Video Game General

[Virtue]

Been noticing a few "Gamergate 2" personalities on youtube and twitter promote gacha games, particularly Nikke. Besides the obvious, what sort of appeal do you think gacha games have that make them successful?

Gambling. Casinos wherein you invest money, time, or both in exchange for things that are insipid—Gacha players, all tastelets. I believe this to be the primary appeal of Gacha games.

So playing gacha games is like gambling, a vice.

What makes people susceptible to vices, is despair, and there's nothing more than despair in this rotten world. This explains the consistent success of gacha games.

The gameparts, I believe are mostly interchangeable, there is a great overlap between different games' fandoms. It is either very simple (The case with Nikke—One can play it with one hand) or when it's not it just imitates already existing games, not innovative (The case with Genshin Impact—Shallow Zelda)

Now I will quote Anthony.

[Opportunityless people]They always have been prey of casinos, now they're prey of League of Legends and yeah maybe that costs less cash and you're less likely to end up in obscene debt but when you think of the amount of time you can just lose in here and how it's like a bunch of nervous strain over what is ultimately nothing— The Experience isn't really Redeemed by much of a social or aesthetic factor like my experience today[Tarkov] was with a friend. It's like a casino game where the financial element is mostly removed and does that really make it better? Well it's still sad to see people burning themselves we could say it's like the transition from smoking to vaping as far as gambling goes and do you think it's better that people vape than smoke? Maybe I'd prefer just living in a nice world where people don't do weird shit like that.

He speaks of League of Legends here, but doesn't this mostly apply to gacha games too? Maybe increase the financial investment a little, and decrease the pride investment, and yeah, you basically have a gacha game.

Is the experience of playing a gacha game, redeemed by a social or aesthetic factor?

So let's examine a gacha game, the one Teer brought up, Goddess of Victory: Nikke.
The game is developed by a korean company, and doesn't seem to have much social stuff going on besides being placed on a leaderboard according to your score, it is mostly anti-social.


The latter video reminds me of ecchi anime.
Nikke can be played with a single hand. Something to think about.
Okay, from what we have seen we can deduce that this Gacha game is pandering to a very particular audience, Horny Young Men.



Again, we haven't seen anything yet that would make us think that there is an aesthetic experience to be had here, everything seems to be contrived to make us erect. But we are not here to masturbate. So we can move on to the story now, the story of the game has a VN presentation. And the story seems boring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goddess_of_Victory:_Nikke

I as a thoughtful man think that one ought to watch this video and indulge in his vices, rather than actually sinking time and money into something that is as shallow as Nikke.

[Guest]

Gambling doesn’t explain the gacha phenomenon. When you gamble, there is an expected payout. Players believe that if they’re good or lucky they’ll get more than they put in. Yes the game they choose needs to be one they like but gamblers really do believe they can make money doing it. Everyone who puts money into a gacha game understands they are buying digital content. The game studio does not trick you into thinking dollars will come back out. In gacha games and ‘competitive’ multiplayer games there is something that is analogous to gambling in the sense that you are sacrificing something (time) for a chance to receive something worth more to you than what you put in (excitement/fun). But the idea that that alone fully explains an extremely popular and lucrative game type is dumb. The pseudo-gambling of gacha simply acts as a way to introduce scarcity. MMOs do this through time alone via random drops but gacha does this via time and money. Scarcity is an important element for the three types that the games cater to which explain their popularity.
 
Tamagotchi/Nintendogs players
These are people who would’ve been stamp collectors in previous decades. But now, not only can they collect pointless things, they can also interact with them. Rotate the character models, play voicelines, watch cool animations, and even take care of them. The scarcity I mentioned earlier makes collecting the characters rewarding and the gameplay revolves around logging in to take care of your characters by feeding them various resources making them stronger.
 
Shonen simulator
What kind of game might someone play if they don’t actually like video games but they do like anime/manga? The answer is gacha. You get to build a team that ‘powers up’ with your investment of time/money. The developers routinely release new ‘story arcs’ where there is a new big baddie your team needs to defeat and a new world or zone you need to explore. This is done at a pace far faster than most MMOs can do. Usually every month or every few months they add this stuff. You might be surprised but there’s a ton of people who play Genshin this way. They login to complete the new ‘story arc’ and then stop and wait for the next installment.
 
Idle ‘gamers’
These are people who like the grind in MMOs and only the grind. Actually, the other elements in an MMO are troublesome because they require attention to properly learn a raid or dungeon or maybe you need to talk to other people to join a guild. Idle ‘gamers’ want to play cookie clicker without realizing they’re playing cookie clicker. The scarcity value created by time+money makes them think their idle time is going into something productive because their characters’ numbers went up.

[Teer]

Don't want to waste space in this thread talking too much about gacha even though I brought it up. Gacha, Loot boxes, CSGO skins, and casino slots are all the same in the sense that you put in money and time in exchange for something. Thats it, whether its titillation, more money, or aesthetics, it does not matter. It's suited for the monotonous and repetitive lives of the majority of Chinese and Koreans that play and create them. So that's why I wonder why a gacha game is being promoted in certain circles.



This was one of the first trailers I watched for Dragon Age Origins. A lone White man with flaming blue eyes fighting hordes of ork-like beasts, with a little trashy Marilyn Manson at the end. I wanted to play this solely because of the trailer. And when I did as a kid, I loved it. Looking back at this series, its no wonder it went the way it did. But you could ignore the gay stuff in Origins because the vast majority was explicitly straight and implicitly White. The main story wasn't particularly interesting, and the humor was always hit and miss, it had a charm. You could kill the gay elf, you could impregnate the witch. It was obsessed a little too much with sex, sure. But the characters were fine, the scenarios were interesting. I personally blame Origins more than Mass Effect for popularizing worthless "Banter" that has become so pervasive in Western games.
Between retcons and Bioware desperate to get rid of its audience, two bad sequels from this series came out. And with time, Bioware did get rid of its old audience and found a new one. They even got a Netflix series with gay niggers and brown elven dykes. 



I really do miss this game.

[anthony]

I was just posting elsewhere about the first Mass Effect game. Bioware's last release before Obama, I believe. It's such a clean, genuinely progressive vision of the future.





Blue. Sharp. Tasteful erring towards simplicity in all things. Relatively minimalist graphics. Looks more like a highly polished Xbox game than a 360 game.

By Mass Effect 2 everything is noise and weight and dirt and Brazil in space. The Obama factor.



Look at the image and listen to this. The character is completely flattened out into pointless garbage for idiots. Epic serious war in space. The cool 2000s white sleek futurism is dead and gone.

