"well-written" videogames

[Broco]

May as well dig up my Big Posts about well-written games

Elsinore:

I can't believe today was a good play (Games you played today)

I played through Elsinore over the weekend. I was a little worried before playing it would be like eating my vegetables but it kept me engaged, especially thanks to being able to fast-forward time and having the events I’d already seen reoccur regardless of whether or not I witness them. At its best, the game plays up the ridiculousness of what can happen in Shakespeare. The melodramatic highlights for me were the ghost ending, Hamlet killing Claudius and the hilariously creepy and nihilistic…

Hypnospace Outlaw:

just want to go back to 1999 (hypnospace outlaw)

I just finished Hypnospace Outlaw after installing it yesterday and wound up playing nonstop until I finished it. I installed this thinking I was just going to nostalgically enjoy a pastiche of 90s design styles, but the game delivers a lot more than that. [08%20AM] First, it kept me engaged with a clever and satisfying search-keyword-detectiving and rules-enforcement game – like a combination of Her Story and Papers Please. [05%20PM] But what this game is really about is a love letter to …

Half-Life 2:

Full-Life

In Portal, the voice acting, scriptwriting, clinical lighting, humming sound design was all from people preexisting at Valve, and you can see those elements as a progression of HL2. In particular, the fantastic dialogue was all in HL2, merely underplayed there. Dr. Breen’s script and voiceacting doesn’t get much attention, but it’s politically insightful about a particular subculture. He’s a West Coast futurist, confident his knowledge of science and long-term historical perspective gives hi…