Started playing Lunacid
I finally started playing Lunacid - a "King's Field like" from 2023. As far as I can tell, it's the game in this small genre that helped it kind of break out into the mainstream (in the way that indie games have their own mainstream). I like it! It's easy and heavy on the vibes. The vibes are very, very good.
One of the reasons I hadn't picked up Lunacid previously - or any games in this tiny genre - is that I was under the impression that their combat was deliberately hard or annoying. I think I got this impression from conversations with friends where they either exaggerated stuff to me or said stuff about King's Field itself that I misinterpreted. I'm glad to say I was mistaken - Lunacid is actually pretty easy and accessible even to people who don't consider themselves good at combat-focused games. It might be a little too easy??
I did not grow up playing games like this, and I lack the cultural context to receive this in the way it was intended, I guess. There's stuff that these PSX-style games have in common with the PC games I grew up with, like low-fidelity 3D art... as well as stuff that I find very alien. I did not play fantasy combat games at all as a kid - I was sheltered enough that I was basically only introduced to genres when my friends got into them, and my friends were all just into Age of Empires and Star Wars games. Despite playing PC games beginning in the mid-90s, I was not even aware that people made first-person fantasy games until well after Morrowind came out. So KF-likes are not hitting any nostalgia in me! I think I am enjoying Lunacid more as a, like... Fromsoft demake.
Anyway, one of the reasons I wanted to pick this up is because there's ANOTHER game coming out in this genre - Queen's Domain - and I've heard that it's very good, and I figured I should lay my own context-foundation for playing that one by playing Lunacid first.
The other reason I wanted to play it is that because I'm learning level design, I figured I needed to spend more time looking at games with extremely spare, simple level design - beautiful hallways with nice curves and twists, of course, but simple nevertheless. I did not grow up playing the games that Dark Radiant lends itself to. So the next best thing I can do is play modern games which imitate that style, I guess!