Burnwinter wrote:
Klaus wrote:
I thought it was a mediocre game personally.
I find I get some satisfaction from games that offer up weirdly emotional landscapes or creative mechanics, as well as the incredibly railroaded, straightforward cinematic experiences like the Naughty Dog games, or the dully repetitive ones like the Assassin's Creed series.
As a working stiff the only ones I find it really hard to get behind are the ones involving genuinely huge amounts of labour. I can't afford to spend 100-200 hours on a game any more.
I've enjoyed Witcher 3 but I have no idea what the crafting and potion system is supposed to achieve, it's rather boring, like filling out paperwork.
I think I just like games that have a strong emotional and asthetical connection, whether it's through narrative or mechanical interaction. (The distincion is actually misguided since narrative is quite often a form of game mechanic, but let's just go with it for the sake of a clear dichotomy.)
I never get that sense from Naughty Dogs' games. Or Rockstars' for that matter, Red Dead Redemption being the sole exception. I love things like Bayonetta, or Super Metroid, or Mario, or Rez. I'm addicted to old bullet hell shooters, and to the visual music experiments that Tetsuya Mizuguchi spent most of his career pursuing. There's just an aesthetic dimension and a spatial presence that is infinitely more rewarding for me to tap into than grinding for ten hours in a Final Fantasy game.
And I think things like Dear Esther and Kentucky Route Zero (and to a lesser but also a lot more accessible degree, Gone Home) really nail the opposite approach, where interactivity becomes metaphor and metaphor becomes narrative. KRZ in particular is a towering experience of the kind that is only really possible to achieve through interactive software; I can't say I've ever seen the like of it before. I've been waiting for the 4th episode for over two years now and I'll gladly wait two more if I have to. It's just unique.
What I dislike about a game such as The Last of Us isn't the narrative-heavy focus. It's that the game proposes to have a vision but really, it's just yet another world built around the need to justify certain game mechanics because they neither have the strength nor the ambition to design interaction around themes and ideas. And so you get prerendered films intercut with segments of tedious gameplay instead, gameplay where you look for boards to bridge gaps and shoot intruders in the face. To me it's a much bigger chore than, say, the crafting systems in Fallout which actually serve to make the world richer and deeper (at least until they lose their traction). People often say that they want a button to skip the cinematic sequences, but I kinda want a button to skip the gameplay instead when I sit down with The Last of Us. And then I realise that I'd just skip it for a story that is emotionally immature and, in its purest sense, bullshit. It's just not good writing.
I've got massive respect for a game like The Walking Dead and the way it builds scenes and then invites the player to act within them, by contrast. It's quite extraordiary how much better Telltale are than Naughty Dogs at not just telling emotionally evoking stories but also to give off a sense of danger and adrenaline... things you'd traditionally expect a pure action game to portray more effectively than a dialogue tree with a timer attached to it. To my mind, it's because it all means something.