[Unformed Golem]

Listened to the Oriental Gun Fetishism video.

There's something else going on with guns in video games which has changed since Doom.  This is the appearance of the Operator.  The Operator supplanted the '80s action hero as the default badass with a gun.  The player in Doom is a movie action hero.  His guns are magic wands.  This translates quite intuitively into a video game because you're not actually handling a metal object weighing several pounds, you're just flicking your mouse around.  Arnold with the minigun in Terminator 2.  A lot of the "realism improvements" in this vein were really just ways to lean into this aesthetic -- macho shotgun-pumping and the like.

Around 2000 you saw designers trying to make guns more realistic.  Counter-Strike was the most popular an early example, although a more important one was Operation Flashpoint.  OFP (later ArmA) really does capture the feel of lugging your M16 around over the terrain to fire at some distant guys in your iron sights quite well.  Day of Defeat led to Red Orchestra.  These games tried to capture the feeling of being a "real soldier" -- this is the simulationist impulse that's pretty absent from Japanese games.  I think many of these games were also based on developers working off of their experience going to the range or shooting pumpkins on their friend's ranch.  This is not an experience that Japanese people have.

Post-2001 and ramping up through the Iraq War though you had the Operator, and even in the civilian world the 90s mall ninja evolved into the "practical shooting" enthusiast.   Competitors in organizations like IPSC (presumably with Bush-era government support) actually became minor public figures with TV shows.  And the thing is, these people really were capable of some pretty incredible stuff with their guns.

Here's an IPSC champion on a pistol range:


And here's Keanu Reeves:


I posted /neo/ because I wanted to make a certain point: he's an actor, this is a trade skill that can be trained with material + time, like fencing or welding.  You need to go through tens of thousands of rounds to get to this point.  It also a matter of routine for Operators -- special forces who do the most demanding direct action operations.  You'll notice that these people are no longer "lugging an M16 over the terrain".  Everything is automatic, everything flows.  It is this feeling that many modern Western shooting games are trying to capture.  The gun is still a physical object, but it should just be an extension of the shooter's/player's body.  It shouldn't feel like you're manipulating this separate object in your hands like you're trying to fix a lamp.

[Guest]

Been noticing a few "Gamergate 2" personalities on youtube and twitter promote gacha games, particularly Nikke. Besides the obvious, what sort of appeal do you think gacha games have that make them successful?

 suppose some look towards aesthetic appeal and the title "rpg"

[Guest]

Gacha = Good art and an interesting narrative structure along with short daily consumption that leads to much better digestion of said art and narrative. Also gachas have the best music in the industry at the moment, and it is not close. It is essentially the "new" JRPG in terms of something alien, fresh, and high quality that is completely divorced from the Western World.
I am not surprised to see the kneejerk responses towards it, because that it is exactly what happened with JRPGs when they first became popular. Now that JRPGs have been thoroughly dissolved aside from a few small exceptions, that ire goes to the new source of that energy. All things repeat.

[FrenziedFish]

Wanted to make a quick post here to send out a point that was made on of all places a Night Owls space a couple of weeks ago. I had attended and the topic moved to video games, I said that I mainly played "tactical shooters" like Squad and Escape From Tarkov, Nightmare Vision made a point that part of the success of these games was by facilitating (or being the product of) a sort of White Flight.

To expand on this point I think it's obvious that the mainstream shooter franchises, Call of Duty and Battlefield have suffered decline (regardless of your initial opinion on either) which was mostly noticed and voiced by White gamers. It'd also be somewhat safe to say that this decline was caused by, but not in necessarily pandering to, a browner demographic who gainied control and influence over the development and advertisement processes. These two tactical shooters I listed earlier do have majority or entirely White teams. What they do both suffer from though, which I believe is interesting, is a lack of direction in development and developers given to bouts of reflexive or pressured changes from their diverse in opinion but generally White playerbases. This is what ties it with the White Flight analogy I believe, there is definitively a shift from patronising the triple A western space towards more independent games but these suffer from a lack of confidence and direction beyond their concepts, they are afraid to position themselves in opposition to the mainstream and they don't want to split up or alienate sections of their diversely opinionated playerbase. These issues are mostly down to a lack of resources on the sides of developers or prospective developers, and overall a lack of games these diverse and generally maturing White gamers can play or are aware of.

[anthony]

Wanted to make a quick post here to send out a point that was made on of all places a Night Owls space a couple of weeks ago. I had attended and the topic moved to video games, I said that I mainly played "tactical shooters" like Squad and Escape From Tarkov, Nightmare Vision made a point that part of the success of these games was by facilitating (or being the product of) a sort of White Flight.

To expand on this point I think it's obvious that the mainstream shooter franchises, Call of Duty and Battlefield have suffered decline (regardless of your initial opinion on either) which was mostly noticed and voiced by White gamers. It'd also be somewhat safe to say that this decline was caused by, but not in necessarily pandering to, a browner demographic who gainied control and influence over the development and advertisement processes. These two tactical shooters I listed earlier do have majority or entirely White teams. What they do both suffer from though, which I believe is interesting, is a lack of direction in development and developers given to bouts of reflexive or pressured changes from their diverse in opinion but generally White playerbases. This is what ties it with the White Flight analogy I believe, there is definitively a shift from patronising the triple A western space towards more independent games but these suffer from a lack of confidence and direction beyond their concepts, they are afraid to position themselves in opposition to the mainstream and they don't want to split up or alienate sections of their diversely opinionated playerbase. These issues are mostly down to a lack of resources on the sides of developers or prospective developers, and overall a lack of games these diverse and generally maturing White gamers can play or are aware of.

There is definitely a browning going on. I just saw this recently.



But, Call of Duty was always fairly stupid. It used to be very "white". An interest in WW2 in the 2000s, edge, online focus when that's still a novel thing for most people. It was dumb all along in retrospect I believe, but dumb because everyone was dumb. This was a dumb, miserable era. What happened more specifically I think is that a decent number of whites grew out of that, while the games themselves stuck with their broad base. And with the higher element moving on the base grows both more influential and complacent. I imagine that there's a heavy overlap between the Call of Duty and Walking Dead fanbases now. When I think of them I think of obese excitable black people.

Call of Duty was naive, now it's dumb. This was not white flight. This was white growth. Growth which mainstream entertainment infrastructure refuses to embrace or support. I think you have this a bit backwards, and go to some odd places. "afraid to position themselves in opposition to the mainstream", what? "and they don't want to split up or alienate sections of their diversely opinionated playerbase", I don't understand. How would they do so?

