This is a followup to @[email protected] ‘s recent thread for completeness’ sake.

I’ll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre… in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of “doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book” puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.

So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.

  • Hexagons [e/em/eir]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    My two are Ori and the Blind Forest and also Soma.

    I played Ori several years ago, so my disappointment with and rage at that game have cooled. It was bad though. The art style didn’t look at all cohesive, but rather like there were assets from two or three different games. The story was generic and boring, but yet somehow confusing at the same time. I played through the Ginso (?) Tree escape, and I hated the movement the whole time. It was too floaty and felt imprecise. (But people speedrun it, so the movement is actually probably plenty precise, it just felt bad to me.) I also absolutely despised how I could never tell whether the environment was safe to land on or would kill me instantly. And this isn’t even getting into the combat, which basically everyone agrees is bad. I don’t know, I wish I had liked Ori, it feels like it should be right up my alley, but I hated it so, so much.

    Soma I played recently, and I’m still seething about how much time I spent on that stupid, shitty game. Its story wasn’t deep and I didn’t care about the characters. The game pulled the exact same story trick 3 fucking times, and apparently expected you to still be surprised by it the third time? Yeah, no, I’d rather experience a sci fi story that doesn’t treat me like I’m too stupid to understand it. The monsters also fucking sucked, they weren’t scary, they were just fucking annoying. It was always extremely easy to figure out their gimmick, and once you’d done that, it was just a matter of exploiting it and hoping you didn’t fuck up or get lost in the overly dark environment that all looked the fucking same. Also, I hated having to try and find the lever or button or switch or whatever that I needed to interact with. It was very hard to tell what was background non-interactable stuff and what was the tiny little switch that was blocking my progress. If the story had been good, I could have forgiven the gameplay, but it was just like tech bro’s first sci fi kind of plot, I fucking hated it.

    • FourteenEyes [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think they were intending to surprise you with the perspective switch. Simon clearly doesn’t get it, but they’re trying to make it very clear just how horrifying what is happening to him is.

      But yeah, I like the game and I have to say it’s a much less miserable experience when you turn off the monster aggro. It’s existential horror and it’s a bit hit or miss at times, but I feel like when it does hit it hits hard.