What are the most pretentious games ever made?

[HeyYou]

In the year of Our Lord 2023, you've got to be retarded to deny the art, writing, character design exemplifies the culture of the "dirtbag left", as it's called on wikipedia, or in plain terms tranny shit. When I played it seven years ago, I wasn't aware of it, I thought it was a nasty, gross and pretentious scam.

No, not really, Disco Elysium screamed that more to me especially when the writer said he liked Chapo. Undertale is basically an Earthbound ripoff with some bones thrown to LGBT shit with the lesbian character and the typical violence is bad maaaaaan message that has become common in video games. Its fanbase is more obnoxious than the game is, the game can be pretty funny at times and the music is good.

 

[Rockin da Worm]

Milk Inside a Bag of Milk Inside a Bag of Milk is one of the most pretentious pieces of garbage ever. It's sort of the stereotypical game about depression, you're the voice inside some sadgirl's head and have to talk with her as she battles anxiety or whatever and the gameplay is about six different dialogue choices you can make, and if you mess them up and act too mean to the unlikeable protagonist the game restarts. I played it with a friend so we could have fun laughing at it, but in any other circumstance it's absolutely abysmal.

 

[Kill a Troon for Pikamee]

Pentiment. You WILL play as a 16th century feminist peasant girl. You WILL dine with peasants listening about how peasant good because poor but miller bad because not poor. You WILL manually click the bread three times during the dinner with said peasants to advance the dialogue. You WILL pretend you're not playing a visual novel and your choices matter

 

[Articles and Nudes]

Pentiment. You WILL play as a 16th century feminist peasant girl. You WILL dine with peasants listening about how peasant good because poor but miller bad because not poor. You WILL manually click the bread three times during the dinner with said peasants to advance the dialogue. You WILL pretend you're not playing a visual novel and your choices matter

I love how much of the hype and advertising was based around how you could totally accuse the wrong guy, and never find out if it was true!

Spoiler

Fuck all matters because the perpetrator can't be accused or implicated due to the limited choices, and you die anyway.

It's like a mystery claiming you'll never be able to figure it out, only neglecting to mention that's because none of the evidence is physically within the story.

 

[Safir]

No, not really, Disco Elysium screamed that more to me especially when the writer said he liked Chapo.

I played it. I remember every character in it except the tall skeleton talked like xe was trying to cybersex a tranny on twitter.

I don't judge the game by its creator(s) (although I can't say it has no effect -- background information could contextualize ambiguities). For example, I like the game Anodyne, even though it's made by an entitled woke azn and a gross troon. But the game has no suspect shit it in that would glow pink-and-blue in that light.

Regardless, at the time I bought and played Undertale, I knew nothing about the people involved. I only vaguely remembered it'd collected quote a lot of money on kickstarter despite the ugly graphics.

with some bones thrown to LGBT shit with the lesbian character

Which was a large part of the game! First the hon chased Snoopy and tried to murder it, then his fat queer nonbinary girlfriend kept squeeing through a puzzle sequence. I looked at the wiki for what to do about the hon and found out about the uwu pupgirls. Snoopy itself is a genderblob, not an AFGNCAAP (I just checked the wiki -- apparently I was so naive I hadn't noticed back in 2016).

This is how you pander to true and honest lesbians of the female persuasion:

This is a character from the webcomic Lady of the Shard, by Gigi DG, then-lesbian Undertale artist who's since trooned out. It's cutesy and ends with a 12-way polyamorous relationship (because all the women are hot and the author doesn't want to clitblock anyone's uwu pairing) but no one in it is fat or has smelly balls.

the typical violence is bad maaaaaan message that has become common in video games.

Yeah, but relatively few of the "violence is bad" games insult the player. Undertale went above and beyond: "if you're not willing to waste your life trying to get better at the dodgy game with shitty controls, you personally lack determination and betray humanity to monsters". Fuck this loaded troon dogshit. (I wonder if Scorpia played Undertale; if so, it'd be elder abuse.)