[FrenziedFish]

There is definitely a browning going on. I just saw this recently.



But, Call of Duty was always fairly stupid. It used to be very "white". An interest in WW2 in the 2000s, edge, online focus when that's still a novel thing for most people. It was dumb all along in retrospect I believe, but dumb because everyone was dumb. This was a dumb, miserable era. What happened more specifically I think is that a decent number of whites grew out of that, while the games themselves stuck with their broad base. And with the higher element moving on the base grows both more influential and complacent. I imagine that there's a heavy overlap between the Call of Duty and Walking Dead fanbases now. When I think of them I think of obese excitable black people.

Call of Duty was naive, now it's dumb. This was not white flight. This was white growth. Growth which mainstream entertainment infrastructure refuses to embrace or support. I think you have this a bit backwards, and go to some odd places. "afraid to position themselves in opposition to the mainstream", what? "and they don't want to split up or alienate sections of their diversely opinionated playerbase", I don't understand. How would they do so?

I think this is a good response and refocusing of the idea: White Growth. I'd certainly say that the generations who have been more influenced by the internet have been able to grow while the boomers are at least creeping more slowly from Tucker on Fox to Tucker on X, he and Donald Trump did a lot to get them actually interacting with the internet and slightly challenging their cultural upbringing.

With the internet, with its general availability of information and association, people are given a lot of space to grow and discuss their tastes. What happened with mainstream gaming is that people commented on games via youtube, critiqued the mass-appeal turn of the 7th gen, then dismayed at the continuing pace of it with the 8th gen and then fragmented over Gamergate. Many were shown as unserious or duplicitous, battle lines and "alliances" formed as people were forced to confront a new wave of change more complex and hard to discuss than chest high walls, gray filters and "on-rails" experiences. Many people did grow from this, they did develop their taste over time spurred by their initial gamergate motivated value judgements of "I hate walking simulators"/"I hate dudebro games".

The 8th console generation was one, and now more noticeably with the 9th, where the majority (perceived or real) of gamers would be minorities.



I think it's safe to say that the western mainstream space is now lost for good output for varying reasons.

Now to discuss what I meant with my later observations.  

- "afraid to position themselves in opposition to the mainstream"

More so independent developers are, I feel, afraid to go too far with the scope and mechanics of their game, they don't want it to be punishing in terms of pure difficulty or complexity. They don't quite understand that they are drawing from a consumer-base/fanbase that are more willing/wanting for this and so still end up designing their games (or redesigning them) to be more "player-friendly", often making them bland or compromised in the process.

- "and they don't want to split up or alienate sections of their diversely opinionated playerbase"

There's a lot of games in the space I'm describing that are either in early access (Star Citizen) or a form of live service (Escape From Tarkov) where keeping the playerbase on side is important for the further development and "realisation" of the project. To do this the developer does need to (or at the least feels they need to) keep the different sections of the playerbase happy with any change they end up making, compromising and often dumbing-down/softening the game, though not necessarily because the players want a dumbed-down game but because that's the product of these compromised changes.

For these issues to be dealt with there needs to be further white growth. People need to be more willing to seek out what already exists which conforms to or satisfies their tastes and start making what they want to play. I believe this seed/spark of white growth was with gamergate. There needs to be another, but different flashpoint in gaming, no sweet baby inc soma.

[anthony]

I think this is a good response and refocusing of the idea: White Growth. I'd certainly say that the generations who have been more influenced by the internet have been able to grow while the boomers are at least creeping more slowly from Tucker on Fox to Tucker on X, he and Donald Trump did a lot to get them actually interacting with the internet and slightly challenging their cultural upbringing.

With the internet, with its general availability of information and association, people are given a lot of space to grow and discuss their tastes. What happened with mainstream gaming is that people commented on games via youtube, critiqued the mass-appeal turn of the 7th gen, then dismayed at the continuing pace of it with the 8th gen and then fragmented over Gamergate. Many were shown as unserious or duplicitous, battle lines and "alliances" formed as people were forced to confront a new wave of change more complex and hard to discuss than chest high walls, gray filters and "on-rails" experiences. Many people did grow from this, they did develop their taste over time spurred by their initial gamergate motivated value judgements of "I hate walking simulators"/"I hate dudebro games".

The 8th console generation was one, and now more noticeably with the 9th, where the majority (perceived or real) of gamers would be minorities.



I think it's safe to say that the western mainstream space is now lost for good output for varying reasons.

Might just be worth repeating again here that I believe that very little good actually happened in the west, especially America, even before this. Generally around the edges, accidents, etc. Halo for example was poorly understood by everyone, most severely so by the white PC elitist old guard. There was never an artfag west. Just a mainstream mass of retards who at least were not yet actually Oaxacan, but spiritually may as well have been for the most part.

Now to discuss what I meant with my later observations.  

- "afraid to position themselves in opposition to the mainstream"

More so independent developers are, I feel, afraid to go too far with the scope and mechanics of their game, they don't want it to be punishing in terms of pure difficulty or complexity. They don't quite understand that they are drawing from a consumer-base/fanbase that are more willing/wanting for this and so still end up designing their games (or redesigning them) to be more "player-friendly", often making them bland or compromised in the process.

I don't follow new game too closely, but is this really happening? What are the independent shooters? I don't think anybody is dumb enough to try to make Call of Duty or Battlefield with less money, but I'm not really looking. I know there's Rising Storm 2 (their next game apparently went into production hell), Hell Let Loose (got bought out by some other people and had some trouble there, but seemed to play in its own distinct way), Enlisted, maybe a few others. I don't hear of casualisation being their problem. But again, I don't pay much attention. Squad and Tarkov are our stated examples so far, and they seem to be doing all right on all of this.

- "and they don't want to split up or alienate sections of their diversely opinionated playerbase"

There's a lot of games in the space I'm describing that are either in early access (Star Citizen) or a form of live service (Escape From Tarkov) where keeping the playerbase on side is important for the further development and "realisation" of the project. To do this the developer does need to (or at the least feels they need to) keep the different sections of the playerbase happy with any change they end up making, compromising and often dumbing-down/softening the game, though not necessarily because the players want a dumbed-down game but because that's the product of these compromised changes.

For these issues to be dealt with there needs to be further white growth. People need to be more willing to seek out what already exists which conforms to or satisfies their tastes and start making what they want to play. I believe this seed/spark of white growth was with gamergate. There needs to be another, but different flashpoint in gaming, no sweet baby inc soma.

