i just wanna say i love the term “prestige 'em up” and i think we need to officially enter it into the Select Button lexicon.
also not a big shocker to learn it has that horribly uninspired adorkable tone to it, but it’s good to know i don’t have to play this game now.
and yeah Annapurna published KRZ and Outer Wilds, so not everything they published was bad. i’ve also heard that Gorogoa game wasn’t horrible (also i met the guy who made it several times and he’s nice enough)… but ever since i spent money on Edith Finch fully expecting to like it and hated it i haven’t wanted to take a shot on another one of those games
Annapurna was founded by Megan Ellison (Larry’s daughter), and is partially responsible for Sorry To Bother You as well as like Spring Breakers and multiple movies by PT Anderson. i think they have a generally good reputation in film as a studio that will help fund actually good movies and take chances on funding projects that wouldn’t otherwise get funded. not trying to come to her defense per se because she’s obviously rich as hell, just that my general impression is that she’s motivated to use that money to help actually good movies get made… which is partly why they have had financial problems.
i don’t think she has any involvement with Annapurna Interactive though. Annapurna Interactive is clearly trying to echo the film company but often less successfully. so yeah i think Annapurna Interactive’s place as this sort of funding for these obnoxious prestige indie game projects is annoying and i think they’re a big obnoxious gatekeeper. but i don’t think Larry Ellison has anything to do with actually running them. i could be wrong though!
As long as we’re slipping into a world of increasingly-tenuous commercial sustainability I think posh patrons are beneficial. Annapurna’s one of the only places doing the work to get games treated as a rich patronage activity just like films funding; that games straddle the line between tech product and art product has let them ride blue ocean funding when new devices like phones and VR open up, but apart from Annapurna they’re not getting opera patron funding yet.
What they are and do shouldn’t exist but as a fellow Cool Millenial my tastes line up fairly well and they’ve helped a bunch of friends do work (including the Judge Dredd/Sega Saturn/Rainbow Six blend Due Process, which finally exists!). Dipping into chunky pixels and blood helps forgive their slips into this grating, distinctly California tone.
anyway I mostly agree, like Apple Arcade I think they can be deadeningly middlebrow at times (Edith Finch being the obvious early example here) but easily a net positive especially considering that the peripheral market is no nobler
and just to be clear my posting Larry Ellison’s real estate portfolio wasn’t meant to be like “yeah but they’re BAD ACTUALLY because the ORACLE GUY has his NASTY FINGERS in them” but rather that their work is often functionally comparable to Larry Ellison’s real estate portfolio (we have updated the sins of the father to be more economically multithreaded!), though I’m not sure whether the contractors are better paid than the game devs
tbh i’m pretty suspicious of the whole indie publisher thing in general, but then i have been rebuffed by at least a few people in know in the space about that. so i dunno! it’s not my movement.
It might just be my comic book fandom speaking but I tend to think self publishing, while incredibly risky, is also probably the only main pathway to future success for individuals or small groups who aren’t already affiliated with more established institutional players.
Now, granted, I’m thinking of it in the sense of either you’ve been part of the machine and want to break away from it or you want to make enough of a name for yourself that the machine has no choice but to recognize you and the space you’ve carved out for yourself. No guarantees, very much a “get rich or die trying” kind of thing but I don’t see how else you do creative work and retain ownership of the IP and get to a point where you get little bits of royalty money for every bit of creative work you’ve done over your career (a thing that still happens in comics and as far as I can tell happens less so in video games).
Maybe self publishing is more realistic in comic books where one person can literally do all of the work (if they want to or are able), take on all the risk, easily find communities and audiences, and reap greater rewards over the longer term.
Whereas video games usually are not made and published by one or two people (though some are) so you really do need the cash a lot sooner rather than later.
kind of now realizing that the only asian american representation I can think of in video games is all our asias by sean han tani and takashi from nba street
I’ve finished Zelda 1’s second quest for the first time in a million years. I’m kind of glad that I don’t have this one as strongly memorized as the first. It was nice feeling my way through level 9.
I got disappointed by 3 games in a row including 2 prestige’em up here is a negative post
I’m all for maximum indie prestige minimalism like what In Other Waters is going for but, please, I need at least one hook to keep me going, please. Just One Hook. I’m not mad this isn’t Subnautica but I cannot look at an interface for 30 minutes, barely interacting with anything, reading videogamey narration and descriptions of alien flora I can’t look at, and still continue playing
You know how in Phoenix Wright in which you can look at 3d models of every item in your inventory, rotate them to find secrets etc. Can we all agree that this rules? Well in I Am Dead you can do that with every object in the game world, and even better you can also see through them to look at their insides find new items, focus on those, etc. This is amazing. Here is the thing : the first time I could do this I instantly found the object the game asked me to find and the game whisked me away from that room forever without asking. We are fundamentally at odds here. I just want to look at stuff but the game is trying to Tell A Story. They have this amazing tactile concept / interface and it’s only in service of an extremely linear indie prestige game (that, again, does not have enough hooks, and is too twee) It could have been splendid. Give me a house to explore as I want and a mystery to solve instead
Also this game has the archetypal prestige indie mini-game, which is « Push buttons until the image is less blurry, like you’re handling a very simple camera » I swear I’ve seen this like 4 times already
Kunai makes you realize how important environmental design is in a Metroidvania. You cannot just have lame platforms floating around and no interesting background details. Especially with these story and characters. There is 0 desire to explore or care. Castlevania’s architecture never make any sense but it at least tries to make you think it does.
had you stuck with the game you would see it’s actually a heartbreaking portrayal of a relationship that sours to the point where you and your partner start angrily and explicitly articulating story themes to each other
kind of fascinated with the distinct look of a lot of those prestige things. in my head i think of them as representing “portfolioisation” where the job of artists is just to create individual portfolio entries for aspiring content monopolists to use for leverage in the baroque hypothetical struggle to become the new netflix. in the same way that a portfolio piece is maybe less meant to act as a work in itself than to indicate a more general sense of potential still to be embodied. and that same sense of potential is maybe more appealing to people who already have more money than god than any specific set of aesthetic qualities or sales figures.
what are the aesthetics of potential? clean lines, soft colours, “warmth”, cosiness mixed with purpose, kind of like those mocked up images of new development sites with little nondescript and welcoming people strolling in the sun in the proposed new shopping district or what have you.
no love lost for the alternate kinds of commercial grotesque that these things are replacing but kind of entranced that everything is just morphing towards Rococo II instead (with edith finch as the equivalent for ‘the swing’?)
in maquette’s case, the entirety of the aesthetic (which does feel like the nadir of annapurna’s “aspirational” house style) revolves around trying to evoke the mood of a trendy coffee shop in san francisco. the relationship between two main characters begins because she spills coffee on him while ordering one for herself, the writing has that gushy twee tone which is meant to make you feel welcome, the cutscenes are based on very familiar diy sketchbook aesthetics, the licensed music is emotional, inoffensive and performed by “the locals”. I found it suffocating – its overwhelming agreeableness leaves no space for a real conflict, unexpected texture or prodding emptiness, the relationship breaks down simply because there was no communication, lines like “I’m searching for closure but I’m not sure what closure is, things end, that’s the closure” literally pop up in the air with no grounding whatsoever and come off as platitudes – but even worse, it takes an incredibly evocative gameplay concept of shifting perceptions, trying to think of everything on a few levels at the same time, and limits its endless imaginative potential to familiar forms of a marketable indie movie and coffee shop decor. the game constantly implies it wants you to think on a bigger scale while completely failing to do the same thing, it’s always stuck in the smallest maquette there is