Its fanbase is more obnoxious than the game is

I don't care about the fanbase. I've only interacted with a fanbase of anything once, when I just got on the interwebs and decided to add my IRL game to a fanpage of a background anime character. Having been raised on media older than me in the pre-internet age, I never had friends into the same media I was, thought fandoms were neat and wanted to "identify" with one. That was the extent of my participation. Of the things I like, only Captain Harlock has a "fandom", and it's just fujos schlicking to porn of the abominable live-action movie. (Yes, there's probably a Japanese woman somewhere drawing watercolor postcards of Saburo and Kichou, but I have no way to contact her and nothing to say to her. I can't draw worth shit.)

 

[Slav Power]

Ah yes, GTA4 and GTA5. I have something to say about it too.

I think it's unfair to look at GTA IV through the lens of the 3D era games, and not look at it through the pure "complete mayhem power fantasy" prism. Because sure, under that aspect IV sucks. You have a weak selection of weaponry and the map is probably more restricted than III's. However when it comes to the story writing it's the best GTA game in the series. All the characters are fantastic, and the fact that you don't end up with a super awesome Hollywood happy ending was definitely fresh. Unless you want to be cynical and say it was too negative.

By the end of III you were the king of Liberty City and you haven't lost anything of value. By the end of VC you were the king of Vice City and you also haven't lost anything of value. Same with SA, the only tragic thing that happened to CJ was the death of his mom, but that happened even before the first cutscene of the game. Every protagonist of the trilogy was an American without a major anguish (besides CJ losing Moms), and their entire story was a story of major success and ruling over the entire game's map. And every single one of them was an unhinged psychopath.

GTA IV finally broke that by making a protagonist that is a Serbian war veteran that illegally immigrated into the US to take revenge on a man who betrayed him during the war. We finally have a protagonist that looks at the US culture though an eye of a cynical European. We also have a protagonist that's actually tragic, before we start the game and after we finish it. And also, we finally have a protagonist that's not an unhinged psychopath, but rather a man that has experienced a lot of pain in his life and sees killing as simply the only job he is capable of doing, and he actually tries to fit into society and act like a decent person despite being a career criminal as that's the only life he knows. And by the end of his story he either loses the only family member he has in this completely alien city and gets dumped by the love of his life, or he loses the love of his life. And we get plenty of moments where we can decide on who gets to live and who gets to die, making the game more interesting. Now of course I know that people in this thread will say that it's just pretentious contrarianism, yet they don't see an issue with the trilogy following the same scheme. But honestly I don't care, the same type of people probably hates everything that's popular just because it's popular.

As for the limitations in what you could do in IV compared to SA, it's worth noting something important. San Andreas was the peak of R* pushing the RenderWare engine on the PS2 to it's limits. And by the year of release of San Andreas, RenderWare was bought out by EA, so R* was forced to make their own in-house solution. This led to the creation of RAGE, and GTA IV was the first GTA game to be made on this engine. And because their new engine was so demanding, and this was their first GTA game of this scale on the new engine, it has led to features from SA being cut or diluted for IV. Therefore you no longer have a clothing system that's as extensive as SA's, you no longer have the RPG elements such as fat and muscle, you don't have vehicle customization and so on and so forth. Basically the reason people dislike IV so much compared to SA was simply because R* wasn't able to port every single piece of mechanic they've made for SA into their new engine that was way more complex and way more resource demanding. The amount of shit they've added in V shows that it was possible, but only after they've got a hang of it.

And as for V, it is definitely inferior to IV in every way, no doubt. It's probably a good allegory of the current gaming industry. It boasted itself as being bigger and better than IV, but the end product seems artificially pumped up for the sake of being bigger. Sure, you have a massive map, but the said map is mostly empty rural areas that have nothing to do. Sure you have all those crazy cars, but they handle even worse than SA cars. They wanted to make them more "arcadey" than the ones in IV because people were complaining that the cars in IV handled like shit, but in the end they've made them handle even less realistically than they did in SA. Similarly a lot of small details that were very impressive in IV got diluted. Euphoria ragdolls got dumbed down, vehicle damage got dumbed down, a lot of it was significantly worsened, and V feels more technologically backwards than IV because of that.