Again, the thinking seems plausible but I don't really know if I see it. And again, I don't really care much for new western games so I'm not actually paying much attention. It could be for all I know. But in the case I know most about, Tarkov, the problem seems closer to the opposite. Nikita doesn't really give a fuck what players think or say day to day. He does not give a fuck about balance. He does not care if many people are having a miserable time. I can't think of a man genuinely less interested in compromise in gaming. He's not performative or obstinate about it. He just doesn't care.

[Mason Hall-McCullough]

I played a few hours of The Talos Principle 2 and it's possibly the most tasteless game I've ever encountered. I'm not surprised because I knew it was going to be worse than the original (which was already mediocre) before it released just from the trailer and blurb, but it's fascinating to me just how much effort was put into making the game worse.

New additions brought by the sequel ruin it in ways typical of modern high-budget games, with unnecessarily large spaced out worlds, overly detailed graphics, excessive cutscenes, too many NPCs, quest markers, anything you can think of along those lines they probably added to The Talos Principle 2. This stands out especially because its gameplay is not some sort of open world RPG where these additions could be reasonably argued, it's a pure puzzle game. The new elements are tacked on to the core puzzle mechanics as clumsily as you would naturally assume, it's baffling that anyone could think they improve the game. The city which serves as the main hub area is a large region which is sparsely populated by asinine curios that have no gameplay significance.




Above are a couple of the worthless things you can discover in the "open world". The irony and cat memes feel very cynical. Because I like to explore, I tried to see if I could escape the city somehow, but my time was completely wasted running through large expanses of shrubbery and shallow water. I thought I could at least enter some of the distant buildings, but they were for show. The average player probably goes first to the few nearby structures that are filled with useless NPCs to hear them babble about lore for a bit, then moves on with the story, left with the impression that they could explore the rest of the world if they wanted to.

The size of each level means that it's necessary to add navigation markers so that the average player doesn't get lost in all the useless terrain. This destroys any sense of exploration because you know you're not going to find anything if there isn't a marker there. You've probably heard this story before.



We have, of course, the dialogue tree thing where you can say many things that do not matter (sometimes you get up to 8 choices, wow) and hear lazily written babble replies that do not matter.

Every time you discover something new in the world after solving a puzzle, your party members speak unskippably in your ear or even call a video conference to raise the most annoyingly obvious questions about things that you would much rather be allowed to discover on your own. "Wow, did you see that giant laser you just fired at the pyramid? I wonder who built this and why? Does it have some kind of power source? New Quest: Activate Towers 1/3". This obliterates the mysterious mood the original (relatively solitary) Talos was able to create at times. It's so incompetently done too, for instance an NPC commented on a structure that didn't look especially notable and I would have otherwise ignored, to the effect of "that's weird, maybe we can come back to this later", basically telling the player that there was a "secret" at this location. A friend described this as like the game was designed for people with no inner monologue. It's kind of amusing how the NPCs are supposed to be helping you in the story, but you're the one solving all the puzzles while they take partial credit by inserting themselves as soon as you make any discovery.



Enjoying the writing or story is an admission that one is at least as stupid as the Croatian dev team. The writing is objectively horrible. Like most nations outside the Anglosphere I imagine Croatians lag behind us culturally, so the plot is filled with ridiculous reddit-tier pseudointellectualism "about" philosophy, that is immediately transparent as such to anyone who is not a midwit. Unlike most of what I've discussed so far, this is was probably about as true of the first game as it is of the second: "Several texts discuss or are written by the fictional Straton of Stageira, a materialist Greek philosopher who in 260 BC pondered the nature of the mythical automaton Talos. Straton introduced the titular Talos Principle, arguing that since Talos was a machine, yet still conscious, humans may also merely be conscious biological machines, who are nothing but the sum of their physical parts." Wow, so deep.



The game is visually appealing from afar, but ugly up close. I took the above screenshot a minute after starting the game. It suffers terminally from fern/rubble/shrub cancer. HD textures and harsh lighting make everything look like an excessively detailed and contrasting mess. I played the original The Talos Principle shortly after replaying The Witness, and the difference was jarring. The first zone of the original has a particularly disgusting brick texture.

The actual puzzles are generally good and I'll probably keep playing it for this reason alone, I just think the game is utterly shit in every other respect. The Talos Principle 2 adds some new puzzle mechanics that are pretty interesting, and I find the puzzles genuinely challenging even though the rest of the game is superficial. It seems like the meta puzzles from the original may possibly not exist in the sequel, and are replaced by plainly visible bonus levels, but I can't know that for sure yet. This would be disappointing.

This sequel really does nothing right and is only passable in ways that were unchanged from the original, so how does it have Overwhelmingly Positive ratings on Steam? There are some obvious answers, but I struck on one interesting idea while meditating on my hatred of this game. On The Talos Principle 2's Steam page is the following image:



This primes the normalfaggot gamer to buy the game and leave a good review in accordance with the majority. Knowing that the game received good reviews might actually increase enjoyment of the game, similar to how a meal might taste better after the chef describes it. Isn't it also interesting that the image, embedded in the Steam description, contains the Steam review score? The developers clearly believe communicating this is important enough to update the description after the game's release on Steam. It's a kind of aesthetic speculation, and a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I think a similar principle also applies to other aspects of the game. The Talos Principle 2 shows you a cutscene of a beautiful vista as you ride the elevator, promising you that you can explore it. Characters interact with the player immediately in an attempt to impart an initial impression of a grand and compelling story. The contents of the story and lore are filled with signals that give the impression of philosophical sophistication. The game advertises itself to you.

These aesthetics never live up to their promises, but that doesn't actually matter. If a tasteless retard is sufficiently captivated by the aesthetic, they won't be able to admit to themselves that they were tricked 20 hours in. Especially not if their friends are also tasteless retards who publicly praise the game. They will "genuinely" enjoy the rest of the game despite it being shit because they fell for the aesthetic confidence tricks in the promotional material and first hour of the game. I think this effect underlies a lot of these design trends seen in modern AAA games, which The Talos Principle 2 aped even though they didn't mesh with the gameplay at all. The average normalfaggot gamer cares only about first impressions, if you can mold their all-too-malleable mind into thinking your game is vast and deep and intriguing they will spend 100 hours finding every collectible. Even when the masses seem to form a negative consensus (e.g. Starfield), it's just speculative turbulence and gamers aren't really thinking for themselves any more than they are when they change their opinions to align with positive reviews.

[Guest]

[...]

Wholeheartedly agree. I toyed with the idea of making a video essay about it a while back, lazy as I am I never ended up getting to it though.

