Should a game with mediocre or bad gameplay be considered "good"? After all gameplay is what you're here for

Depends on what you sign up for and what you expect, this parallels the experience you'll get.

Going back to something like Pong and Tetris.
The gameplay is very simple, yet very engaging, and very different from one another. You don't play Pong for the same reasons you play Tetris, it's just two vastly different worlds.

Same thing with something like Mario and Metroid. Both are 2D side scrollers where you jump and shoot (less shoot in Mario but there's still the fire flower), but the games are completely different. You can argue that Metroid has "better gameplay" because of all the powerup, upgrades etc. you get with it, but you can't really say if one is better or worse because of how different the experience is and the intent of their gameplay

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A lot of games (Mainly RPGs and adventure games) have mediocre or worse gameplay but are considered good games. So yes, they can.

Having said that, Soma is all round mediocre.

goddamit what
you didnt answer how

>goddamit what
soma lacks all of those

I hate how that faggot company who made the Amnesia sequel took a look at a game that actually has gameplay and thought: "Hey, maybe the way to improve the formula for the sequel is to remove all features?"

Soma gameplay is good for what it is though. It's an athmospheric exploration/puzzle game with some stealth/horror sections.

explain how thats bad

>the you that you are currently will never live in that paradise

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Was Catherine in the wrong to lead Simon along like she did or was he an idiot for not understanding how the whole "brainscan-copy" process worked the third time around?

Simon is a moron, but he was the first brain copy so it probably wasn't that great to begin with

The latter.

explain why lack of gameplay is bad? uhh its a video game?

WAU was in the wrong

A game doesn't have to be good to be enjoyable

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Video games are a broad medium with broad audiences of varying tastes. Keeping a level interactivity is important but conveying information through a combination or storytelling, atmosphere, sound design, graphics, themes, etc. is also important. SOMA does what it sets out to do and is excellent at it, through people may not like slow methodical nautical games and that's ok.

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I think Catherine could have did a better job explaining it, but he probably still wouldn't have have understood what it really meant to send yourself into a virtual world. All he knew was of his own consciousness and that being stuck underwater was a situation he did not want to be in at all.

>game halts progress until you do a bad thing
>do bad thing
>DONT YOU FEEL BAD FOR DOING THAT? ARENT YOU A TERRIBLE PERSON? WHY DID YOU DO THAT

>people eat this up as "good" writing

Amnesia is better

Kek, thought you were describing Spec Ops the Line

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it isnt lack of gameplay tho
its just lack of distinct gameplay systems
which were archaic btw

You are retarded

The game should have done something with the survey answers the player can submit. The game could have profiled how Simon would respond and you would have only gotten the moron ending the if the game determined that you're a moron.

>After all, gameplay is what you're here for
No, that's why different genres exist, or else nobody would like jrpgs if they had a shit story.

Deadly Premonition has a terrific atmosphere, world building and story, but shitty game play. It’s still a great game

That's a tutorial. You are only forced to do the bad thing once to see the consequences and after that there is always a choice.

The dev were the guys who made dear esther so no surprise there. It's a fucking shame because the story in AMFP is quite good and builds on the story of TDD. I still want a sequel to the story but this time with appropriate gameplay
Removing gameplay elements is rarely if ever a good choice especially when it leaves your game with practically nothing to do outside of walking and avoiding enemies
He was an idiot. There is a debate whether or not Simon is simply retarded because of his brain damage or if the game itself doesn't take into account how any normal person should've understood the concept of copy-paste already
WAU literally did nothing wrong, it is just doing what it was programmed to do

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the game is super scripted and quite linear, funny thing is you can actually edit the scripts, they're in a readable format, that's why the game is so easy to mod

Catherine was in the wrong by introducing the "coin flip" theory which was bullshit to begin with, but had she not gave him that glimmer of hope Simon 2/3 would've just sudoku'd right there.

how does that even describe soma?

you dont have to manage any resources, you dont have to solve any puzzles (as easy as they may be), you dont have to do anything besides walk and restart if you get caught. it is literally a regression in terms of gameplay

The coin flip is a pretty functional metaphor for what happens tho IMO

How? There is no coin flip, the game could've ended when you swapped bodies to get ready for the abyss.

