idk, different strokes, but it’s crazy to me how visually crummy this game looks! like, what’s the term for that school of landscape portraiture intended to put the viewer in the position of an idealized manor lord gloating over his or her property? where all the scenery seems to bend obsequiously towards the gaze, where nothing in the landscape comes across as strongly as the sheer bland complacency embodied in the viewpoint itself - the fantasy of being the one who watches? this is like the videogame equivalent of it. even in-game video footage all looks so exasperatingly managed, in the same way as the fake screenshots that games tend to put on the back of the box - the ones that use dynamic visual compositions not so much to convey a feeling of dynamism as the feeling of looking at it, of getting to be the connoisseur-eye that owns and apprehends all this activity without necessarily having to be involved in it.
it’s creepy to me. i feel like i’ve watched a few different pieces of video footage of this and like, for all the detail, nothing actually registers in them beyond a sense of strange bland adequacy of composition, like a forcefield that no other visual information can get past. in the vein of games that play themselves: games that look at themselves, so you no longer have to. i think one of the traditional minor pleasures of 3d games has been the sheer volume of “bad” (useless, inscrutable, unnecessary, banal) images that they engender, as the camera grinds and clips its way through concrete walls and into empty corners. it’ll be one less reason to check in on any of these things as that gets replaced by tours through someone’s schmaltzy colour-balanced environmental art portfolio.