It's been a couple months since my playthrough of it now, but here's what I can remember:

The game performing quite poorly, albeit my PC is getting on in years. Was at a (not even stable) 30~ FPS.

This applies to the first game too, but I never much liked how the first-person perspective limits your initial understanding of the puzzle, and increases the amount of time spent performing the steps to solve it (running around putting it all together).

The great contrivance of these androids as Human; begs any number of questions about why they must find themselves in this particular configuration (why should there be multiple, discrete AI? Is it of any use when they are merely modified copies of a single progenitor? Why must they be installed onto humanoid frames? All this stuff is dead obvious, and there's a great deal more questions one could ask of course). Though, obviously, it's simply a matter of the writers not caring about the setting, they need human-equivalents, they cannot be bothered to make it even remotely plausible, the androids simply must be clumsily conformed to the shape of Human. Only the most shallow characteristics of their being androids are ever remarked upon, nothing distinct about their thought, behavior, culture etc. in manners one might expect.

Getting the bonus stars was already stupid & tedious in the first game, even when following a walkthrough, but it's totally unacceptable in the sequel, having to follow that fucking sprite around half the map.

Tacky use of literary/religious reference, "Byron" is the one I recall as being particularly stupid & cheap.

IIRC the game was written by one of the two writers from the first one, a Greek guy, and his wife as replacement for the other guy. Remember finding that a bit funny.

[Unformed Golem]

I recently beat Subnautica, a first-person "survival" game. I bought and played it for about 20 hours a few years ago, but my playthrough got interrupted. I couldn't remember much about it so I just started over.

It's a good game. The survival aspect is not really that hard; there's just enough there to add some intensity and force you to plan out exploration a bit without being tedious. Throughout my playthrough I frequently just spent several hours fooling around and building various bases. The "volcano" portions of the game are kind of boring but on the other hand it does make sense that there'd be less biodiversity there than in other regions of the ocean you're in. Overall I though that I was only in danger of getting bored right at the very end, and the clear goal (build a rocket to escape) pushed me through that.

One thing it does do is make effective use of the sense that @anthony complains about where the guns or other tools don't feel like real objects. They sort of do, actually, but what they are in-game is various high-tech iPad bullshit. It keeps you alive and is actually quite nice in a lot of ways, but it's just really not mean to be Heavy Machinery.

[Guest]

The greatest shift has already happened. "Gameplay" has been left to the...group that worships it. Art has been found again outside of regular games, largely in gacha. The de-bodying of the mass man is essentially done although it can still stand to gain some more ground (and it will gain more ground.) It simply means lower physical proficiency leading to a greater stimulation through digital means that are made to be "ideally difficult" for the audience. Or trainable, in that tiny training space that has little to no crossover as it has no physical component. Many will dream: I will digitally interface with a million killing machines and incorporate a thousand-year Kingdom of my own. Amusingly, this idea has already been tackled by Lara in an Atelier game. The reality is that these bold professors have merely degraded to a point where they can no longer "sense" what is missing. Divergence is total and merciless. It also largely follows economic lines, for whatever reason, I do not care to speculate as to what idea might be more right. The silo of the rich has been developed further and there is even space for slaves, so that is all going well. The word-cel is an ironic creature, by nature, not by personality. He is sincere. He believes in what he says, but his dedication to "gameplay" is as always, a dedication to that abstract in words. It looks like Shakespeare. It tastes like Shakespeare. It smells like Shakespeare. Or in shortest terms: Can someone without physical performance rate any other performance? No, unless you are of that other ilk. This is the divergence simply enough. As always, many who claim to be this or that fall on the one side with many who claim the opposite. Birds of a feather rot together.

[Virtue]

The greatest shift has already happened. "Gameplay" has been left to the...group that worships it. Art has been found again outside of regular games, largely in gacha. The de-bodying of the mass man is essentially done although it can still stand to gain some more ground (and it will gain more ground.) It simply means lower physical proficiency leading to a greater stimulation through digital means that are made to be "ideally difficult" for the audience. Or trainable, in that tiny training space that has little to no crossover as it has no physical component. Many will dream: I will digitally interface with a million killing machines and incorporate a thousand-year Kingdom of my own. Amusingly, this idea has already been tackled by Lara in an Atelier game. The reality is that these bold professors have merely degraded to a point where they can no longer "sense" what is missing. Divergence is total and merciless. It also largely follows economic lines, for whatever reason, I do not care to speculate as to what idea might be more right. The silo of the rich has been developed further and there is even space for slaves, so that is all going well. The word-cel is an ironic creature, by nature, not by personality. He is sincere. He believes in what he says, but his dedication to "gameplay" is as always, a dedication to that abstract in words. It looks like Shakespeare. It tastes like Shakespeare. It smells like Shakespeare. Or in shortest terms: Can someone without physical performance rate any other performance? No, unless you are of that other ilk. This is the divergence simply enough. As always, many who claim to be this or that fall on the one side with many who claim the opposite. Birds of a feather rot together.

Can you give an example of art in gacha games that is impressive? And no, your blue archive goonfolder does not count. I cannot make sense of what you have written at least, post some images, if you cannot employ language to convey meaning in an unambiguous way.

[FrenziedFish]

This sequel really does nothing right and is only passable in ways that were unchanged from the original, so how does it have Overwhelmingly Positive ratings on Steam? There are some obvious answers, but I struck on one interesting idea while meditating on my hatred of this game. On The Talos Principle 2's Steam page is the following image:



This primes the normalfaggot gamer to buy the game and leave a good review in accordance with the majority. Knowing that the game received good reviews might actually increase enjoyment of the game, similar to how a meal might taste better after the chef describes it. Isn't it also interesting that the image, embedded in the Steam description, contains the Steam review score? The developers clearly believe communicating this is important enough to update the description after the game's release on Steam. It's a kind of aesthetic speculation, and a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I think a similar principle also applies to other aspects of the game. The Talos Principle 2 shows you a cutscene of a beautiful vista as you ride the elevator, promising you that you can explore it. Characters interact with the player immediately in an attempt to impart an initial impression of a grand and compelling story. The contents of the story and lore are filled with signals that give the impression of philosophical sophistication. The game advertises itself to you.

