Awful Stealth, and by that I mean White Day: A Labyrinth Called School

[Clownbaby]

Maybe I'm just a moron but I've been struggling massively with the sneaking around in the PS4 remake of Korean game White Day: A Labyrinth named School, and after looking on all sorts of gaming forums a lot of other people seem to be getting their arse kicked as well, completely randomly, without any logic to it. I haven't played the original so I'm not sure if it's always been a shiter. Anyone played it?

You're a boy who sneaks into school after hours to return a girl's diary and surprise her with some sweets but there's bad feng shui in the area and something supernatural I dunno. While you trying to navigate the place you're being stalked by a violent angry Janitor with a whistle and you must be very quiet and very careful to not be caught by him

...except it doesn't seem to matter at all what you do, if you permanently crouch, barely ever use your lighter to see, don't switch on any lights, obsessively look back down corridors for any sign of him, hell just be on you out of nowhere, with a baseball bat. No warning whatsoever. I've seen some people mention jangling of keys as a sign he's nearby and I haven't heard them once. There is subtle music that creeps up as he's near but unless I'm doing something horribly wrong, he just spawns right by you out of thin air and gets in your face anyway so a buildup of any kind is completely redundant.

Surely in any stealth based game there should be carefully designed sound and visual pointers like, I don't know, the janitor being visible outside the school. Oh he's outside the classroom, right. I better duck under the window. Oh there he is in the corridor. Better find a way round him. Nah just have him invisibly tethered to your location at all times and arbitrarily decide to surprise the player whenever, instead of building up a sense of satisfaction and progress from learning how to give him the slip. There isn't any satisfaction if it's pure chance whether or not you'll bump into him.

Shame though because even though it's a very plain blank looking game I was kind of drawn in by the simple nastiness of a violent human stalking around like a cunt, just because he's a nasty bastard. There was something mundanely horrifying about the bit where you see him beat a kid to death with the bat and drag him through the door, partly because of how plain and unatmospheric it looked.

I didn't pay much for the game but any more shit stealth related games I should avoid? I'm on a survival horror/stealth thing at the moment.

[madhair60]

I didn't pay much for the game but any more shit stealth related games I should avoid?

Yes mate here's the list:

- All of them

[Clownbaby]

Yes mate here's the list:

- All of them

Oof got me.

[rack and peanut]

gitgud

Felt like a cunt writing that even in jest

[Clownbaby]

Turns out setting the game to ''very easy'' gives you the gift of actually being able to determine where the janitor is roughly so you can actually do sneaking. On 'very easy'' mode the janitor actually behaves like a properly functioning threat that is visible walking around and searching, rather that a heat-seeking military missile. Not indicating where he is at all in every higher difficulty is just a lazy way to make you more on edge because it's absolute chance if the janitor appears in your face, and has nothing to do with your intuition or strategy. I felt like a bit of a fanny going back and setting it to ''very easy'' but such a basic, logical function as knowing where the enemy is so you can evade them is present even in hard settings of other similar games. Absolute shiter.

[ImmaculateClump]

Yes mate here's the list:

- All of them

Hehe, I have to admit, I think stealth is very rarely done well in games. I think the only one I really enjoyed was the original crysis.
It's totally optional, which I think helps, the games fail state isn't built around it.

So much fun playing that as a stealth game, using your invisibility cloak, setting your gun to single bullet fire with a silencer on, creeping around the grass on your belly, popping heads and chuckling under your breath.

I hated crysis at first but a friend told me to whack all the settings down as low as they'd go and play it as a stealth game. Glad I listened to him because I've never gone from actively hating a game so much to totally loving it before or since.

[samadriel]

Don't play Commandos 3. DO play Commandos 2.

Don't play Splinter Cell: Blacklist or Double Agent. DO play Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. The main campaign of Splinter Cell: Conviction is shit, but it's worth playing most of it to give you the arsenal to properly play the rather addictive Hunter missions (short campaigns were you have to stealth kill ten baddies at a time.)

You probably should play Shadow Tactics, but don't expect it to be as good as Commandos 2, it lays the guards on a bit too thick for you to really get creative with your stealthing.

[Sin Agog]

Been totally hooked to a game called The Swindle the last couple of days.  It's like Spelunky if it were a stealth game.  You gracefully break into houses trying not to be seen or die so's you can get enough skills to nab a super anti-crime 'puter before it ruins your business.  The levels are completely procedural, and mostly logical.  It can be hard as nails, and the 100-day limit does add a slightly unfortunate stressful nagging, but once you get a few upgrades it really is brilliant.

Bought White Day for 99p on ios years back, but never opened up the app, as happens when you start buying games for the sake of buying games.

[bgmnts]

Stealth games seem hard to get right for some reason.

[Bazooka]

I've been playing Shadows of Mordor on psn, I had it on ps3 but never played it much.  Anyway the stealth is pretty forgiving in it, apart from the character sticking to every piece of scenery and object in existence, doing a perfect stealth run and bam get snagged on a sack, and spotted and yep start all over.  My general method for killing the captains is stealth in close and then charge in and fuck em up fast hopefully killing them before the alarm sounds and 1 million orcs turn up where you parry hit parry hit for half an hour.

Morrowind stealth was my favourite, most people who played it know, but go to one of the small swamp towns(forget name) go into a specific hut, jump on stuff at the back toggle stealth and look at the guy, leave it and an hour later come back and you've got 100 stealth and went from lvl 1 to 13.