• they/them

plural, body 22
usually we will either sign our posts or use a format where names are already included.


madeline exclusive account (real)
cohost.org/madeline-haunt-council?page=0

GhostTypeGirl
@GhostTypeGirl

I've been thinking about Signalis a lot recently because people have been doing Halloween streams of it. The devs recently made it so the flashlight no longer takes up an inventory slot and added the option to increase the total number of inventory slots players have access to. The first one is pretty welcome, since the flashlight isn't really a resource or a puzzle item, but is a real significant quality of life upgrade. And while I understand adding more slots in general as an option, I think the strict inventory limit actually does its job quite well.

I've seen people get mad at the inventory system and say it ruins the game for them, only to watch their footage and see them leave the safe room with 5/6 item slots full, pick up a single bullet for a gun they're not even carrying, and then get mad that they have no room for a puzzle item. At a certain point you have to accept that maybe this is partially a you problem, my guy.

My own issues with the inventory mostly went away when I started thinking of open inventory slots as a resource unto themselves. Which changes things from "I need to scrounge every bullet I can find off the floor" into "Is it worth it to exchange an open item slot for 2 measly handgun bullets even though I'll need to run back home sooner, which will maybe wake up enemies that I'll have to deal with? (It isn't)"

Suddenly, instead of hording stun prods looking for the most opportune moment to use them, I'm picking them up, and using them on the first enemy I see to get that item slot back. And if I get hurt? No need to run all the way back to base for my item collection, I left a repair spray on the floor just 2 rooms over! The whole level is my inventory! This kind of play definitely doesn't remove the inventory friction entirely (I still had to run back to base fairly regularly) and I don't think the system is perfect, but it does make things way smoother.

The bigger issue, in my opinion, is that player habits and genre expectations can be deeply entrenched and it can be very hard to break people out of them. Even if you were to add extremely overt tutorials that try to tell players how to play, a lot of people are stubborn in how they play, and many who are familiar with survival horror conventions will insist that the genre is "about" hording as massive a pile of health kits and bullets as possible throughout the game, and therefor any game that puts up roadblocks to that playstyle is objectively doing it wrong (even though I'd argue that making it so not picking up the bullets is frequently the correct choice is a more interesting form of inventory management.)

In some ways I don't really know if there's a solution to this kind of friction other than to make follow-ups with the same genre deviations until people adapt their expectations. It worked for Fromsoft.


You must log in to comment.