These aesthetics never live up to their promises, but that doesn't actually matter. If a tasteless retard is sufficiently captivated by the aesthetic, they won't be able to admit to themselves that they were tricked 20 hours in. Especially not if their friends are also tasteless retards who publicly praise the game. They will "genuinely" enjoy the rest of the game despite it being shit because they fell for the aesthetic confidence tricks in the promotional material and first hour of the game. I think this effect underlies a lot of these design trends seen in modern AAA games, which The Talos Principle 2 aped even though they didn't mesh with the gameplay at all. The average normalfaggot gamer cares only about first impressions, if you can mold their all-too-malleable mind into thinking your game is vast and deep and intriguing they will spend 100 hours finding every collectible. Even when the masses seem to form a negative consensus (e.g. Starfield), it's just speculative turbulence and gamers aren't really thinking for themselves any more than they are when they change their opinions to align with positive reviews.

Normie cattle really have been getting on my nerves as I've been getting into film. This is somewhat a straying from the topic of this thread, video games, but I'll tie it in a bit.

I remember normies actually being quite hostile to reviewers, especially game reviewers as being disconnected, being bad at games or being biased (if those normies were of a gamergate inheritance). These views were generally solidifed and refined by a videogamedunkey video from 2017 where he makes a few alright points in regards to review scores, critic voice and first impressions but in the end what the video serves to do is embolden the even more uninformed and idiotic opinions of gamers. His next video, two years later, exists to cover his back by rightly attacking these gamers. But, he doesn't offer any sort of solution to the problems he discusses in either video, he knows this and uses the ending "joke" of the second video as a cop-out. He hits on this one more time, barely, with a video released recently, a video that can only be understood as seething over the fact nobody seemed to understand what he was saying in the prior videos (though he wasn't saying anything truly insightful in either). I can, of course, read into the "comedy", structure and focal points of these videos to take away some type of prescription, that game reviewing needs to be more "nuanced", yet this remains another cop-out. What I'm getting at here is that discourse on criticism, specifically over gaming, is poor to non-existent (I have no other examples which spring to mind) and is tainted by a sort of wallowing over how bad and shallow "it" is.

I've personally never listened to a review from a "major" gaming outlet like IGN or Gamespot. I used to listen to reviews from "independent" reviewers like GmanLives as sort of background noise to a low intensity task, he never really dove deep enough for me but did manage to have a distinct voice (if a bad one, being heavily influenced by banal boomer shooters). I still listen to MandaloreGaming but this is again quite passive listening as he postures about taking a closer look but remains relatively surface level, insofar as actually evaluating the game other than a "game". "game" being the dialectical product of western gaming "culture", a game being a thing which is valued from the standpoint (often implied but sometimes explicitly said) that they are unimportant, silly, childish, time passers, a set of rules with certain processes and outcomes and are fundamentally unserious while also at the same time threatening to usurp "traditional" mediums, particularly sports, film and hobbying by providing satisfaction (by fulfilling those prior listed valued elements) more efficiently. 

I haven't seen a game reviewer that, other than Matthewmatosis (yet I haven't revisited him as I myself have revised my opinions on gaming), has really discussed games in a deep and informed way. Anthony with his recent video has inspired me, partially, that game discussion is fertile ground for ourselves to influence the wider "culture" or at least develop our own ideas on art more broadly.

Now I'd like to discuss film, this ties in a little with the dunkey section. Dunkey mentions Armond White as a "contrarian" but identifies him as a useful barometer if something is universally bad or good if White ends up agreeing with consensus, he's wrong on this, Armond White is useful as a critic because he is actually a critic, he isn't merely a reviewer picking at the surface level elements of film. Read this review of his on Taken 2. White ties in, and explains to the passer-by adequately, various other filmmakers relevance and likely influence upon the picture along with the picture's own triumphs in a level above "cinematography good" or "plot good" or "acting good", take this line: "Besson is less ostentatiously “engaged;” his audience is those urban viewers most dependent upon escapism but also more responsive to the pressures of social and economic violence than to self-serving political rhetoric.". This whole line, a rigorous defence (without cucking at any stage) of the American middle class who patronised the visionary (in his and my opinion) Taken series from "Hollywood" and other liberal elites who look down on European (produced or creatively directed) cinema when it isn't suitably exotic or deferent to Jewish "magic of dah pictahs" gospel, is to me his appeal and usefulness as a critic, he actually says something. White, is of course, not without his faults, I do not believe he is a contrarian but that he is to some degree deranged (possibly due in part to his genetics) by existing in such a vapid epoch where he can only gather recognition by being exceedingly bitter.

To move on to what I dislike particularly about movie discussion amongst the normie cattle.



Here are the top 3 reviews on the movie database and review site letterboxd for a recently released Zendaya starring romance film. I'm sure you may have seen screenshots like this of other top review sections on letterboxd, this is what most people have to say and want to see on film. Vague high culture allusions "thy", "biblicial" and low culture turns (bottom comment), "vibe". To say they aren't getting towards something is wrong, they are, yet they are always at that stage, simply "getting at something". This kind of "take" is then a mental prison (to be expected of the women who predominantly post things like this, so what) worse to actually understanding and appreciating film on any level (let alone art) than a review listing things like "acting good/bad" as it is the allusion without the yearning.

I have to end this post here, sadly, for I am feeling very frazzled and fragmented. I myself have been trying to work towards actually writing on film in an intelligent and appreciative way, starting with a more basic x good y bad approach to build up a nuts and bolts filmic eye mixed in with some attempted insights along with a foray into the long form on this forum to develop my own voice as a "critic". I hope to spark some interest in the topic of film specifically.

[Sakana]

I've been playing Hacknet recently. It's an early '10s game based around hacking into computers to stop a secret conspiracy to rule the internet.

To a great extent, the game doesn't really simulate "real" hacking, or real coding in general. It's more focused on giving a proper impression of a terminal window and browsing through one. This isn't necessarily bad, but on it's own it would be weak aesthetically.

The second, and more important, aesthetic it uses is that of the hacking movie. Those 90s attempts at depicting hacking that were decried by Redditors as unrealistic, leading to the horrid fellatio of Mr. Robot.

You can see people whining in the comments about how that's not real hacking and how the animators didn't give a shit. Obviously, we know that they did. They were attempting to copy the feeling of hacking rather than the actions themselves. More importantly, they wanted to make hacking cool. Hacknet attempts this as well, and is fairly successful. There's a intense, pulsating soundtrack in your ears while hacking, you have to enter commands at a rapid pace while thinking about where to go and what to do at all times. The game has a fair bit of complexity, and leans into it. If you want to, you can {and are often forced to) do a lot of weird and interesting things in it.

Some of the aspects of the game detract from this. You constantly have to check your mailbox, which is tough to interface with and makes an annoying sound when checked. The act of breaking down a proxy isn't very fun or interesting, it's just spamming the same command constantly. Obviously, these are somewhat petty complaints, but they honestly detract from the flow-like state that makes up the primary experience involved in playing Hacknet.

