Monolith

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Yeah, I know you said before you'd given up on ChaosGod but congrats on clearing it. Because you're pretty much guaranteed to be reduced to the peashooter at some point, Temple runs and the whole no ammo thing inevitably become about stocking up on damage as much as possible beforehand. Getting a lucky weapon container with something decent prior to Warden helps since you won't be able to bring anything along at max ammo. Felt very one-sided in terms of item selection strategy, whereas in the original release damage % was a helpful bonus, but not an outright necessity as plenty of decent weapon combos existed that worked well at or near the base damage level.

[XoPachi]

Yeah, I know you said before you'd given up on ChaosGod but congrats on clearing it. Because you're pretty much guaranteed to be reduced to the peashooter at some point, Temple runs and the whole no ammo thing inevitably become about stocking up on damage as much as possible beforehand. Getting a lucky weapon container with something decent prior to Warden helps since you won't be able to bring anything along at max ammo. Felt very one-sided in terms of item selection strategy, whereas in the original release damage % was a helpful bonus, but not an outright necessity as plenty of decent weapon combos existed that worked well at or near the base damage level.

I tried again and managed to do it in full. I got SUPER lucky and ran into Renegade in Archives with the 400% ammo buff which I genuinely think got an appearance rate nerf.


https://youtu.be/7hjmTxpsMvg

Only showed the fights. If I showed the temple in full this video would have been 15 gigs. Pass.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Congrats on beating it!

That seems awfully large for a video of just one floor; you may benefit from tweaking your recording settings so that you get a quality video file without being quite so massive from one recording. O_o What settings are you using to record?

[PerishedFraud ឵឵]

Yo, use this to prevent giant video uploads.

For further details see here

[XoPachi]

Congrats on beating it!

That seems awfully large for a video of just one floor; you may benefit from tweaking your recording settings so that you get a quality video file without being quite so massive from one recording. O_o What settings are you using to record?

Yeeaaaah...
It's ShadowPlay. I use it just because it's SUPER easy and I don't know anything about video editing. :c
I feel like tweaking settings in the software would murder the output quality. There aren't many settings for the instant replay feature to begin with.

Yo, use this to prevent giant video uploads.

For further details see here

Thanks, I'll take a look next time I need a smaller file size.

[XoPachi]

Ok I've pieced together a rough order of events just because I like how this game handles it's mysterious plot.

Overlord seems to have been the first to venture into the facility with an honest goal of destroying the Power. He goes in, fails (in his own words) and is warped by it.

Chaos goes in after him, defeats him, then finds the Machine in his fresh state and wounds it. Whatever Chaos was after I'm not sure, but I assume Machine retreats to seal away the Power after being matched (he doesn't blow up he just gets the scars you see during Null's fight and fades into the darkness). Machine is obviously a defense drone of some sort guarding the Conduit (for cautionary or malevolent purposes) and after his bout with Chaos scatters the seals to the Forbidden, locking himself away with it.

Null and D13 then enter the scene and go in with different motives. Null collects the seals, destroys the injured Machine (who had sealed himself behind that structure) and opens the way to the Conduit, fails like Overlord, and becomes Monolith. I get the feeling he does it intentionally since he's far more optimized than Overlord's form and still has his sentience judging from the secret ending.

With the seals open and the Machine out of the way, D13 is forced to kill his brother.

And I think Arena Blaster is the original base for all of them. I can't think of his quest motive other than to maybe find his origin which is why he goes to Database? Not that he's the only one who can get there or get there first, but he's called Visitor 1 which makes me think he's the first to have found it. I can't think of any other clear spots in the happenings of the 5.

Skully is...I don't care, I hate playing him.

But yeah, this is just how I'm interpreting things.

[Some-Mist]

I'm glad I didn't play it before the updates/changes because I just bought it this steam sale and had a blast getting my first clear even though it's a bit easy. if I experienced it before the changes I'd probably be in the same boat as people upset.

the bullet patterns and charm pulled me in right away and I'm not even huge on most roguelike or twin stick games. nex machina is sick, I don't really care of enter the gungeon, and blazing beaks is somewhere in between. the enjoyment I got out of monolith was somewhere between nex machina (not a roguelike so very loose comparison) and blazing beaks

not sure if I'm gonna keep playing but I know there's a bunch of content I've missed

it was worth the $4 for sure

[Wooph]

This game just received a large update and is now called Star of Providence. There's quite a lot of new content as well as balance tweaks. There's a sort of TLB you can fight by reaching the end of the final loop, which was shortened from 50 to 13. I never bothered with looping before, but I don't think there's enough of a difference between loops to justify going through it 13 times, let alone 50. It could probably be shortened to 4 or 5. The boss itself is great though and I just about managed to beat it on normal. I'm not sure I'll ever be good enough to do it on hard though. Edit: Just managed it on hard as well. Overlord is probably the best ship for high loop runs because it can sweep out a clear path through a thick wave of bullets in a room packed with enemies.

Another edit: This update also has a fair amount of content devoted to its boss rush mode. It's not just a straight up boss rush. It also includes some puzzles to solve. I didn't exactly appreciate having to solve puzzles in what is more or less a shmup, but was pleasantly surprised at what awaited me at the end of the final trial.

