i don’t necessarily like tweeness at all, i thought the game was structured in a way that criticized that whole sensibility and turned it on its head by starting out very twee and then moving to something else… that sorta feels like the point of the game to me.
3 Likes
i don’t think anyone who calls anything “the best of x” should be trusted anymore
phrase your opinions like it matters to you personally please
7 Likes
I find it weird how the Shovel Knight’s devs cited Zelda 2’s swordplay as a inspiration when it seems like they only got a small portion of it. I mean, both games have common enemies that are supposed to serve as mirror matches, and the contrast between those fights is night and day.
I still think it’s an pretty good game, it’s just that the space of “pretty-good-but-formulaic megaman games” is super crowded as is. Plague/Spectre Knight were at least better in terms of providing interesting movesets. (King Knight’s moveset felt overdesigned and kind broke my brain tbh.)
Anyhow, few takes fill me with more ennui than hearing some dork or another say that Celeste “is better than any platformer of the classic era” or some nonsense like that.
smash hagiography
5 Likes
it just shifted to another type of twee-ness in the second half in my opinion. It’s been a while since I played through it but I felt kind of like the game just did what I expected a game of its type, esp with the dustbound, who were the major source of twee-ness for me. Offering my a pastoral fantasy to contrast with the authoritarian comfort of the Center.
Like, its not the condescending tone of the Center that registered as twee for me, it’s the simplistic morality of the game that felt twee. The fact that I was expected to chafe against the limitations the Center imposed on people’s lives, and to have those rebellious impulses validated by a bunch of late game npcs. I felt like I was being talked down to.
The game didn’t speak to my experiences of queerness because the contrast on offer was between two different sorts of anodyne experience.
edit: ok I skimmed through a longplay video to remind myself why the game, while aesthetically pleasant and with some creative moments, never really impressed me in terms of writing.
It was the conversation with Beatty that opened with “Oh sweetheart”, a phrase that sets me on edge immediately as I prepare to be treated like a child by yet another adult-figure (but this time a queer coded adult!)
And now… isn’t it time to form yourself once again? Isn’t it time to take that power of adaptation, and redirect it towards what you truly believe? As long as you are alive, Nova, that is your gift. You can always become something new.
It’s just so treacly
2 Likes
Oh my god yes. It’s so unearned. You don’t even have a shield! It’s literally just the downthrust so just say Ducktales
I really like shovel Knight but it feels like peanut butter to play
5 Likes
insult to pb imo
2 Likes
i don’t necessarily “personally identify with” the tone of that game or whatever, it just felt appropriate for what the game was i guess. if i wrote something i wouldn’t write it that way, but inside its own universe it somehow felt appropriate to me. i think the kind it evoked the potentially lost in translation very morally simplistic games like Zelda 64 or whatever that still somehow evoke warm feelings because the world feels kind of both quaint but janky or unstable and there’s something about that makes you feel it more.
not saying “i agree with” that sensibility, whatever that even means tbh, but it works as a commentary on the whole construction of a lot of games as these whole small controlled nostalgia worlds that you secretly know don’t really reflect real life at all. so you have find a way to reconcile real life with what’s being presented to you in those games, which is both sad and painful and also reveals the inherent instability and fragility of the constructed digital world and piece of software you’re engaging with.
when i reflect back on how most of those early 3d nintendo games have stayed in a lot of people’s consciousness in particular (esp like given the insane nostalgia they seem to hold and the amount they are speedrun) it makes me feel sad… because those virtual worlds can never hint at anything beyond Nintendo’s overly simplistic approach to storytelling and worldbuilding and can never escape being contained by the sort of consumer-first family-first ideology of the games. they’re inherently hollow, in spite of the occasional element that exists on the edges and suggests at something deeper. that’s something that Anodyne 2 really prods at for me in a way i haven’t seen any other games do.