And as for V's story, it is in fact the worse in the series. It's possible that originally there was only supposed to be one protagonist, Michael, but then they went for the "3 simultaneous protagonists" gimmick, but even then, the writing of the story and characters is insanely idiotic and even more Hollywood-y than even San Andreas. All three protagonists do some crazy heists, dealings with the feds and whatnot, explosions, action, everything at once, and by the end you have three choices, with the third one being the most happy ending super rainbow Hollywood ending imaginable where you kill all the feds and influential people that were a problem for you and you never get chased for doing so. And the other two endings is you meaninglessly killing off either Michael or Trevor because the fed told you to. Basically no one ever picked those endings and they were only there to be some allusion to how IV only had bad endings but now we have a third good ending so it's all good.

And speaking of that ending, R* has a fucking fetish of retconning every potential storyline choice of V into being the true canon ending. For example those three endings, Online made it canon that both Michael and Trevor are alive, making Ending C the canon choice. They went so far with this that they've made it canon that Michael didn't kill his asshole psychiatrist. At this point everyone should consider everything from Online as a retarded millennial fanfiction that has nothing to do with what happened in the singleplayer campaign.

As a final remark, GTA V was the sign of R* running out of steam. They had no idea what to do with that game, and their final product was inferior to both IV and SA. And after the release of V, T2 has decided that R* should focus on the Online part as it brings in the most cash, and in that time Leslie Benzies, Dan Houser and Lazlow Jones left the company, which strongly implies that R* as a brand is over, and nothing that they may release in the future will be as good as what released before. Not that having that trio still in the company would help much, but with them out of the picture it will definitely make things worse.

---

ffs I wrote an entire fucking essay over this

 

[Coolio55]

Which was a large part of the game! First the hon chased Snoopy and tried to murder it, then his fat queer nonbinary girlfriend kept squeeing through a puzzle sequence. I looked at the wiki for what to do about the hon and found out about the uwu pupgirls. Snoopy itself is a genderblob, not an AFGNCAAP (I just checked the wiki -- apparently I was so naive I hadn't noticed back in 2016).

What the fuck are you even talking about? Your unfunny schtick is obscuring what part of the game you're referencing.
I assume you're referencing Frisk? He's not really supposed to be anyone, an intentionally ambiguous shell for the player to project on. The fact that he IS a character is intended to be a spoiler.

This is how you pander to true and honest lesbians of the female persuasion:

This is a character from the webcomic Lady of the Shard, by Gigi DG, then-lesbian Undertale artist who's since trooned out. It's cutesy and ends with a 12-way polyamorous relationship (because all the women are hot and the author doesn't want to clitblock anyone's uwu pairing) but no one in it is fat or has smelly balls.

Didn't know about GiGi. Most troons want to be a homersexual of the opposite sex. Was this some bizarre ploy to avoid admitting that it was all a phase?
Sidenote: Isn't that character just Devilman Lady? (yuri fans try not to not to directly plagiarize challenge [IMPOSSIBLE])
Lol at the idea of a 12 person polyamorous relationship (a female only one, no less!) not exploding into a giant fireworks display.

Yeah, but relatively few of the "violence is bad" games insult the player. Undertale went above and beyond: "if you're not willing to waste your life trying to get better at the dodgy game with shitty controls, you personally lack determination and betray humanity to monsters". Fuck this loaded troon dogshit. (I wonder if Scorpia played Undertale; if so, it'd be elder abuse.)

You are taking this shit far too seriously. Also, git gud.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

People talking about GTA reminds me of this meme:

Thinking about it, RDR2 was pretty pretentious with talks about morality and choice, but because it's spread so thinly around the player doing random shit, it's easy to forget it. My favourite is going Capitalism bad and kicking out the loan shark, after a mission where you gun down an army base troops due to daring to capture your convict friend.

To The Moon

I remember keep reading about the game in "most emotional games ever made" lists but no one ever elaborates on it, which from the description sounds like the general "meaningless tragedy".

