Especially in the Blazing Citadel's puzzle room.

In said room you're not just jumping between lowering and raising platforms, you also need to watch for lava (molten ore?) falling from above. Whenever I've not met the game's standards for precision in jumping, Aeron's defaulting to hang from the edge of platforms when pushed over their edge has kept him off of the lava covered.

Nonetheless, tying the game's autojump to a player controlled action (let's say rolling or running off of an edge) would give players more control over Aeron's jumps. Doing so would also inject the game with a bit more of a sense of discovery. Even if that sense of discovery tingled when a player simply found a better part of a ledge to jump from to another ledge.

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