Jikkal, it’s perfectly reasonable to have strong feelings about a game like this. I understand why you might be defensive. Especially given how toxic it seems that anonymous writer was. That said, it did seem like that first poster had a point. Games are sort of elitist, and you proved it for him. While players like you might like the game, you need to understand that not everyone can be like you, having played all of these games, including Legend of Zelda games, Monkey Island, and even an obscure freeware game released by this otherwise unknown developer 5 years ago.
If a game requires thousands of hours of background knowledge, it isn’t fair to say “you can only judge it if you’ve played everything it references.” Look at things like Star Wars, where not every bit of nerd lore is known by the reviewers. They can have valid viewpoints. Look at how they deem The Last Jedi amazing in general, and criticize the lapses in its structure much more accurately than any detail obsessed fan.
Despite our disagreement, this post really helped inspire me to make a blog post for this week. Video games are strange in that they have such continuity compared to other mediums, and I want to ask if that is good for the art form.
By continuity, I do not just mean the process by which games are inspired and take inspiration from other games. Continuity also affects how games are played. For example, playing Sonic the Hedgehog is not just an experience that stands alone. The average player was familiar with games like Mario, even back when the Sega Genesis version of the game was released in 1991, six whole years after Super Mario Brothers. They knew how controls generally worked. They had already learned that it was fun to go fast. In other words, they could enjoy the game more because they knew what to expect.
This quarter, we’ve run into a handful of games that seem to rely on this principle. Galatea was really confusing since it seemed to ask the player to chat, but only responded to verbs. A couple of people on Discord seemed to take to it like a fish to water, while others floundered trying to get any response out of Galatea at all.
A large number of narratively acclaimed games are installments in large franchises, like the very confusingly numbered Xenogears, or the unnumbered Fire Emblem games, or the Nier franchise, or Bioshock, or Mass Effect… the list goes on. This poses a problem. So many of these games require either immense genre knowledge, learned reflexes, or even just knowing what happened in the last game in order to proceed or have a good time.
While iteration is good, too much can lead to a sort of game development inbreeding. It should be the responsibility of game developers to make sure their games remain accessible to all. There is No Game is a good example of how this can fail. This game essentially requires that its audience be experienced gamers. The players should be completely familiar with “video game logic” to solve puzzles. They should understand myriad references as well in order to get the jokes and plot. It is no wonder so many people in this class felt disenfranchised.
