In some ways that’s fine, those are canonically well-constructed, pleasing games. I don’t really have a problem with Celeste displacing Mario Bros., Hollow Knight displacing Metroid, and Tunic displacing Zelda. And you have to start somewhere and understand what well-constructed means in the first place.
But we’re all adults. We’ve all played enough good games already.
i do! lol. because there’s a lot more out there doing similar things in more interesting/substantive ways now than there was in the 80’s. and i think there’s an interesting cruchiness to some of that 80’s stuff that’s gone now even tho i don’t hold up Nintendo as the end all be all.
also pretty much my entire life is predicated on not accepting cliches or ‘conventional wisdom’, and i’m having a good time with it tbh.
I’m assuming you’re talking about students here? College is a great time to be pushed from craft to insight
i mean the people who go to study games in school is still a small subset of people. i’m more talking about people who work for the game industry or are youtubers or work for the press. also there’s basically no place for kids in school to have someone hand them Steambot Chronicles or whatever, lol. my experience is kids going to game school who dont’ just want to run a game company or whatever and actually want to engage with more esoteric things is an even smaller group of people.
Yeah
I’m far past expecting people who make games to have tastes beyond middlebrow. The bottom dropped out of the culture of criticism we started building alongside the indie boom and I think that’s what sustains growth and exploration.
I get most purchase from being endearingly enthusiastic about weird stuff and entertainingly scornful and curmudgeonly about mainstream stuff. As long as people trust me that I can give an honest appraisal outside my wheelhouse they don’t shut me out.
I get a lot out of asking junior designers to bring me weird things they’ve found. I think a lot of them have pockets of niche interest that need to be nurtured until they have a language and can define those aesthetics.
100% and i think that can happen as game stuff grows and people are more into following niche communities. there’s just nothing out there to encourage or nurture niche interests outside of maybe like, some youtubers or discords or wahtever. it’s just still a bit far away from coalescing into something. maybe we’ll see where things are at 10 years from now, if most of the US and Europe aren’t complete fascist hellscapes by then.
Tunic was frustrating as heck. Had a decent puzzle hook that ultimately leads nowhere (nowhere being the black pillars of The Witness). And then it’s tied to one of the worst Zelda Souls nostalgia blobs I’ve ever witnessed.
Rain World is the only game in this space without a character with a disproportionately large head.
rain world is incredible definitely, some of the best audiovis stuff in any game, the way it updates stuff like prince of persia & another world into this totally exploded sprawling maze is so compelling. movement feels like leaning to use a new limb which is always my fav
mentioned before about being left feeling cold by tunic for it’s stodgy nostalgia + it trying to do a The Witness, which absolutely does not work without that games tunnel vision and obsession with reducing clutter.
only got a couple of hours into hollow knight though might go back to it at some point-- felt sort of like going through the motions too much like u could just extrapolate the entire game from the first area, maybe im wrong and it has some interesting surprises?
Sounds like I need to check out Rain World
It gets better and there are definitely surprises. My personal experience of Hollow Knight is that the second area (Greenpath) was the most boring in the game, and the first area was the second most boring.
I don’t remember exactly why it is I kept playing (I usually quit games that start poorly with great prejudice): probably it’s that I read some interesting SB post or screenshot about something later in the game that whetted my interest just enough.
That said, at this point 6 years later, I recommend waiting for Silksong anyway. Even after Hollow Knight starts to get better, there remain several obvious game design problems that other explor-action games manage to avoid, so they’re likely to get fixed. Hollow Knight will still be there later if it turns out you really enjoy Silksong and want to experience its precursor.
i like Journey as well tbh but not for like ‘omg games can make u feel… things’ type bs-- the visual design is very good and has a sort of like 2000s pictoplasma / vector art thing going on which i like. ambient 3d platformer is something i get a lot out of for whatever reason lol, floating around in sort of vacant desert and bumping into another rando and chirping at them. though interesting you mention the music perhaps clouding ur judgement cause the music in thatgamecompany’s stuff is one of the biggest sticking points for me, esp in flower haha. flow has great audio at least.
i got to greenpath i think (the garden area) so maybe i will go back to it if those are the worst parts hah
i think i mostly just like the art/environment design of Hollow Knight, and the scale of it. i also like insects, so games heavily featuring bugs has a lot to do with it. i’m not sure it does anything super innovative gameplaywise but i found it a pleasant experience the whole way thru that does a good enough job translating that sort of Metroidvania formula over… aside from some sorta annoying boss encounters. the half-baked Souls mechanics i could take or leave, but they didn’t really bother me that much either. there were some interesting bonus areas in the game too. it feels appropriately rated as a game to me, but i also am fully on board people not getting or liking it since there’s plenty of prestige indie titles i don’t get either.
i did play it at the same time as Knytt Underground and i tend to think about Knytt Underground way more though. i’m not sure that it’s better, but i just have a lot of unanswered questions about it.
the main takeaway from this is rain world is an absolute all timer.
at this point i think it’s the one videogame i would choose. not necessarily my favourite, but i’ve gone back to it over and over and over and it always surprises me like nothing else does.
was wondering about Knytt Underground! i played Knytt and Within a Deep Forest wayyyy back in the day and saw the name but didn’t know anything else
will give it a playthru
The gem among those games for me is Knytt Stories. You can create your own custom areas (though the mechanics are quite limited) and it was fun to see what people came up with at the time. (Probably no one messes with it anymore.)
it’s worth it. just feels like a lower budget, alternate universe version of that kind of game. i’m not sure it’s better in a conventional sense, but it felt memorable in its own way, esp once you get outside of the first second of the game. Nifflas’s game “Uurnog Uurnlimited” is a more left-field, experimental game in the vein of like Doki Doki Panic/SMB2 that i liked a lot also… and is shorter. that’s probably my favorite of his games.
Ooooh, what’s everyone’s take on Ori and the Blind Forest? I liked the escape sequences but the rest of game felt otherwise middling compared to how well received it was by critics.
knytt underground’s pretty cool. I like how well hidden some of the areas are
I played both Ori games a couple years ago when an old XBOX came into my possession and I remembered being curious about them. They are fun and have nice visuals, but they don’t really do anything new that I can remember. (And those nice visuals are maybe a little too flashy at times, bordering on garish.)
I’d recommend Ori over, for example, that recent Deedlit game, which I found competent but ultimately just kind of a watered-down SOTN. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you’ve already played SOTN and want more of the same (which was the case for me because I played it to the end), but you know how some games give you a persistent feeling that you’d probably be better off using your time in some other way? And I don’t mean necessarily being productive, but maybe just playing a different game that would be a more meaningful experience.
One game of this type that I played a little and quickly abandoned is Shovel Knight. In that case, for whatever reason, I just couldn’t do it.
Edit: Because of this discussion, I listened to Celeste music for the that last part of my work day. It’s still excellent, in case anyone was wondering whether it had somehow diminished in quality over time.
Gran Turismo 7 (PS4)
Back to check on it after almost a year away.
Selling, buying… Got a Gr.1 but still can’t find any tracks I want to drive repeatedly.