[Light1000]

Correct me if I am wrong to say this, but is it really correct to consider this game to be a shoot 'em up? I'm questioning this in specific because this topic is in the shmups sub-forum, and no one has complained, so it seems to me that everyone isn't necessarily automatically offended by the implication.
I've seen posts ITT that state this game has design which is much closer to a shmup than most other indie twin-stick roguelites (why don't we make a new term just for that genre? there are enough to justify it by now...) but still, to me, one of the most defining aspects of something being a shmup is an autoscroll. The fact that this game lacks one automatically disqualifies it, in my book.

[Hazuki]

Correct me if I am wrong to say this, but is it really correct to consider this game to be a shoot 'em up? I'm questioning this in specific because this topic is in the shmups sub-forum, and no one has complained, so it seems to me that everyone isn't necessarily automatically offended by the implication.
I've seen posts ITT that state this game has design which is much closer to a shmup than most other indie twin-stick roguelites (why don't we make a new term just for that genre? there are enough to justify it by now...) but still, to me, one of the most defining aspects of something being a shmup is an autoscroll. The fact that this game lacks one automatically disqualifies it, in my book.

Well... I guess you're still shootin' things up, lol.
...but then that would make something like Rockman or Contra "shmups" too.

[To Far Away Times]

For me, Monolith is not a shmup. It's certainly got a lot of shmup elements, but it's also got a lot of Zelda too, ya know?

You don't even neccisarily need to have autoscroll for a shmup, IMO. Top down games with push scrolling like Outzone are still shmups in my book. In fact, I think you need to have the aiming be kind of secondary to the dodging to be a shmup. Maybe we should have called them "dodge 'em ups" instead.

Many of these twin stick rouge-likes put the emphasis on aiming, rather than dodging. And also, I think rouge-likes are really their own thing, with random elements playing such a large role.

Monolith is however, regardless of shmup status, a really great game.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

In fact, I think you need to have the aiming be kind of secondary to the dodging to be a shmup. Maybe we should have called them "dodge 'em ups" instead.

Twin stick games can be shmups too. Score Rush is a really great example of this, it's a multiplayer autoscrolling shmup but firing is twin stick multidirectional, which it's built around given it's a wide screen game. Otherwise it plays very much like a traditional bullet hell shmup, and the only nonstandard element is the aiming itself.

Saying you need autoscrolling to have a shmup omits a LOT of games, including literally the earliest shmups like Space Invaders. Single screen shmups like Monolith and Smash TV still have a lot of the same movement and dodging fundamentals autoscrolling shmups have.

[PerishedFraud ឵឵]

Shmup should be a scale rather than a selection. Who are we to say what is a shmup and what isn't? By doing so we're just stating where we draw our personal border on the scale. Meanwhile the amount of "shmupness" is not really debatable - it's there.

[DJ Incompetent]

Star of Providence is great. Guardian Legend is a STG, this can be a STG.
I love the music cues, transitions, and stings, but the overall soundtrack is catchy, but mid.

I've never seen a STG become really good because of post-game content. The DLC boss designs especially are excellent. The room designs, map generation, and enemy modifiers are good innovations.

I mostly solve the ammo problem by staying with weapons that fire slow, like the Temple Tier 1 reward. I fight floor bosses early when I happen to pickup an ammo. When I unlocked Skully, that ends the ammo problem and I don't like to use any of the other ships. Blessed Thrusters is the truth. Chaos ship is ok if I want to remember what the regular game looks like.

Blink upgrade is great for macrododging, but I don't like the shortened dash. I'd rather choose Quickening and Fortune.



I like the story-discovery-carrots delivery method of lore, but the story is irritatingly falling on its face, especially these awful endings.

Spoiler

So like, "Visitors" are invading aliens, I'm playing as the bad guys. But the planet cult wizard residents were already murdering people and shoving souls into a eternal power machine, so I'm the bad guys, fighting the also-bad guys.

And that's learned only if you're paying attention to the subtle final boss and TLB boss changes, and observing the secret loop floor bosses, and whatever the nonsense-hell the loop endings are. Then you gotta exploit a power bomb spawner on the tutorial level to give you a excavation bomb to blow a hole in the beginning of the tutorial. then you gotta mash a secret code the cat tells you without any context 2-9-1-2-9-1, mash a direction twice, another direction nine times, another once, repeat.

But then the only real way to begin to find out what is actually going on is to have a chance encounter with trader needlenose fat NPC in the lobby who happens to want to talk more than usual.
I want to know what the hell is going on but every new discovery nugget is like, bad? Oh goody, I'm corrupting my own computer now that I'm stuck in, look at how all-for-nothing this is!
Youtube or reddit don't have any simple-folk breakdowns of the story because the people who would shoot those vids I imagine can't get that far in the game? Or they find hidden lore text after the ending of a demo?

and fuck those Trials puzzle hidden shards, and giving the end bosses of Trials a Quickening form is hurtful.
Multiple layers of true-last-bosses is something I haven't seen before. It's neat. I don't know if I like it? That's a lot of TLBs. Beating Chaosgod for a cartridge or a weapon or a nothing-ending is unsatisfying. I don't know what to make of it. So much good in here, stick the landing!

But anyway, Monolith Evacaneer Doom or whatever is a fun videogame.