![]() And anyways, it’s easy to forget that you even have a key when you can only use it in the one instance. A key to a door is simple enough, but when a key is Maxim’s braclet and it opens a magic door, it gets tricky. As these items are really just nothing more than added text in your menu, it’s not always easy to draw the connections between an piece of inventory and something in the environment which requires it. An exception to this is the suggestion of a raised room on the exterior pathway to the castle, a seed that plants itself deep in the initial instances of the game.īecause the number of abilities is so few, Harmony of Dissonance uses some peripheral, inventory items to replace abilities as limiting factors. Because there are so few interaction points in Harmony of Dissonance (and the nature of the upgrades mean that they can’t be made explicitly clear, ie higher platforms as opposed to a clearly defined grapple point), this stringing dynamic is hardly at all in play. Once at the junction point to the next area and then maybe a few times after that. They’re only ever properly needed a few times throughout the whole game. Furthermore, there’s a very lax reliance on these already too few abilities. Considering the game’s size, 3 abilities is far too few to string the player from one part of the game to another. Harmony of Dissonance only has 3 obtainable abilities to limit the player’s progression: Lizzard’s tale (slide), Sylph Feather (double jump) and Griffith’s Wing (high jump). This is a tried and true design element of Metroidvania games. They’ve done it! The player thinks that they are so smart for figuring it all out and rushes to where the interaction marker is (conveniently, the next part of the game) with haste. The interaction markers (a grapple point, a platform that’s just too high to reach) plant seeds in the player’s mind which they mentally flag down, then once they obtain a new ability (grapple beam, double jump) and draw the connection between the new ability and the interaction point, a “click” goes off in their brain. You do this by starting the player off with only basic functionality, dropping interaction markers for not-yet-acquired abilities throughout the environment and then finally coughing up the abilities necessary to interact with said interaction points. The best measure for guiding the player in a Metroidvania game is to create a baiting system around the player’s not-yet-acquired abilities. ![]() Because of the large number of avenues and potential dead-ends for players, Harmony of Dissonance ought to utilise a combination of techniques to gesture players towards the right path. This number doubles at the “Castle B” point on the map where the entire castle is duplicated and the player can switch to the slightly modified palette-swap version through special portals. At any point in the game there is more than one path to take. ![]() The player travels from the entrance to the (uppish) left of the screen to the point labelled “castle b” (they teleport between the 2 masses of areas), then back underneath to the entrance and finally to the central box. It’s also very difficult for the player to mentally compress this amalgamation of play zones into a coherent order. That is, if you need to get from the Sky Walkway to the Entrance, you must backtrack through 3-5 subsections depending on which route you take. Subsections effectively act as routes to other subsections bottlenecking progress and creating large amounts of needless backtracking. Harmony of Dissonance‘s castle, as you can see from the map, is a muddle of interconnected subsections (marked by their text labels) without a central hub to string players neatly from the end of one area to the start of another. My playtime was drawn-out in Harmony of Dissonance because of numerous road blocks which brought my playtime to a standstill. My experience with Harmony of Dissonance can be summarised like this: it took me about a month of on-and-off play to complete Harmony of Dissonance, whereas I beat Aria of Sorrow in 3 days of solid play. Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance – Castle Layout and Ability “Stringing” November 2nd, 2010
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