After a couple of technical issues, we’re back in the game and hoping to protect the team of reporters trapped in a recreation of H. H. Holmes’s Murder Castle. We’ve yet to lose any of them, and with luck, we’ll keep it that way.
Correction: I have yet to lose a single charge yet, in any one of these Dark Pictures games. Poor Chris, always making the exact wrong decision and costing his people dearly.
As the cards at the end of the last episode and the start of this one made clear, we experienced a technical issue with the game in the middle of our recording. A scene on Chris’s end failed to load properly, which meant I was unable to progress on my end either. Reloading the game and rebooting our consoles did nothing to solve the issue, so we had to go into the Chapter Select and restart the section we were doing in order to get back on track.
It’s easy to decry the development team for an issue like that, but games aren’t easy to make, especially when you’ve made four of them in as many years. To be honest, it’s impressive that there haven’t been more issues over our time playing these games. (Although I hear that the patches made to the previous Dark Pictures games have introduced new bugs.)
While I understand how this could happen, and that it’s not a severe enough defect to prevent the game from being shipped, glitches are a tricky thing for players. Once we find one, particularly one big enough to cause us to lose significant progress, it becomes tricky to place trust in the game. Chris was hesitant to trigger the scene again, even though he knew he would need to in order for us to keep going because he was afraid the game would glitch out.
Once we’re questioning what’s a bug versus an intended feature, it’s not something that we can stop questioning until the end of the game. For a genre like this, where suspension of disbelief and immersion are king, that can be the death knell. It’s understandable, but it’s painful all the same.
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