Engineer you electrocute
Woman you suffocate
Woman kept alive by medical robot which you unplug
Old You that you shut down

did you miss all the world interactions retards ?
did you miss how every enemy has a distinct way to avoid/defeat it ?

No it's just there for Catherine to go below layman's term for the fucking idiot to understand what's happening

i think you missed the entire point of the game by a country mile

>After all gameplay is what you're here for.
No, the overall entertainment value is what I'm playing games for.

it has one more enemy type than the dark descent and none of the gameplay mechanics. try again

>play game
>see robot engineer stuck on the wires who think he's a human
>think the whole game is about a machine who copies peoples minds and places them inside machines
>get excited
>game is just about stupid people who cant distinguish they are copies
>get disappointed

It's pretty clear the developers were inspired by the story and didn't set out to make a game around a gameplay mechanic.
Consider point and click games. The enjoyment comes from the writing, not the gameplay itself.

Hey you said it happened once, that was factually incorrect so I provided examples of more.

Right, and we had no way of knowing when the instance of Simon we play got actually created and which parts of the game are just memories of previous instances.
Since he didn't wake up on the Ark, we know this instance was created before going into the abyss, but he could have been the one that wakes up on the Ark.

It all depends on the rules of the game's universe, which made it clear that there is no distinction between experiencing something and remembering it, as we also played as the living Simon and the first instance when waking up in the facility.

i said no such thing

breaking news
a man from Yea Forums didnt play the game
more news as the story develops

Are you being autistic on purpose? The process is copy and paste, no coin flip, the game could show either perspective and it's equally as valid

prove me wrong

I loved this game. I've always been morbidly fascinated with/terrified of the abyssal ocean. The descent scene where you get stuck and have to repair the elevator by the bioluminescence of a swarm of jellyfish is the most kino moment of any video game I've ever played.
Only thing I didn't like was that there weren't any dialog branches for people that weren't complete retards who can understand that making a copy of yourself doesn't magically transplant your consciousness into that body.
Simon 2/3 was a bitch, but I loved the symbolism of him and Catherine essentially becoming the Adam and Eve of the virtual garden of Eden.

There are no "instances" user, they all exist. It just shifts our perspective, the player, to fit the narrative, nothing else.

All of the Simons exist as separate beings, you just get to play the one most convenient to proceed with the story

i only try when responding to decent baiters
besides
you outed yourself already

Try playing it in VR

so you cant
good talk

lel
try more

prove me wrong

What I mean is the "coin flip" decides when "you" actually come into existence. It works but Simon didn't understand how.

steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=528322680
>he cant google shit
pathetic

The "you" is decided by the game to keep the story going as already explained. Every version of simon is equally valid in the games universe

I just want more games with great atmosphere where I can pick through all the drawers and shit

>5 visually distinctive monsters, 3 different behaviors
you sure showed me lmao

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If you enjoyed the experience overall then it was a good game. Simple as that.

cant read
cant count
needed at least 69 main monsters amirite bro?

there are 5 visually distinctive monsters in soma with a total of 3 different different ways to play against them. congratulations, thats one more than in amnesia

daily reminder that running simulators are to survival horror what mobile "strategy games" are to RTS/RTT/TBS. whoever unironically thinks that running simulators are good or God forbid, horror, are the scrapping from the bottom of the barrel of degeneracy.

This.
Executing horror is essential, and tying it to pre-established gameplay enhances that

>mfw encountering the Wendigo in Dusk for the first time

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i an industry that has 1 per game
id say thats good
you clearly need more
1448 at least
what are you counting as "visually distinctive anyway