This charming adventure could afford to take a few steps back

I personally always dislike it, too.

There are two reasons you might want to do this as a dev, of course. One of them I feel kinda half-asses your design, if you don’t want to get a threat or failure during gameplay to get into the way of your storypacing, just make a visual novel. Or at least something like SOMA, Amnesia or Still Wakes The Deep.
Or alternatively, if you want to make a game explicitly made for children that’s okay, but then also do the marketing a bit more kid-centric IMO. I dunno, maybe this one is actually genuinely meant for children, but some of the humor and writing doesn’t feel that way if I’m honest. Princess Peach does this more thoroughly: It is the same “handholding 100% of the time”, but it’s also very obviously meant to be played primarily by relatively small children!

  • @PunchingWoodEnglish
    7•5 hours ago

    All a game like this would need is the ability to disable the feature.

    It’s like developers are so obsessed and occupied with making it as accessible to everyone, that they seem to forget that there is also an entire playerbase out there not looking to be handheld through everything (including children). I’d get a bigger sense of achievement if I managed to do it on my own.

    I remember playing Mario on the NES and it was completely unforgiving as a child, like insta-deaths, limited amount of lives, no save games, hidden secrets, etc. But it was pure bliss when I finally beat the game.

    • @JusticeForPorygonEnglish
      4•5 hours ago

      19 and still can’t beat the original Mario bros 😭

      • @[email protected]English
        3•3 hours ago

        It’s not an easy game, that’s ok. The reason most of us beat it in the 80’s is because we only had one or two games at a time to play until Xmas/birthday every year.

      • @ampersandrewEnglish
        1•3 hours ago

        Hold Start and press A when continuing to continue from the current level.