lol alright it took a while because i was playing silly sword rpgs for most of last year but i played nemesis. it's good! i enjoyed the expanded action mechanics and corresponding increase in enemy count, and the resource play on hard mode was pretty fun and challenging. i died a bunch more than in the earlier games trying to get greedy, haha.
to be honest, when i found out about the random elements, i thought it was going to be more of a downer for me. i don't really like that stuff as much as fixed knowledge, and the enemy respawns really had me nervous halfway through the game because i'd backtracked a lot, draining resources without much apparent gain. there's also a lot more scenes where the enemies are specifically placed to appear suddenly when you cross a camera transition, which is the kind of thing that makes me go "that's so evil" in a way that i admire while groaning. to be honest, there are spots where the difference between enemy types or items in a room feels hilariously huge (particularly when it's a couple of dogs versus a significant zombie horde, and the place where i bopped myself greedily the most was the pharmaceuticals office. i really wanted to start making magnum bullets! hahaha. i only actually got the 3a3b version of that closet one time though...
that ended up being one of my favorite setpieces though because i saw multiple of the umbrella drug ads, which is such a fun detail to put that effort into. the 90s cyber aesthetics always end up being some of my favorite bits in the games, though as usual the overall feel of the backgrounds and static art always make me so happy. part of that is obviously the way that the rendering and compression of backgrounds always seems to play out in this cd-rom era...on that note, this game feels a lot myst-ier than 1 and 2, with a bunch of puzzles about fiddling with controls and consoles. they're very appealing too, i really loved the last one with the water sample.
the cutscene prompts are a bit weirder. at a certain point i started to think "ok, i guess most or all of these probably don't kill you? it doesn't seem that likely i'd just happen to have picked the right one every time." it's not a bad idea, but it feels pretty separate from the rest of the game and kind of undercuts nemesis a bit. not that that's a particularly bad thing, it honestly gets pretty funny by the end where he's just like some recurring cartoon villain that jill hits with a power cable or feels comfortable enough to push off a bridge with her own hands. though nikolai surviving multiple huge explosions maybe just establishes that's the vibe of this game. still, nemesis' repeated visual transformations and move variety is pretty cool.
the best part of the game is when he breaks that door, it really makes you think about that very minor relief of entering the load zone....and the game doesn't have a lot of new adventure design tricks besides that one, the innovation feels more aimed at being more exciting and varied. actually while i'm on it, the map is a lot more of a long path with some side areas and small loops as opposed to the tighter, more interconnected buildings of the first two games. there's still a lot of highlights, and maybe i just haven't been as happy lately as when i played 1 and 2, :/, i'm sure that did a lot for how giddy i felt pretty much every time anything happened in those games. and the fundamentals are still there, so i liked it a lot