The game only becomes more interesting aesthetically and mechanically towards the end. It goes beyond even terminal mimicry and hacker movie, and becomes a depiction of hacking unique to itself. It's legitimately a very interesting finale, and I like it a lot. What this game really gets right is how cool it is to be a hacker (at least, the coolness of the hacker fiction). You're constantly looking through pages for connections, trying to find the way to your objective, messing around with servers... it's a very nice experience. The writing feels quite authentic to the culture, a lot of stuff is put in there because the dev liked the idea.

The game was made by one Australian guy who didn't make anything of note before or after. It's quite enjoyable, despite it's flaws. I'd like to know your thoughts on it.

[Frank]

[...]
 

You're really straining to find things to be negative about.

Exploration is not the point. This is not an open world game. New Jerusalem, the puzzle areas, and the Megastructure are all deliberately constructed to have limits. The inhabitants of New Jerusalem are constantly complaining that it's too small. You're there to solve puzzles, not explore vast untamed nature -- you're 1k, not Lifthrasir. That said, natural beauty is part of the point. I will accept that the Megastructure looks like someone vomited in Substance Designer -- look at the System Shock remake for a perfect example of Your Brain on Substance. It's probably worthy of a whole post or thread. However, getting mad at a game because there are ferns misses the entire point of the fern criticism. The nature of nature itself and man's moral imperative regarding nature is a huge part of the story, and soaking in this (artificially constructed) natural paradise is very much to the point. They are visually evocative of the points being made in the story. The ferns belong there. Cats are a common motif for the same reason. Oh, but the story is Reddit so none of that matters. (The Somnodrome scene is very Reddit, I'll give you that.)

There are, however, serious issues with the game: 
- It's long for the sake of being long. People don't feel like they got their money's worth unless they get at least dozens of hours out of the game. That means you have to hear the same people regurgitate the same talking points ad nauseam so that they have something to say while you solve puzzle #1000. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the puzzles and finished every one of them, but it often felt like it detracted from the storytelling.
- The meta puzzles are either trivial to solve, tedious, or complete bullshit. One puzzle was almost impossible to solve because the engine visually culled the thing I was supposed to point a laser at. Chasing the spark and the X marks the spot "puzzles" are clearly placeholders for real puzzles they didn't have the time/ability to add. 
- Having to listen to hours of Yaqut's voice. Who the fuck programmed a robot to be gay?
- The insistence upon storytelling with optional text. Not just the "audio log" cliche but a whole fake message board, expedition groupchat, and DMs constantly prodding you.
- Mass Effect 3 ending. The conversations with Prometheus/Sphinx/Pandora feel like meaningful choices with real consequence. I always took a moment before entering the tower to collect my thoughts. Who would fire off half-baked responses to the Sphinx of legend and not expect dire consequence? And then there's Doge and the secret societies, all the NPCs, your companions... Then you reach the end of the game and you pick from one of three endings. The premise of the whole game is that Athena is trapped for years in mental loops trying to figure out the answer to an extremely consequential question, but for some reason she gives all responsibility for the God-Machine to someone she just met who's really good at solving puzzles. No convincing necessary, just have at it. Oh, but you get to influence who becomes mayor, like any of that matters. How game devs keep doing this is a mystery to me. Also, the bonus ending stuff you can unlock by completing optional stuff completely trivializes much of the thrust of the story: People accepting harsh realities that even a God-Machine can't fix.

[Mason Hall-McCullough]

I "100%"ed The Talos Principle 2 since my last post, but didn't actually complete the ending puzzles because it punishes you for doing fun skillful jumps across the water in the dystopia area; unlike every other area in the game it respawns you back to your previous position when you die, so due to the terrible design of this area you can be softlocked and forced to restart the entire set of puzzles from scratch, which happened twice and then I just quit the game. I might not finish it because the cutscenes felt like anti-rewards and I'm not invested in the story at all.

The star puzzles were indeed disappointing in Talos 2. Even some of the meta puzzles felt similar to the lever and sprite puzzles too, when they were often predicated on finding a hidden object or fixed connectors hidden somewhere in the large cluttered terrain. I felt like I got lucky with these a few times and resorted to cheating on one of them simply because I didn't see something. I actually had the most fun messing around with some unnecessary attempts to steal puzzle objects, and spent hours on South 1 going out of bounds until I was able to reach the edge of the world and fall without dying.

I can't tell if the puzzles in the sequel were easier or if I had already learned many tricks and approaches that made the new puzzle mechanics easier, I guess the distinction isn't that important but I was definitely challenged more by the first game.

Another thing I noticed related to the game advertising itself was how often characters would praise the puzzle design, and the design of the megastructure. Praising the player directly (which this game also does plenty of) makes them feel good, so they'll review the game positively. One way the player is praised indirectly is via another character attesting that the puzzle they just solved was hard and the genius FEMALE scientist who created it must have been very intelligent, but the puzzles weren't designed by a fictional character they were designed by the developer... It was also a stretch for the characters that live in an advanced utopia with a giant dome over the top to be so shocked by the existence of a giant pyramid, this felt distinctly like the pyramid was being hyped up using the character voices in a cynical attempt to inspire a sympathetic reaction in players.

The file size of the sequel is more than 10x of the original, and the graphics are not really much better. I don't know if this is somehow the fault of Unreal Engine (original Talos used a custom engine, for the sequel they used UE5) or if there were simply more textures/narration.

The great contrivance of these androids as Human; begs any number of questions about why they must find themselves in this particular configuration (why should there be multiple, discrete AI? Is it of any use when they are merely modified copies of a single progenitor? Why must they be installed onto humanoid frames? All this stuff is dead obvious, and there's a great deal more questions one could ask of course). Though, obviously, it's simply a matter of the writers not caring about the setting, they need human-equivalents, they cannot be bothered to make it even remotely plausible, the androids simply must be clumsily conformed to the shape of Human. Only the most shallow characteristics of their being androids are ever remarked upon, nothing distinct about their thought, behavior, culture etc. in manners one might expect.

Yeah, and as a result I find it very difficult to take the game's philosophical musings at all seriously. Unfortunately I have come to expect from video games these types of convenient stories that were clearly designed post-hoc to justify certain game mechanics, I wouldn't care much if I could just ignore the story like in the first game but it really shoves the story down your throat this time. This change was probably motivated by all the reddit feedback praising Talos 1's story (which was about as contrived and lazy).

[...]

