Too Long; Didn't Play: Son of Nor

Sponsored By: Wishlist Clearinghouse

Time Telekinected: 49 minutes

Sand Review

More like Son of Neither.

Boulder Review

Allow me to translate some common phrases for you:

“Exploring other opportunities” means “fired.”

“Handyman’s Dream” means “This house needs two walls and a roof before you can legally live in it.”

“An A for effort” means “this might have actually sucked less if you hadn't worked so hard on it.”

Which brings us to Son of Nor. There's a lot to like about Son of Nor. It has a decent presentation that serves an interesting story. The voice acting is good, if a little rote. I love the premise behind what the gameplay is trying for.

But that gameplay. My goodness, I've never seen such a great setup result in such a whiff. It's like if Babe Ruth, after pointing defiantly at the stands and taking his position beside the plate, had tried faced the wrong way while holding a flyswatter.

The idea is so good! You are a Son of Nor, a group of mystics with the power to manipulate your environment with the power of your mind. You need no weapon! You can launch boulders at the lizard-men attacking your temple. Double jump? What use is that when you can simply raise the earth beneath your feet?

It's like a whole game based on the supercharged gravity gun from Half Life 2! Think of the puzzles you could solve! Think of the combat potential!

Think of the disappointment when none of that works right!

Let’s start with the combat. There’s no heft to anything. You’re manipulating gravity by waving your arms as if you’re playing a bad VR game, but everything feels like you’re throwing styrofoam blocks around. The giant rocks you’re levitating move as quickly as you do. There’s no movement cost to holding this giant thing in front of you.

That might have been forgivable if the targeting worked, but it doesn’t. I’d point my giant boulder at an enemy, and press the launch button only to see the boulder ricochet off in some unrelated direction.

On the off chance that you actually hit something, it bounces off as the enemy ragdolls straight down with no regard for momentum at all. I would have expected that a giant boulder would have collided messily and carried the enemy with it, perhaps colliding with a wall in a satisfyingly squishy way. Nope. The rock bounces off of them like a super ball and the lizard man may or may not collapse in a heap.

You can also pick up enemies and throw them, but it only seems to work half of the time and for some reason you can throw boulders for miles but not lizard men. They only go a few feet.

So either the lizard men you’re fighting are incredibly dense constructions, in which case they shouldn’t be able to walk on sand so easily, or the boulders you’re throwing around are actually made of balsa wood and your Nor-granted powers aren’t actually all that impressive, like if Uri Geller said he could only bend spoons that were already bent and also were made of pipecleaners.

Well, ok. So maybe the game isn’t about combat. What about the environment-deformation puzzles? Surely something interesting must come of trying to reach higher platforms by building a staircase out of raw firmament.

As Leslie Neilson might have said, "Don’t call me Shirley." When you use the “elevate terrain” spell, the terrain deforms to a sharp point which is virtually impossible to stand on, as if the Son of Nor was using a brush tool with the diameter set too small. You can surmount this by “scribbling” a bit, which works in low-pressure situations where you’re just trying to get to a random collectible. However early on you’re up against a moving laser-beam trap, where you have to alternate between raising the terrain to jump over the approaching lasers and then lowering it to duck under them. This is the first proper puzzle you have to solve using the terrain powers, and it’s neither fun nor instructive in their use. It serves only to illustrate how frustrating the rest of the game is going to be.

Which is fortunate, because it kept me from having to play a full hour of the game to find out what a turkey it is.

Will I Keep Playing?

Ugh. No.

Is it the Devil Daggers of its kind?

“Games with amazing premises that fail utterly to execute on them” is probably a genre in itself. I can’t honestly say Son of Nor is the ultimate example of that, as Hello Games has that honor sewn up for the foreseeable future.

The difference between Son of Nor and No Man’s Sky, though, is that even through No Man’s Sky failed to deliver on its fundamental premise, I still enjoyed playing it. What’s there works, even if it isn’t necessarily what the audience wanted to be there. There is no amount of tactful spin I can apply to my opinion that would allow me to say anything remotely similar about Son of Nor. It could have been a good version of The Force Unleashed (defined by me as “A game that uses Force powers but isn’t a Star Wars game”) but alas, no.

So no, Son of Nor isn’t the Devil Daggers of its genre. To do that it would have to be fun and challenging. This one is simply dreadful and impossible.

Comments

It's so interesting how reading these will occasionally have me thinking "Y'know what Greg would have really liked...?"

Today's example: Fracture.

You liked Fracture? My memory is everyone feeling like it was a cool tech demo but a shallow game.

I don't recall my overall feelings, though I cannot say it's a game that comes to mind often. I think I was more disappointed that it was bound to be the last non-Star Wars Lucas Arts game or something like that. In hindsight I think I found it to be alright.

I imagine if he can find it for cheap, Greg would find a good amount to love in a game like Fracture.

Which is fortunate, because it kept me from having to play a full hour of the game to find out what a turkey it is.

And thank you for letting me know if my Kickstarter money was well spent so I don't have to. An hour saved!

(Hey, they had a good pitch and it was 2012 or 2013. We were all young and stupid back then. Alcohol might have been involved as well.)

shoptroll wrote:
Which is fortunate, because it kept me from having to play a full hour of the game to find out what a turkey it is.

And thank you for letting me know if my Kickstarter money was well spent so I don't have to. An hour saved!

(Hey, they had a good pitch and it was 2012 or 2013. We were all young and stupid back then. Alcohol might have been involved as well.)

It was a good pitch. It's still a good pitch. I just wish the game had lived up to the pitch.

There's no shame in backing a bad game. I respect kickstarter because it rewards taking risks, both on the part of the creators and the backers.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

There's no shame in backing a bad game. I respect kickstarter because it rewards taking risks, both on the part of the creators and the backers.

Even though my level of participation with crowdfunding dropped off significantly last year, that's still my feelings on it. The ratios of good:bad and released:failed projects are still positive in my ledger so that's a win to me.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:
shoptroll wrote:
Which is fortunate, because it kept me from having to play a full hour of the game to find out what a turkey it is.

And thank you for letting me know if my Kickstarter money was well spent so I don't have to. An hour saved!

(Hey, they had a good pitch and it was 2012 or 2013. We were all young and stupid back then. Alcohol might have been involved as well.)

It was a good pitch. It's still a good pitch. I just wish the game had lived up to the pitch.

It's a good pitch, Grog.

wordsmythe wrote:
doubtingthomas396 wrote:
shoptroll wrote:
Which is fortunate, because it kept me from having to play a full hour of the game to find out what a turkey it is.

And thank you for letting me know if my Kickstarter money was well spent so I don't have to. An hour saved!

(Hey, they had a good pitch and it was 2012 or 2013. We were all young and stupid back then. Alcohol might have been involved as well.)

It was a good pitch. It's still a good pitch. I just wish the game had lived up to the pitch.

It's a good pitch, Grog.

Now let me tell you about Loom...

You don't need to tell me about Loom. I know Loom. I played Loom.

You, senator, are no Loom?

Anyway, let's talk about Loom. It's great.