What are the most pretentious games ever made?

[God of Nothing]

Shut your whore mouth, sinner. "Keep Your Rifle By Your Side" trumps any flaws it may have.

Nor did I get any fart-huffing vibes from it. It left me wanting more redneck wars. My biggest complaint with FC5 is that the Resistance points forced the story to progress too quickly, and that you can't go half a mile in any direction without getting in a drive-by with Peggies.

enjoy your magic bliss bullet for the latest not!Vaas to rant about how much of a loser you are for fifteen minutes

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

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People like to make fun of Gone Home, Fez and depression quest. But I think the granddaughter of all hipster pretentious art game crap is Braid. It's an alright puzzle platformer with super Mario bros references. But game journalists and homosexuals in the video games are art crowd circle jerk over braid being deep because the ending is a text screen references the Manhattan project. Braid is such hipster trash. Even college humor made fun of braid for sniffing its own farts back in the day. Yes, that college humor.

Nah, they liked it because it ended with "Gamers are really evil rapists rather than princess savers" message. It was when a huge push to promote feminism in gaming happened.

Metal Gear Solid 2

It's always Metal Gear Solid 2.

Ironically MGS2 got less pretentious when the ending gaslight about secret world organisations manipulating the populace via lies and memes turned out to be 100% correct

 

[Shart Attack]

I love Bioshock Infinite, but god damn does it get pretentious in the second half. The game feels like it was rewritten at least five times during production by different teams with vastly different goals. It's like the initial writing team justed wanted to make a swashbuckling adventure game, but the team that wrote the ending had just watched Looper and thought it wasn't nihilistic enough for their liking. And let's not forget that it inspired an army of fart-huffing gaming journos to repeat the phrase "ludonarrative dissonance" ad infinitum.

The Stanley Parable is pretentious as fuck, too. To this day, people still treat it like it has something deep and meaningful to say about choice or game design. The game presents you with choices A, B, C, D, and E, but choosing anything other than A results in a smug narrator making some ironic comment to effect that "Most games only let you choose A." Games have finite choices despite giving you the illusion of choice. Just like real life! Isn't that deep, guys? Hmmmmm?

 

[Psyduck]

I think its funny how people try to justify some of the games in this thread and they only end up sounding even worse

 

[Glowie Hunter Art Bell]

Aside from indie bullshit, probably Death Stranding. Gran Turismo 7 is also a pretty good contender. Possibly post 3 FarCry?

 

[God of Nothing]

Aside from indie bullshit, probably Death Stranding. Gran Turismo 7 is also a pretty good contender. Possibly post 3 FarCry?

Definitely Post 3 Farcry
4: Your choices have consequences - Everyone (They Don't)
5: The cult leader of a bunch of deranged freaks was right, and you should feel bad for killing them (Please buy New Dawn)
6: You doomed a country to instability and war for a generation because you thought he was a bigot...and that's a good thing (Don't go; we brought back Vaas)

 

[Table Country]

Shut your whore mouth, sinner. "Keep Your Rifle By Your Side" trumps any flaws it may have.

Nor did I get any fart-huffing vibes from it. It left me wanting more redneck wars. My biggest complaint with FC5 is that the Resistance points forced the story to progress too quickly, and that you can't go half a mile in any direction without getting in a drive-by with Peggies.

If only 5 was even a tenth as good as Keep Your Rifle By Your Side is...

 

[A Sentient Cloud]

I love Bioshock Infinite, but god damn does it get pretentious in the second half. The game feels like it was rewritten at least five times during production by different teams with vastly different goals. It's like the initial writing team justed wanted to make a swashbuckling adventure game, but the team that wrote the ending had just watched Looper and thought it wasn't nihilistic enough for their liking. And let's not forget that it inspired an army of fart-huffing gaming journos to repeat the phrase "ludonarrative dissonance" ad infinitum.

