Supplice Early Access Playthrough (2024 / v0.3.0.5), Episode 2
0Supplice E2 adds some new ingredients to the mix... and I have mixed feelings about the additions.
I certainly appreciate the change in aesthetic to represent that we're now in a different facility... and there's plenty of both audio and visual ambience to reflect what a dire state the place is in, quickly reinforced by the lore dumps which continue to be impressively numerous and excellently written.
The episode starts off on a surprising new tone for Supplice: we're unable to run and gun, instead needing to sneak around a bit and make the most of our environment. While this is an interesting idea, it can become a bit onerous when it ultimately amounts to luring enemies to specific locations where you can use the environment to dispatch them (but be careful it doesn't also dispatch you). Fortunately this doesn't drag on for too long.
By this point, the episode has already introduced one new enemy type, which will proceed to be my least favorite enemy in the game so far, as they like to explode. If you can take them out from a distance or in a single shot, they don't pose much of a threat. However, failing that, at low health they will zip around rapidly and randomly right before exploding. If they happen to zero in on you, expect to take buttloads of damage on the spot.
There is one particular section in E2M2 that specifically applies these enemies in a horrendously tight space where their zoomy-explodey routine is practically impossible to dodge, and one-shotting them with the cyclomortar is unlikely to work without splash damaging yourself. If this were a one-off troll I might be willing to laugh it off - but that section severely overstays its welcome with half a dozen of these guys. I have to expect there's supposed to be some other means of taking them out harmlessly that I was expected to use here. You can bait their explosion by moving close to them, but that still requires also having enough room to move away again immediately, which I wasn't confident would work out in that area.
Another new enemy I'm not a huge fan of is the floating ghosts. They tend to be trivial to deal with (literally stand still and attack as they come to you), but they're semitransparent, they always float just above eye level, and they can be downright impossible to see in low- or no-light situations.
PS: this episode has more low- and no-light situations. That plus non-independently-lit enemies continues to be my biggest annoyance.
Episode 2 also introduces a new environmental enemy in the form of limited-oxygen areas, which can be kind of neat if you're a fan of anything like hell runs in metroidvanias. Oxygen stations are helpfully marked on the map, but there are a couple of instances where it's easy to lose track of where they are - one being during the final boss battle of the episode, which definitely seems more intense than E1's. Honestly it was hard for me to get a visual read on what was even going on during it, otherwise I might've enjoyed it more.
Speaking of difficult visual reads: this episode also introduces one more new weapon, which is exactly the weapon I was hoping would make an appearance: the flamethrower. Unfortunately, firing it severely interrupts your vision, making what I expected to be an extremely satisfying weapon tragically unusable instead. I really hope they can figure out a way to tone that down between now and final release...
I was worried I might not succeed in finding the secret level in this episode, but fortunately I did - and it's a much larger and more original level this time around; as it turns out, the secret exit in E2 involves gimmicks consistent with E1. I wonder if that will continue to be the case throughout the entire game.
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