You're really straining to find things to be negative about.

Exploration is not the point. This is not an open world game. New Jerusalem, the puzzle areas, and the Megastructure are all deliberately constructed to have limits. The inhabitants of New Jerusalem are constantly complaining that it's too small. You're there to solve puzzles, not explore vast untamed nature -- you're 1k, not Lifthrasir. That said, natural beauty is part of the point. I will accept that the Megastructure looks like someone vomited in Substance Designer -- look at the System Shock remake for a perfect example of Your Brain on Substance. It's probably worthy of a whole post or thread. However, getting mad at a game because there are ferns misses the entire point of the fern criticism. The nature of nature itself and man's moral imperative regarding nature is a huge part of the story, and soaking in this (artificially constructed) natural paradise is very much to the point. They are visually evocative of the points being made in the story. The ferns belong there. Cats are a common motif for the same reason. Oh, but the story is Reddit so none of that matters. (The Somnodrome scene is very Reddit, I'll give you that.)

There are, however, serious issues with the game: 
- It's long for the sake of being long. People don't feel like they got their money's worth unless they get at least dozens of hours out of the game. That means you have to hear the same people regurgitate the same talking points ad nauseam so that they have something to say while you solve puzzle #1000. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the puzzles and finished every one of them, but it often felt like it detracted from the storytelling.
- The meta puzzles are either trivial to solve, tedious, or complete bullshit. One puzzle was almost impossible to solve because the engine visually culled the thing I was supposed to point a laser at. Chasing the spark and the X marks the spot "puzzles" are clearly placeholders for real puzzles they didn't have the time/ability to add. 
- Having to listen to hours of Yaqut's voice. Who the fuck programmed a robot to be gay?
- The insistence upon storytelling with optional text. Not just the "audio log" cliche but a whole fake message board, expedition groupchat, and DMs constantly prodding you.
- Mass Effect 3 ending. The conversations with Prometheus/Sphinx/Pandora feel like meaningful choices with real consequence. I always took a moment before entering the tower to collect my thoughts. Who would fire off half-baked responses to the Sphinx of legend and not expect dire consequence? And then there's Doge and the secret societies, all the NPCs, your companions... Then you reach the end of the game and you pick from one of three endings. The premise of the whole game is that Athena is trapped for years in mental loops trying to figure out the answer to an extremely consequential question, but for some reason she gives all responsibility for the God-Machine to someone she just met who's really good at solving puzzles. No convincing necessary, just have at it. Oh, but you get to influence who becomes mayor, like any of that matters. How game devs keep doing this is a mystery to me. Also, the bonus ending stuff you can unlock by completing optional stuff completely trivializes much of the thrust of the story: People accepting harsh realities that even a God-Machine can't fix.

It might not be the focus but exploration was encouraged in Talos 1, actually because the levels were smaller and you would die to chromatic aberration if you wandered too far. It felt worthwhile to search for things that might help you solve the stars, because the density of relevant objects was reasonable such that there was no need for waypoints to be added to the UI. It was a good feeling in the original Talos exploring the tower and its surrounding area especially, and carrying around the axe. Talos 2 isn't an open world game, so why did they space out the puzzles more? That's the major issue I take with the sequel. I think this decision to space out the puzzles forced them to make the star puzzles shittier because more interesting secrets wouldn't hold up in these larger maps.



As an example, the whole top area that's partially cut off on the map is a forest with nothing in it, in addition to being partially separated by elevated terrain that's annoying to climb up/around. I ran around this area in my search for the blue spark, without a true map, the whole time unsure if I was missing something deeper in the forest or on the coastline because I couldn't keep both sides in view at the same time and my view was obstructed by many trees, then minutes later stumbled around to the blue spark on the coastline. This really wasn't fun, this island should've been halved in area at least.



This is what I meant when I said I felt the city was making a promise to players that it doesn't deliver on. You can't even go anywhere inside the tower other than directly to the helicopter. My first impression was that I would get to explore the entire dome or at least go to some of the interesting-looking buildings in that screenshot. Maybe the smaller cities you see outside the dome could have been where the puzzles were. On the way as you walk to the one place in the tower that it's actually possible to visit, giant windows show you an even wider angle of the dome city that you aren't allowed to explore. Obviously it would be unrealistic for this game to be actually open world, but it shouldn't show off this giant dome if you can only visit a few pointless buildings in 5% of it. It's an aesthetic deception that is effective on the naive as I discussed before.



The pyramid's interior is without a doubt the ugliest part of the game, yeah. But I didn't feel the beauty of nature in other areas, it felt more like someone had chaotically spammed ferns, shrubs and rubble everywhere, which is precisely what they did. Games with detailed textures and a love for detritus never actually create realistic natural environments (which isn't an achievable goal), but detail does signal "realism" which induces in goycattle the belief that the game is "realistic". The tree spam was also super annoying because they block your vision making large areas even harder to navigate.



I took this screenshot when I noticed that the shrub spam suddenly stopped in the region separating that level from the rest of the map. The game for a single moment forgot its deathly fear that a player might be required to walk on geometry that was not covered entirely by random "nature shit", and the effect was quite striking. The rest of the map looks like this (screenshot from Youtube so poor quality). Is the world really going to feel less natural and immersive if we removed 80% of that crap from the ground? I see your point that the story might not work well if the game looked like The Witness, but then maybe this story is not workable without making a game that looks ugly.

I agree with your criticisms of Talos 2, I had similar struggles trying to connect lasers over very long distances and tried to use the F3 photo mode for guidance which was barely effective. Although I assumed immediately that my responses to the conversations with the 3 holograms couldn't affect the story without the player being given a more obvious cue, so I didn't care at all about what they had to say and gave whatever random answer I felt like. The cutscenes in general felt like unfair punishments for succeeding in solving puzzles, especially the unskippable Athena ones where they obscure your vision with a crappy shader and you aren't even allowed to run around, only walk.

---

I have to end this post here, sadly, for I am feeling very frazzled and fragmented. I myself have been trying to work towards actually writing on film in an intelligent and appreciative way, starting with a more basic x good y bad approach to build up a nuts and bolts filmic eye mixed in with some attempted insights along with a foray into the long form on this forum to develop my own voice as a "critic". I hope to spark some interest in the topic of film specifically.

An interesting post that made me consider new ideas, I agree with your perspective on what it means to be a critic. It seems like we're currently getting the worst of both worlds with both the Steam score decided by morons and the IGN score decided by financial incentives more visible. I basically only discover new games/films/music from recommendations by people I know, and this could be part of why I arrived at that approach.