The Stanley Parable is pretentious as fuck, too. To this day, people still treat it like it has something deep and meaningful to say about choice or game design. The game presents you with choices A, B, C, D, and E, but choosing anything other than A results in a smug narrator making some ironic comment to effect that "Most games only let you choose A." Games have finite choices despite giving you the illusion of choice. Just like real life! Isn't that deep, guys? Hmmmmm?

Bioshock Infinite is the "This Is America" of video games, a lot of style and provocative imagery that ultimately didn't have anything to say. I gave up attempting to follow the plot at around the halfway point and just enjoyed the swashbuckling.

The Stanley Parable I find interesting just because of the sheer number of outcomes possible. I guess it's possible to over-analyze but just from a gameplay perspective it's pretty cool.

 

[Ser Prize]

Unironically Spec Ops.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

Need a game where you play as the human deathsquads that declare Total Android Death at the end of the game (where they raid the abandoned ship and purge them all).

Typical SS13 round.

The Stanley Parable I find interesting just because of the sheer number of outcomes possible. I guess it's possible to over-analyze but just from a gameplay perspective it's pretty cool.

The sequel "remastered edition" is such a lazy copout.

It's the same endings, except there's a bucket in it.

You don't even have to look for new content. It's literally behind a door labeled "new content".

The narrator's speech about video games is so up it's own ass. It's 20 mins of him moaning.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

The Graveyard is number 2 but Sunset is number 1 and that one is a real piece of number two...

 

[augment]

There will be plenty of people attacking a game for being "not of my political opinion" or "personal creed", but to qualify as pretentious the piece has to present itself claiming to be of higher meritorious craft than what the medium can allow to showcase (this isn't some bullshit I made up, the term is loaned from a frogword pretentieux)

If you really adhere to the definition, the collected works of Hideo Kojima are truly the most fitting.

 

[Jaimas]

Brother @Next Task is quite correct that I have played some very, very pretentious games, but you may be surprised to learn that the most pretentious ones aren't JPATG titles, though there's some real fucking heavyweights there. Indeed, not even a few very well-known heavies like YIIK and Dear Esther can really hold a candle to the top of my pretentious game list. Not even Gone Home or Firewatch can truly lay claim to the pretentious crown.

So what's the top of my list? Three simple words: Tale of Tales.

We are not story-tellers in the traditional sense of the word. In the sense that we know a story and we want to share it with you. Our work is more about exploring the narrative potential of a situation. We create only the situation. And the actual story emerges from playing, partially in the game, partially in the player’s mind.

With a fucking company statement like that, you should be utterly unsurprised that this company is responsible for not one, not two, but fucking four of the five most pretentious games I have ever played. The fifth would be Cibele, or as I like to call it: "Nina Freeman gets her tits out and cries about relationship drama in an MMO: The Video Game." For the other four:

4. The Path
A game of several girls lost in the woods. They then get metaphorically raped to death by wolves. The way you win is by ignoring everything except staying on the primary route and going where you need to be. If you step off the path your character will be seduced by things like a swingset or something fun to do and immediately get metaphorically raped to death. Like all of Tale of Tales' games, they take absolutely no advantage of gaming as an interactive medium and are there mostly for the art.

3. Bientôt l'été
....This is not a fucking game. I know "not a game" gets thrown around a lot in our circles, but it really fucking isn't. It's an artistic piece. The underlying goal of the game was to demonstrate that people can communicate, even if limited, by what they can do. However, all of this requires that you are playing the game when someone else is, which never fucking happens, and as such the only thing you can really communicate with in-game is the AI. You're on an endless beach and can smoke, drink wine, and occasionally, find chess pieces. If you find enough of them to complete the set it's possible to play chess with other people through the game. That's literally it.

2. The Graveyard
This game is five minutes long and I could make fun of it for six pages. You're an old woman at a Graveyard for a Funeral. You very slowly move around, sit on a park bench, and die. That's literally it. it's an interactable painting that Tale of Tales had the balls to charge five bucks for. There's an alternate ending if you're a hardcore gamer if, after she sits down, get back up and leave the Graveyard.