 

[God of Nothing]

People talking about GTA reminds me of this meme:
View attachment 5086462
Thinking about it, RDR2 was pretty pretentious with talks about morality and choice, but because it's spread so thinly around the player doing random shit, it's easy to forget it. My favourite is going Capitalism bad and kicking out the loan shark, after a mission where you gun down an army base troops due to daring to capture your convict friend.

I remember keep reading about the game in "most emotional games ever made" lists but no one ever elaborates on it, which from the description sounds like the general "meaningless tragedy".

Oh hey, I was in that thread.
Very few games can ever do an honest to god anti-hero or villain protagonist. Even in RPGs, you are never quite a villain. It sucks. Very few games take the route of Starsector and let you be an outright smuggler/terrorist/pirate.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

To try to not just make this "Here is game what I don't like, let me tell you why!" I'm going to offer two games I actually do like, as games but still feel pretentious, and I don't think either one has been brought up.

The first is kinda cheating because it's a relatively small indie title by one guy, but it got a fair bit of press a while back. Getting Over It by Bennet Foddy. The gameplay is amusing, if incredibly frustrating. And its short enough that it doesn't wear out it's welcome.

But the "soundtrack" to the game is commentary from the developer about his thoughts on game design, and a fair chunk of it boils down to "most challenges in games are fake because they're designed so you can figure out how to overcome them, but my game is different, because it's incredibly frustrating and you can basically have to start over with one little screw up". It's... pretentious as fuck.

---

The second is a big name title, and one I actually enjoy and have a lot of hours in, and I generally really like the devs - No Man's Sky. The devs really dropped the ball when the game first came out, but they have spent years putting out free content and updates to the game. So props to them for that. But when you actually get into the story of the game, it gets lost up it's own asshole, and ultimately boils down to "nothing matters, because everything you're experiencing is just the last few minutes or seconds in a computer simulation of reality that's corrupted and failing... there's nothing you can do about it, nobody else is real, you're just a new iteration of a mind that has been spawned over and over again, it literally is all a game, so you might as well make the best of it". I guess.

 

[Peru oso donas]

The first is kinda cheating because it's a relatively small indie title by one guy, but it got a fair bit of press a while back. Getting Over It by Bennet Foddy.

I never saw that game as anything more than the streamer bait of the month, the dev jerking himself off in game does sound taxing, but i should at least give him credit for doing the bare minimum and letting you turn off his rants during the game, when i wouldn't trust most indie devs to even do that, thinking that you should be thankful to them for letting you hear their stupid tangents about how special and better than everyone else they are.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

I never saw that game as anything more than the streamer bait of the month, the dev jerking himself off in game does sound taxing, but i should at least give him credit for doing the bare minimum and letting you turn off his rants during the game, when i wouldn't trust most indie devs to even do that, thinking that you should be thankful to them for letting you hear their stupid tangents about how special and better than everyone else they are.

Oh, it's absolutely streamer rage-bait. But it is actually kinda fun, if you pick it up on a sale for basically next to nothing, like I did. A lot of those streamer rage-bait games can be fun in small doses, like I Am Bread or Octodad. Sometimes "barely controlled failure" can be fun.

 

[Am I Very Wrong]

Oh, it's absolutely streamer rage-bait. But it is actually kinda fun, if you pick it up on a sale for basically next to nothing, like I did. A lot of those streamer rage-bait games can be fun in small doses, like I Am Bread or Octodad. Sometimes "barely controlled failure" can be fun.

as someone who's very easily irritated, i actually found the game quite relaxing. i really enjoyed it.
then again, i only get pissed at online games.

 

[Jason Wynn]

One game I adore but will begrudgingly admit is a bit pretentious is Planescape: Torment.

Yes, for 1999 you didn’t see many games really focus on having semi-deep philosophical issues examined, or a story that goes beyond “you hero! Him bad guy! Go kill!” and look into morality and how your past can follow you forever. It was something pretty innovative and new for the time.