3 Likes
Yeah I suppose in the end I didn’t like the writing, but I acknowledge that the writing worked for the people it worked for. I don’t particularly care for games about games, or games about nostalgia for games, or whatever. Its not an interesting or challenging sort of intertextuality for me.
Like, I think basic anti-escapist parables have limited meaning for me. Parables at all, really. I don’t think Anodyne 2 intended to be pandering but I felt like I was being pandered to the entire time. It felt like a game that told me from the first moment “this is an art game with a lot to say” but as I played it I waited for it to challenge me in any way (thematically, mechanically, aesthetically) and that never happened. It felt like training wheels for “art”.
1 Like
My take If a game has thematic content, it’s going to be obvious really fast, because games are often lacking it though? I don’t think it’s just anti-escapist, I think it’s a lot more about trying to figure out where you fit into in a world where you were presented with one mode of thought, and then begin to question it? Which I immediately connected with, since that was a big part of my last five years. And still is now.
The comforting language didn’t seem like it was talking down to me as the player, both because I’ve needed that sort of comfort and because it’s a fictional character going on a journey and needing that to develop. Which makes sense, because shit like that did help me, and often does help me. I don’t think it’s patronizing at all, it’s very honest for a particular kind of person, and one that I found extremely relatable.
Plus on top of all that, I really liked the writing in the smaller stories, and just the craft and and and ingenuity of the the extremely small team. It felt really, really, personal in a way I’m not used to games feeling, even allegedly very personal ones, because it felt like it was trying to examine everything it was riffing on, and contextualizing it.
I dunno, I thought it was one of the best games I’ve played in my life?
2 Likes
I think my life experiences are too outside the purview of the game for me to be able to have any connection to the narrative. I’m trying very hard not to be mean about the writing even though it scuttled the experience for me
1 Like
That’s fair, I’ve been slowly coming to grips with the specifics of my childhood being very, very, strange and singular compared to a lot of folks I’ve met, and I definitely react to stuff differently. I think that’s why the comforting, smothering tone it initially has resonated with me a lot because…well it kind of reminded me of the kindness of my folks and how much the stuff I was raised to believe failed me in a way that was intertwined with this kindness that’s very reminiscent of how Anodyne plays out.
4 Likes
If nothing else Celeste is a top-tier speedrunning game. And one of the very few that was successfully designed to be one on purpose by the developers. (E.g. Axiom Verge also added a “speedrunning mode” but nobody cares.)
And I don’t think it’s unreasonable to treat speedrunniness as a proxy for quality and depth, given the acute pressure it puts on a game’s structure, although that is only one of many valid perspectives (and one that originates more from a sports value system than an art value system).
3 Likes
i think the fact that it is good for speedrunners is a reason why it’s so popular, and why it’s so popular is a big reason why people continue to sing its praises (because as we all know, in videogame world, popular = good to many many people including “respected” critics who don’t want to piss off fans) though i don’t think a work should be evaluated on that very much at the end of the day. i was just blown away by people acting like that several things that Flash platformers started doing collectively sometime in the mid-00’s were any kind of great mechanical innovation when presented in Celeste. it’s like a huge group of people just collectively got amnesia and forgot all that stuff was a thing, or something.
@felix and @ellaguro play The Messenger. More and more I am convinced it is the best of the current whatever group you want to put these various indies in.
1 Like
tbh i played some of it and it didn’t really strike me much at all. just felt like a decent retro Ninja Gaiden clone. i understand it does some things later but wasn’t too impressed by what i had spoiled to me. but i didn’t play it that much.
The sword juggling mechanic gets a lot of mileage.
1 Like
A lot of the mechanics in Celeste were iterations on things that the same creator was doing as far back as 2004 in the Jumper series. It’s possible that some Flash games were doing similar things at around the same time, though. I find it difficult to pinpoint the origins of trends and mechanics, even though I was immersed in indie games at the time.
11 Likes
i think about the nonsense that this is
5 Likes
lol this looks like one of the forbidden developer zones from .hack, that rules
2 Likes
5 Likes