1. Sunset
Times change, people change, paradigms change, but this is still the most pretentious thing I have ever played by a country mile, and it comes with the added benefit of being what killed Tale of Tales and led to their most glorious meltdown ever. Sunset is a game about being a housekeeper in a country that is undergoing a regime change. You have one hour each day to clean an apartment up for a dude that is literally never home, and then write a journal entry. While interesting shit happens off-camera, absolutely fucking nothing happens of relevance in-game until hours in, the characterization is threadbare and sucks, and the payoff is fucking atrocious. However, it has one redeeming feature: in the lead-up to it, Tale of Tales had a massive event with various Game Journalists who were lining up to suck its pretentious cock as hard as humanly possible. Unfortunately for Tale of Tales, two weeks before it launched, Steam implemented its refund policy. What followed was one of the most wildly entertaining meltdowns since Bro Team Pill got Tale of Tales to shut down the server for Endless Forest and individually ban every single one of his squad.

 

[retard strength]

I was going to name Night in the Woods but I didn't play it long and it seems more "incredibly cringe" than "pretentious". The dev team if I can even technically call them that does suck a lot of dick for cock though.

 

[Sand Mega]

The sequel "remastered edition" is such a lazy copout.

You don't even have to look for new content. It's literally behind a door labeled "new content".

The narrator's speech about video games is so up it's own ass. It's 20 mins of him moaning.

I don't like to use the "it's meant to be bad" excuse, but I think that it's literally that, it's ironic, meant to poke fun at the lazy cash grabs developers come with, hence why it is literally the same game with a bucket and why the ending is the title screen changing infinitely to mark "sequels"

 

[YachieKicchou]

The above avatar reminds me that FAITH: The Unholy Trinity should have ended up pretentious, but instead went so fucking hard that it was anything but.
>Don't be afraid John

 

[Sand Mega]

The Stanley Parable is pretentious as fuck, too. To this day, people still treat it like it has something deep and meaningful to say about choice or game design. The game presents you with choices A, B, C, D, and E, but choosing anything other than A results in a smug narrator making some ironic comment to effect that "Most games only let you choose A." Games have finite choices despite giving you the illusion of choice. Just like real life! Isn't that deep, guys? Hmmmm

It's funny because I always thought some part of the game was supposed to satirize that with the narrator being pretentious himself and especially the "Art Ending" but regartheless of message, I will defend that the game can at least be enjoyable simply if you like messing with the narrator, hearing his jokes or seeing what weird things are in the endings

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

2. The Graveyard
This game is five minutes long and I could make fun of it for six pages. You're an old woman at a Graveyard for a Funeral. You very slowly move around, sit on a park bench, and die. That's literally it. it's an interactable painting that Tale of Tales had the balls to charge five bucks for. There's an alternate ending if you're a hardcore gamer if, after she sits down, get back up and leave the Graveyard.

The chance of her dying is RNG and uncommon. What makes it really, really pretentious is that you are supposed to play it over and over like you are visiting a graveyard and then sooner or later she dies and that is the actual end of the game. iirc she is visiting her husbands grave.
I have a memory of it being free before Steam opened up and started letting all kinds of indie trash monetize their garbage, but I might be mistaken.

There's a free demo and here's the difference between the demo and the full version:

 

[Colon capital V]

The chance of her dying is RNG and uncommon. What makes it really, really pretentious is that you are supposed to play it over and over like you are visiting a graveyard and then sooner or later she dies and that is the actual end of the game. iirc she is visiting her husbands grave.
I have a memory of it being free before Steam opened up and started letting all kinds of indie trash monetize their garbage, but I might be mistaken.

There's a free demo and here's the difference between the demo and the full version:
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>paying to die
My god what a bargain! Truly GOTY material

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

>paying to die
My god what a bargain! Truly GOTY material

And as I remember it, the "game" was free before they could monetize it via Steam.

Their last game, Sunset, wins the dunce cap though. There's also an unintended meta with that one that makes it a comedy, if the whole circus around it was intentional it would be poignant but it was not.