recent: tears of the kingdom, or as i like to call it botw 1.2, its the same thing all over again just with one or two added gimicks, the open world is dead, npcs are boring and nintendo just got away with it like that
not so recent: i cant stand persona 5, joker and his entourage are annoying teenagers, the time management is a horrible gameplay addition and the artstyle is just a visual overstimulation
with that being said,~~ plz dont kill me~~
Return of the Obra Dinn. I adore puzzle mystery games, but I can’t stand the art style and it felt like I was constantly fighting the mechanics and interface.
Also Inscryption. Often the cards would purposely not explain their mechanics, but I would use it and it would do something unexpected and one bad decision often would cause me to lose. I usually love deck builders like that but it was so frustrating to feel like I was being punished for trying new things.
I loved Inscryption, especially the first part (no spoilers…) but I can see why It may get frustrating at times. If anyone reading this hasn’t played It, I really recomend going in blind and give It a try
For me, Obra Dinn’s issue was I wasn’t solving a mystery, I was keeping accounts. We’re not trying to find a killer or unravel what happened, that’s been handed to us. We’re just filling out forms indicating how each individual died.
Right?! Thank you. That’s exactly how I feel about it, and yet all I’ve seen are people praising it left and right and comparing it to Outer Wilds, which is a masterpiece of an actual mystery game and far and away stratosphericly better than Obra Dinn.
Obra Dinn just… immediately hands you all the cool parts, and all that’s left is finding out tiny minutiae. And the setting is just a bog-standard example of its genre. And you already know the end, almost immediately, and aren’t given any reason to care about how it got there (and how it got there is very predictable, apart from minutiae like exactly how did each random crewmate die or ‘what was this guy’s name’). And the tools you’re given to ‘solve’ the ‘mystery’ basically just amount to “use this tool and see what happened directly!” - you don’t have to do any deduction or puzzling at all, you just have to use your eyes. There are no satisfying surprises. Just stuff like, “huh, I guess this person I don’t care about killed this other person I don’t care about, woopdedoo” or “this guy fell overboard I guess, oh well,” or whatever.
Sorry I’ve needed to vent about this one for a while I guess. :P
I did like the art style they went for. That was cool. Black and white is underrated.