I Just Want Players to Save Money, They Insist on Giving Me!
Chapter 513 - 169: Are you sure this is a game for kids? How come I, an adult, am having so much fun playing it?_4

Chapter 513: Chapter 169: Are you sure this is a game for kids? How come I, an adult, am having so much fun playing it?_4

This joy didn’t seem to come from the collection of Gold Coins themselves.

It was in fact...

"It’s because the game has hidden the Gold Coins, and yet I’ve found them," Ma Yang raised his eyebrows slightly.

He felt that if these Gold Coins were just blatantly displayed in front of his face,

he might not even be interested in picking them up.

But whether they were hidden underneath pillars, inside boxes, or behind posters,

the joy would multiply once they were discovered and then obtained.

The fun of exploration itself was even happier than the acquisition of Gold Coins.

Because it involved thinking and observing during the process.

It also gave the player a greater sense of participation.

’I facilitated this outcome’ is much more satisfying than ’the game designer handed it to you for free’.

"OMG, this game really gets psychology right, huh? Are games for kids nowadays this sophisticated?" Ma Yang muttered to himself as he continued on his way.

Soon, he discovered that his hat could not only pull up posts, hit boxes, and tear posters,

but it could also pass through the greenery on the ground, causing it to bloom.

After lighting up all the surrounding flowers, he would also receive corresponding Gold Coin rewards.

When he reached a broken bridge leading to the castle, throwing the hat could even activate mechanisms.

The whole process was almost continuously using the hat to do various things.

"This game has great tutorials," Ma Yang might not play games often, but it didn’t mean he hadn’t played them before.

In his experience, many games like to implant all sorts of tutorials from the start: how to attack, dodge, use Skills, how to combine moves,

seemingly eager to cram it all in at once.

But the game tutorials within Odyssey, on the other hand, presented a way for the player to slowly explore and discover.

It reinforced the player’s understanding of the uses of the hat,

and even based on this understanding, there was a designed Gold Coin feedback mechanism.

It gave Ma Yang the pleasant feeling of being a child again, receiving praise from parents and teachers for good grades or exemplary performance.

At least in the past ten minutes or so, he found he didn’t feel the slightest impatience playing this child’s game.

The sense of novelty consistently remained at a high level, compelling him to keep moving forward.

Quickly, with the mechanisms activated, the broken bridge leading to the castle rose up.

Sensory Mode began to take effect.

The tutorial prompted him to shake the Joy-Con controller continuously, making Mario roll up the narrow, steep bridge.

As Ma Yang gently shook his palm, Mario curled into a ball, his hands over his head, rolling down while the controller buzzed with vibration, as if mimicking the noise made while rolling.

Until he reached the castle gates, where he used the hat’s offensive power to defeat several yellow Chestnut creatures blocking the path.

This tutorial was even more ingenious.

At the entrance to the castle, the big door was devoid of the initial highlights or text prompts for other objects to hit.

Instead, directly at the entrance was drawn a hat symbol.

It didn’t delay the player’s time, it was understood at a glance.

This sort of suggestive game design might look very simple.

But achieving a gradual progression, or making the player understand at a glance what they need to do upon seeing the symbol,

is not as easy as one might think.

To this day, there are still many games on the market that do a particularly poor job at start-up guidance.

They are either too detailed and long-winded or too hollow and boring, leaving the player with a sense of disconnection after skipping through, like ’Now that you’ve mastered basic attacks, try defeating the Demon King with 18 combination Skills!’

Ma Yang tossed the hat in his hand, shattering the hat gate.

Once he stepped inside, he discovered that the castle’s interior held a secret.

It was a pristine white space with an irregular staircase leading upwards all the way to the top of the castle.

The only Problem was that Ma Yang immediately encountered a little issue.

He noticed that these steps all had one thing in common.

They were too high.

With Mario’s jumping height, he couldn’t even reach half the distance to these platforms.

But soon, he caught a glimpse out of the corner of his eye, of several frogs squatting on the nearby ground.

This time, there were no prompts.

However, the good guidance in Odyssey made Ma Yang instinctively think of using the hat for interaction.

At first, he thought to...

Attack the frogs with the hat, making them fly up so he could then jump on their heads to reach the platform.

But the moment the hat was thrown,

Ma Yang realized...

He was thinking too small.

Too small!

Good gracious, the game directly allowed him to play as a frog!

As the hat flew towards the frog, Mario was transformed into a beam of light sucked into the frog’s body, completing the Possession.

Ma Yang’s expression was identical to Mario’s after Possessing the frog, both were dumbfounded.

"I can play like this?" Having grown up, Ma Yang realized he had gradually lost his imagination.

He first thought of the more complicated ways to pass a level, but didn’t consider the most direct and whimsical approach.

Acting directly!

After Possession, the frog’s attributes naturally became his own.

As an animal with excellent jumping ability,

with a light press of the jump button by Ma Yang,

frog Mario leaped three feet high! Easily overcoming the platform that he had been unable to reach before,

the height of the jump was so great that the camera was forced to pull back.

During the jump, there were several gold rings that, if he entered accurately, would grant him Gold Coin rewards.