u/Clean-Efficiency-582

I've been going back to that gameplay section lots of times and the thing that keeps pulling me back is how the hacking grid appears while Diana is still physically present in the environment. It doesn't cut to a separate screen and it doesn't pause the action, it just layers on top of everything that's already happening. That's not a small design decision. Every game that has a hacking or puzzle mechanic almost always gives you a protected moment to solve it, like a safe room or a camera cut. This looks like it's refusing to do that and if that's intentional and consistent throughout the game it changes what the experience is asking of you. What I keep coming back to is the attention management angle. If you actually have to solve those node patterns while also tracking your position and whatever is happening around you in the environment, then the skill being tested isn't really combat skill or puzzle skill in isolation. It's about how well you can split focus under pressure and still function in both lanes.

That's a different feeling from most action games where you're either fighting or thinking but rarely both at the same time in a way that matters. I was on myprize while the trailer was running the first time and almost missed it entirely which is probably why it took a rewatch to register how different it looked. The honest concern is that this is the kind of system that lives and dies entirely on pacing and tuning. If it interrupts too often or the node patterns take too long to parse it stops feeling like dual awareness and starts feeling like the game is just fighting you and Capcom has barely explained the mechanic at all which is either confidence or a sign they're still figuring it out themselves. Right now the entire identity of this game feels like it's resting on whether that system actually works the way it looks like it works and I don't think we'll know until someone plays a chunk of it.

reddit.com
u/Clean-Efficiency-582 — 23 days ago