This isn’t so much a bug or glitch as it is a problem with the way the game is, in general.
One thing that HL1 and HL2 never made me do was ‘whore’ my save button.
When playing HL2 there were enough difficult zones, and the puzzles were ‘forgiving’ enough that, if you failed one. It would not result in your certain death, (at least not immediately).
Whereas in BMS. This is not at all the case.
Take for instance these situations:
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In one chapter. You are forced to jump between a bunch of suspended boxes to get from one side of a room to another. Falling/Failing to make a perfect jump results in an instant death, to which you are returned to an earlier point in the chapter, unless you whore your saves and save right before each attempt at the jump.
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In another chapter. You are required after following pipes along a fast moving river of radioactive waste, to turn a valve which moves a hollowed out pipe to create a makeshift bridge. You then turn around, go down a ladder in the middle of a piece of the pipe and proceed to try and jump through them. Falling/failing results in an instant death. The jump, whilst at first, looks easy, is quite hard because the middle pipe moves back and forth whilst it is suspended.
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When coming to the chapter with the Xen beast living in the Silo. When moving past the beast and its huge bladed tentacles/claws. There is no ‘skilful’ way at dodging the beast. Getting hit even once, is enough to kill you in almost 1 hit on Hard. 2 on Normal and 2-3 on Easy. One simply has to save right before making a run-for-it. Then one simply blasts around in circles, praying to god that they don’t get hit more than once by the beast’s arms. It is possible to get from the bottom to the top, and vice versa without being hit once. But it takes quite a lot of tries. This sort of gameplay, (saving right before a scene like this) allows a player to ‘skip’ an extremely hard part of the game and emerge completely unharmed. Because there is no mechanic that allows the player to skilfully dodge or defend themselves against the beast. ergo, there is no cover to hide behind and the explosive satchels have a tiny blast radius and are often knocked away from the beast. On top of that, they only work on the upper floors and won’t help you if you are trying to get from the bottom, back up to the top. Leaving you just the option to leg it.
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There are a million more situations where one needs to whore saves in order to get past certain challenges that could easily kill them in 1-2 failures. Forcing players to play ‘perfectly’ within the game’s mechanic is horrible and not what I, or many people I know, consider fun. But more ‘frustrating’.
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In other levels, you can fall into toxic waste. Certain ‘vats’ of toxic waste hurt the player far more than others. So even if a ladder is nearby, one cannot simply swim out and ‘just survive’ before they are killed by the waste in which they fell into. I’ve found that most areas of toxic waste, in which one is allowed to get out of, via either a ladder somewhere, or some other semi-obvious way. These said areas damage the player far more than ones in which there is almost no ‘obvious’ way to get out of. Maybe this was the intended point of the developer. To force you to endure a slow agonising death whilst you search for a way out of the waste. vs. watching you die quickly as you make a break for the nearest ladder. All in all, it doesn’t force me to do anything except reload a previous save because falling into one of those waste pools, almost always results in my death. Especially at higher difficulty settings.
‘Difficulty’ in any of these situations is only tantamount to basically ‘luck’ or ‘trial and error’, rather than actual ‘player skill’. Whereas, no matter how bad you are at playing a game, simple determination and patience is all that one needs to beat any of these puzzles.
If one is not so good at jumping/dodging etc. they simply make a ton of saves after successfully performing each jump until they are out of the area. In my days as a gamer, I have found this is a horrible ply in certain games. Where one is forced to abuse the ‘quick save’ feature, or equivalent in order to get past a difficult area, in which skill is not required, but instead simply patience and a bit of luck is.
This can’t really be fixed at all unless the devs go back to a lot of the areas and create cover etc. or make a few of the jumps a bit easier. Or if the devs update the keybinds to bind jump+crouch together by default. Unfortunately BMS is one of those games where perfection is required to get past certain areas.
I think its far more fun to emerge from a difficult situation by the skin of your teeth whilst fighting hard and using your surroundings to your advantage. Rather than having to perfectly aim for that platform, or hope that the Silo beast is just a little too slow to get you. etc.
it could just be my personal preference but what is the point in including a ladder at the edge of those radioactive pools, if falling in results in so much damage that one dies almost immediately? In many situations, one can simply slip in (not fall from a point so high that he would have certainly died).