{"id":1296,"date":"2010-12-27T14:41:42","date_gmt":"2010-12-27T22:41:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/?p=1296"},"modified":"2016-12-06T13:51:47","modified_gmt":"2016-12-06T21:51:47","slug":"vigil-blood-bitterness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/1296","title":{"rendered":"Vigil: Blood Bitterness"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve just played the very beginning of Vigil: Blood Bitterness<\/em>, stopping because of problems with the cutscenes: there’s one that doesn’t play at all when it comes up in the game, and when I try to play it from the in-game play-cutscenes-again menu, the game crashes. I suspect a missing codec or somesuch. Googling, though, I mostly see people who can’t get any of the cutscenes at all to play, and most of them are playing from Windows 7 or Vista. So, I’m putting this away until I feel like figuring this out.<\/p>\n

\"Cathedral:<\/a>But, having played it for about five minutes, I’m obliged to post some first impressions. I bought this as part of one of Steam’s Indie packs, but I had played a demo some time previously, and had been struck by its visual style. In fact, the visual style was the chief thing that seemed interesting about it. I’ve mentioned how Killer 7<\/em> defines shapes through shadow<\/a>, but Vigil<\/em> takes this even farther. Nearly everything is made of stark, sharply-defined patches of black and white, which seems to reflect the player character’s world-view.<\/p>\n

\"Menu:<\/a>One other visual trick of note: the blurring. In UI design, an element that’s currently singled out to receive input — for example, a text input field that will receive the characters typed into the keyboard — is said to have “focus”, and elements without focus are sometimes said to be “blurred”. This game takes those notions literally: in menus, the button with focus is displayed in sharp focus, while everything else is blurred and fuzzy. It’s another neat visual trick, but on first encoutnering it, it just feels like a failure of some sort. Games in the Half-Life 2<\/em> engine have taught me that blurriness at the menu is a sign that it’s still loading and not interactive yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve just played the very beginning of Vigil: Blood Bitterness, stopping because of problems with the cutscenes: there’s one that doesn’t play at all when it comes up in the game, and when I try to play it from the in-game play-cutscenes-again menu, the game crashes. I suspect a missing codec or somesuch. Googling, though, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[446],"class_list":["post-1296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventure","tag-vigil-blood-bitterness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1296"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4732,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1296\/revisions\/4732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}