I Loathe: Unlocking doors and opening drawers

And that’s just the start of the issue. I don’t mean that I have an issue with either action in games, obviously—that would be weird. But rather I really hate how The Great Circle requires such things be done.

One of my favorite gaming moments was playing the Amnesia developers’ earlier game, Penumbra, for the first time, and interacting with the moveable objects. Doors and drawers moved in a whole new way: you’d reach out to them, and then push or pull with the mouse in the most tactile way, and it felt so much more involving as a result. It feels like Indy has tried for something similar, but entirely misunderstood how to get it right.

Here, you reach out to a locked door, and rather than just pressing the button to unlock and open it as would be normal, instead you interact with it, but then have to move the left analogue stick in an often arbitrary direction to complete the move. That’s always to the right when unlocking a door, even when the lock is on right side of the door, and it’s so unintuitive! If the game were aiming for the full-on interactivity of Penumbra (and more games should!), it’d be one thing, but this half-way point just makes for irritating interactions, when just pressing X and being done with it would be a much more rewarding experience.