I tried doing a detective story in this and it quickly turned from me chasing a criminal through the woods into me constantly having out of body experiences and ended with a confrontation where I shot the man who killed my partner, who also happened to be said partner, and then shot my partner to death again. Everyone who got shot in this story refused to die so I had to commit suicide by stepping off a building and finally see the sun rise for the first time in years…
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i wonder which of those categories Death Stranding would fall under …
i get that, definitely. it’s more of a baseline connection that i feel the need for, where I’ll fall out of an experience quickly if i become too self-aware while playing it (that may be from something as simple as not engaging with the controls, to an ”i can see the design document" situation).
i recognise that it’s also something of a buzzword for selling realism or ”theme park rides”, but being overtly conscious of that design mentality is exactly the kind of thing likely to pull me out. so i may be using the term kind of flexibly.
metroid ii for instance, despite its simplicity, is an intensely immersive game for me: the stark visuals and urgent sound design speak to me on a core level and i get this sensation of staring deep into the guts of a machine, as if i were playing the gameboy itself as much as anything made by human hands - and that i’d hardly know any better if at some point i glitched over into undesignated regions of memory, or stuff buried on the cart that was never actually meant to be seen or played.
so i guess that’s a bit more like “the matrix” as people were discussing before, instead of a convincingly real place - except that rather than reading it, i was hopelessly (and wonderfully) lost in its noise
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punching Jesus in heaven because I didn’t know how to process emotions was the culmination of my Conquering an Island with One Hundred Men so I made a monument to myself then I made monuments until I was out of rock from which to make monuments then I combined all the monuments into one giant monument
then I married the monument
it got locked into a cycle of finishing everything with “You send the statue back to its home town to celebrate your victory.”
I crowned it King of the Whole World.
eventually I tired of and tried to destroy it but still it ended everything with “You send the statue back to its home town to celebrate your victory.”
nothing I did would let me escape from the long shadow of the monument I had built to my own vanity
but it didn’t game over so I asked if I was in heaven
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I like how death isn’t the end in this game, I got killed by pirates while trying to escape the Empire, and so I became a ghost and possessed one of the pirates and made a horde of wealth stealing and selling spices. Then I killed all the pirates when they told me they sold my daughter into slavery, then realised actually she’s just right there next to me.
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sucking air through my teeth after spending half an hour on the music puzzle in Quern because my brain refused to read the music staff they drew with 6 bars, not 5, why would you do that
otherwise this is very nice
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My favourite AI Dungeon experience so far was when my peasant Herbert Cucumber III was summon by the king to deal with the issue of the elves stealing our crops by presenting to them a bunch of carrots (the kingdom had no gold to offer).
The nearest elf happened to be in the throne room so I just walked over, gave him the carrots and then told the king the job is done, so he invited me to his house which apparently actually belonged to the character of my previous playthrough, Herbert Cucumber II. Then I found a secret passageway that led to a room where I could hear some mysterious sobbing. When I tried to find the source of the sobbing the game crashed
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I died at one point and then just insisted “I rise from the dead alive after all” until the game finally accepted it.
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Should have given the president a bunch of carrots
I beat Hollow Knight then looked at the hoops I would have to endure to get the true ending and went nah.
It’s clearly a new classic. It is a big coherent game with secrets and mysteries and good movement and a fine style and has the lumps many other classics have.
I still didn’t really like it (Play The Messenger y’all.)
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Whoa, In my playthrough just now, I entered my cabin and a voice came to me saying his name is Herbert and he wants to help me because he could hear me crying.
Apparently I am trapped in a magical realm where the elves don’t like carrots as much as they used to
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congratulations you’ve gotten past the very worst puzzle in the game
When practical jokes go horribly wrong.
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Quantum Break is great.
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might this partially be because most videogames don’t hold up to conscious critical reflection? fan-cultural preoccupation with "not ruining the magic,” spoilers, etc. in part reflects cultural production that quickly becomes unsavory if it doesn’t maintain its spell. likewise, it makes sense to have a negative reaction to becoming conscious of the design document behind a game if it points to a shallow, cynical or manipulative construction. on the other hand, do you think you would “lose” that feeling if you closely analyzed how metroid ii was constructed, for instance? i find the artworks i hold most dear more interesting, beautiful, complex, astonishing as a whole the more i examine and learn about them in detail.
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Fwiw I may be “part of the problem” because I desire the escapism and will hand-wave quite a lot (probably subconsciously!) to get what I want out of a game.
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I’m of the same mind. Where are all of the Brechtian games?
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speedrunning frequently entails digging deeply into games, and i find this regularly dovetails with increased appreciation, even as i’m actively “spoiling the magic” or w/e
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