[Click here to start from the first progress log]

I went from hating Kult to really enjoying it and looking forward to playing more of it, only to run up against an enemy (a seemingly plot-crucial one) who can one-shot me with a lucky critical and has enough health to lengthen combat long enough to get one. It makes no difference whether I’m wearing the best armor I’ve found or attunement armor that doesn’t slow down my attacks—the only way of beating this guy I can think of is to either run around trying to grind some new attunements out of items I have or use the bow I have to slowly kite my way to victory. Neither option is very appealing. If the attunement/element systems here were more intuitive this would be less frustrating, but I was convinced that I had selected an air affinity at the start and now I’m starting to think that this impacted nothing but the element of my starting weapon. That means that I’ve likely missed out on a bunch of possible attunements for no reason outside of gameplay vagueness. Talk about annoying.

The city’s pretty dense

One big advantage to the story picking up is that Alitaa is now in a city with a whole bunch of people, many of whom can actually be talked to. There are merchants selling weapons and armor (and they’re a great place to unload unneeded items for some extra cash), as well as all kinds of plot-important characters who you can wander around and receive back story cutscenes from while trying to figure out who you can trust. There are also a bunch of sidequests you can obtain, and while these don’t give you as much information as you’d probably expect (finishing them sometimes requires pushing the main story ahead, which runs contrary to all of my gaming instincts), this is nevertheless a huge upgrade over aimlessly wandering around drab caves with no goal outside of finding some magical MacGuffin sword.

Here’s a weird little Kult-ism that I’m not very comfortable with—clicking NPCs causes the game to wrestle control away from you and automatically run to them regardless of how far away they are. There doesn’t appear to be any way of canceling this, so you’re left to sit around and twiddle your thumbs if you accidentally clicked on someone relatively far away. That’s what happened in the video above, and it even came with the added bonus effect of teleporting me on top of his house for the duration of the conversation. Weird little things like that happen a lot, actually.

Like this pause bug

I got into a conversation while recording at one point, so I paused the game in the middle of some combat for a few moments and discovered that I was suddenly unable to attack after unpausing. Healing still worked, fortunately, but the only thing that fixed this was to change my weapon. It was a really strange thing to have happen. Other combat quirks exist, too, such as right-clicking on an enemy who’s just far enough that the game doesn’t know what to do, causing Alitaa to oscillate between running closer and attacking fast enough that she bugs out in place without making any progress on either front. You have to fix this by manually running closer.

Come on, game, meet me halfway

It’s really frustrating to steamroll absolutely everything, only to reach the arena and have the one-on-one fight with the “Elite Gladiator” mop the floor with me. His normal attacks aren’t even all that bad. It’s just the fact that he can get a critical hit for 600-800 hit points. For the sake of comparison, my entire HP pool maxes out at something like 670 right now, and healing the smaller damage he does causes that to become lower and lower. Now, I don’t mind a challenge, but a game so vague about its weird mechanics would ideally have a more natural difficulty ramp instead of going from “trash mob” to “basically a horseman of the apocalypse.” Seriously.

[Click here to go to Kult: Heretic Kingdoms log #3]

The post Kult – Heretic Kingdoms: Progress Log #4 appeared first on Killa Penguin.