It still remains my all time favorite game, but there are some pretentious qualities about it. The philosophy is very surface-level stuff, about what you’d expect from a first year course in college. You’re pretty much straightjacketed into playing a high INT/WIS/CHA mage if you want to really get into the meat of the game, so people who like to role play as fighters or thieves are screwed out of a good portion of it. Combat does suck, it’s janky as hell. Just because there’s a greater focus on story doesn’t mean you skimp on the combat. Baldur’s Gate 2 had just as great of a story and the combat was fine in that. The devs seem to have forgotten that at its core it’s still a game, and if I wanted to read a book, I’d be reading a book instead of playing a game.

Despite all that, it still is a gem of a game and I’d recommend going through it at least once

 

[ShitlordroltihS]

It really feels like something made by a leftoid majored in Humanities,

The whole game is about jews

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

In the year of Our Lord 2023, you've got to be retarded to deny the art, writing, character design exemplifies the culture of the "dirtbag left", as it's called on wikipedia, or in plain terms tranny shit. When I played it seven years ago, I wasn't aware of it, I thought it was a nasty, gross and pretentious scam.

Can you give more details?

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

So could Hatred count as "pretentious" here? From what I've heard (besides being edgy^10x64) people and journofags genuinely thought this game would cause 6 million school shootings and 9/11s just because Mr. "my name is not important" was gonna cleanse the earth of the human race because misanthropy. I don't know much about the game's story besides surface level knowledge, but I think the beginning speech itself is really all I'd need to know over how schticky the whole thing is.

No, Hatred is hilarious. It's intentionally stupid edgy stuff. In the ending you have to punch the secret code into a nuclear plant to blow it up. The code? 666.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

No, Hatred is hilarious. It's intentionally stupid edgy stuff. In the ending you have to punch the secret code into a nuclear plant to blow it up. The code? 666.

I dunno, I think you could make the argument that, in it's own way, "stupid edgy stuff" is, itself, somewhat pretentious, at least when that's the whole joke/point/whatever, rather than just some 13 year old twerp being a 13 year old twerp.

 

[Gondolindrim]

"There's always a choice," the game reminds you before not giving you a choice and then expecting you to be shocked at what you've done. Also you're delusional and so literally not fully capable of moral behavior, but we'll pretend it's a big deal anyway.

The audacity of making a game where you have no choice but to be the bad guy and then pretending that it's a deep, thinking man experience. KOTOR 2 did it much better and that game was so unfinished it didn't have an ending.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I don't think it would be controversial, but also maybe a little unfair, to say Contrast was a bit pretentious.

I've only got maybe an hour left to finish it. Premise, you are the imaginary friend of a little girl (little like, elementary school) in a city that looks like 1920s Paris but is populated by people like 1920s Prohibitionflappermafialand. The girl sneaks out at night to spy on her mom and finds out her dad (kicked out by mom, trying to get back) his gotten himself in bad with some mobsters trying to get a business going. That already spoils half the game so I'll stop. Your gameplay mechanic, your imaginary friend (an "acrobat" that performs at a cabaret, so, that is, an absolute whore) can phase into walls to become a shadow and run around on shadows, which you have to use to solve problems/move around.

The pretentious:
Artsy setting, but it doesn't actually commit to it in an authentic way*
Muh emotional family story that, aside from the shadow woman, feels incredibly derivative (in vidya, you can just ripoff movies or books to get endless praise)
All NPCs besides the girl are represented solely as shadows on the wall
Game likes to call back to previous scenes with these platforming challenges involving shadows on the wall, like it's so proud of itself it needs to show you it twice
Small child protagonist
Lots of supernatural bullshit like the imaginary friend being real and the city being suspended in a dreamland of floating rocks, but none of it is explained

Critics didn't like it. I think it's actually okay, it's just not particularly good.
The people that made this mediocre thing went on to make We Happy Few.


*I happen to like Interwar French music. I don't listen to/know enough about it to act like I'm an enthusiast, but yes, I do listen to this. Mostly just Josephine Baker's "Jaix deux Amours" and I may let it keep running a long time. They could have played more explicitly into a Parisian setting than they did. There's one big musical number in the game. Had the misimpression music would play a bigger role.