itās like they really want people to pirate their games
this looks cool
no idea how it will be as a game but the setting and art is great
hereās some more on the historical inspiration of the game
Feels like Shank with much less cringey character designs
seriously? they put NPC in a red air quality alert city, running through bridge from the industrial area.
I remember when this felt slightly fresh compared to the usual media glut and now Iām just as sick of seeing this in my feed as any publisher.
I liked the look of two or three of them fwiw
No hate on any individual game as thereās usually a few decent art-styles or premises amidst most of these media parades. I think Iām just becoming longitudinally numb to the perpetual brand festival that blossoms from the undead corpse of E3.
iām starting to feel similar about boomer shooters as i am about wholesome games as in likeā¦ they are both harboring these increasingly irritating culture warrior subcultures that is more about some kind of weird identity that people have created more than itās about the actual games themselves. because all of them being presented up against each other makes each one look more disposable and less novel. itās just another cult to join i guess. another front in the idiotic constantly ongoing culture war. itās all so predictable.
I hadnāt heard boomer shooter before seems like a very ill fitting term for old fps games and the newer ones trying to bring back that style considering that was when they were more abstract and creative and modification friendly and now shooters are reactionary military propaganda trying to be tom clancy movies
Great idea for a farming sim that disrupts the wholesome/edgy binary
yeah idk iāve been feeling really weird abt the whole push for āwholesomeā/ācuteā(not even cute!!! nasty as fuck!!!) games the last couple years, at least since undertale came out and all a subsection of itās fanbase could take from it is that it made them feel good lol. not that thereās āinherentlyā something wrong with that ig but the way ppl in their pursuit of seeing more Positive Catharsis Generator games be made created this language towards serious/deliberately skeevy or violent or grim or whatever games that has at best a really snide tone to it and at worst is engaging in like projective moralizing about what kind of person someone has to BE to ENJOY something this FILTHY!!! and i think the necessary association people compulsively draw between the signifiers of the media someone consumes and their interiority is a really corny and useless narrativization of someoneās motives.
thinking about games as like, a fantasy gemeinschaft simulator like stardew valley and as a way to simulate having friends in a cathartic way like NITW or Smile For Me is to me inherently the same kind of escapist āholodeck simulator of a life that u dont hateā thing as something like God of War or Call Of Duty is but just serving a different consumer demographic and i really really feel like making things in that spirit is artistically flaccid (or at least severely clips the horizons of what youāll be able to accomplish with what youāre doing).
at least with Call of Duty itās not that hard to explain to somebody why it kinda sucks, people get sooooo defensive about their favorite inoffensive timewaster games when you try to have a conversation about the mindset they promote and how toxic it is to games as a language that can relate to and express greater interiorities, i really feel like these games and the consumer culture around them encourage a mindset of viewing artistic work in terms of the function it can serve in generating a dim sensation that you arenāt in your life and that youāre experiencing something fantastic and novel, and i feel like thatās a really reactionary way to frame things.
the games that interest me are ones that both encourage me to think critically about the game and itās rules as a game space and about the space and world around me and in general ask myself questions about what my goal is at the moment, games that instead encourage me to not ask questions and rely on my uncritical emotional reactions to best allow the game to mold me into the experience of the fantasy role i paid for so i can experience the satisfaction of pretending my life has as much moment to moment narrativistic catharsis as a curated universal studios video ride version of my ennui daydream of a way to use my time that would fulfill me.
not to be this person but constructing a mechanism of catharsis deliver through manipulating the uncritical emotional reactions of your perceived audience is a pretty storied characteristic of fascist art regardless if the emotions being played to are summery or bloodthirsty, it just takes on less of a Defend The West tone here and more of that strata of separatist Cottagecore behaviors/priorities thatās enabled by and co-dependent with that same blood and soil shit (thinking a lot here about middle class liberal Iām With Her women ive met at my college that brag about how they make it work with their hardcore trump guy husband.)
anyway the REAL problem here is that these games arent even usually good at being cute and they miss the point entirely, the best use of cute cartooning aesthetics to me is to contrast them with lots of scary and violent shit and play with the exaggerated and vacillating emotional tones an abstracted representation actually lets u do. like give me cute mascot games that are completely evil-aspected and morally rotten and [REDACTED USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST] happens to all the characters AND THEN still ask and expect me to empathize with and show kindness to my surroundings, thatās the sort of thing that would actually be touching to me. every time i see a new Wholesome Coffee Shop game that has annapurna interactive artstyle i feel like this guy arbys guy doesnt like arbys - YouTube
the row over boyfriend dungeon was this issue in miniature and even that game felt a skosh indulgent to me
yeah that game seemed pretty milquetoast and whatever, i didnāt play it, but watching people freak out about it somehow slightly chafing their expectations if anything really emphasizes to me how extreme of a position this mindset can turn into if even crowd pleasing mid like boyfriend dungeon is like too unchaste for people lmao
this mode is also pretty played out to me honestly, but at least it isnāt an oppressive one
Yeah I hate this crap. What annoys me there is that is the shittiest kind of subversive. A nice thing, but twisted. Like fuck off. The world has good and bad things but suddenly making hyper violent Barney is the lowest kind of needing to insult children for believing kindness can exist in this world. I believe all that kind of artās creators get off on the thought of a child or parent mistakenly exposing it as some extremely petty revenge for their own upbringing.
The flip side is the āwholesomeā grates at me because it is trying to construct the safe reality where the bad canāt happen to a 25 year old. Which usually means everyone is just hideously awkward and Whedon quippy and only exists in this bubble of 25 year olds imagine reality should be, but also should be allowed to be shitty and say curse words.
I am circling back that I think 13 Sentinels hits the bullseye of ultimately being a story about goodness and intention and caring winning over nihilism and hatred. Of wanting to convey an idea, even with the mess involved in it. A Short Hike also does this.
Something good exists in this world.
Alternately: The Testimony of Trixie Glimmer Smith makes cute and creepy and earnest and horrifying all work together in a way that anything limiting itself to Wholesome OR Gory couldnāt actually achieve. Thatās how I read
Thereās an opportunity of completeness missed by making your game Only Wholesome, or Only Subversive.
On a personal note, purely hopeful stories always strike me as naive and grating but put that down to taste. All stories should end with a note of hopelessness because otherwise I canāt accept them as anything but fantasy.
Also I fucking loved Super Glitter Rush and that was completely cutesy so I dunno, I guess Iām a land of contrasts
Anyway letās do this again next year
in too short an explaination that game has āpersonality frictionā in a way so many of these things avoid (by silently or passive protagonist?) .
I think we need a generation or two of video games going back to just being like neon abstract shapes zooming around, both as penance and palate cleanser