What are the most pretentious games ever made?

[Anonitolia]

Wow, 25 pages and no mention of Rain World? I'm impressed.



This game is one of those "READ THE LORE" types where it doesn't have an actual story, just a bunch of ""environmental storytelling"" you need to figure out the meaning of after you've come to terms with the godawful controls. Almost all of the worldbuilding is hidden in these stupid little collectible pearls that you need to backtrack across the entire map to use (in a game with limited-to-no fast travel) and sacrifice one of two (arguably three if you count one that you cannot use) weapon slots to carry. The game's actual plot on Normal difficulty consists of "go to here to talk to this person who tells you to talk to this person who tells you to throw yourself down a giant hole where you walk right for 15 straight minutes". Easy difficulty is the exact same thing but with half of that plot stripped out and all of the lore unobtainable because the pearls don't work.
The entire game is also comprised of (admittedly quite pretty) spritework, mostly in muted tones, with hand-drawn "cutscenes" and a chiptune soundtrack. A certified Indie Game Classic.

This, of course, has attracted a fanbase solely composed of rabid retards who will chimp out at you for not understanding how cool and awesome not telling any of your fucking story is.
Or, that's what it attracted before covid came along and made the game blow up amongst the usual crowd of TRAs who think Bluey is deep and mature. Nowadays the game is just enjoyed by a cesspool of devoted dubasses headcanoning the slugcats as ftm prostitutes or whatever. Doesn't stop the game itself from being insufferably pretentious in its execution.

It's a shame, because the actual game itself is... interesting to play. I wouldn't call it fun, but it's definitely unique and I can't really call it bad. The complex AI it won't stop bragging about in press material does make the game engaging, and the actual function of the thing is so confusing that it keeps your attention. But its excuse for a story is atrocious, and it's so up its own ass that it feels the need to hide a barely-complex post apocalypse template behind so much difficult busywork that it's no wonder it only attracts the most fanatic of retards to its defense.

 

[Jarch6]

You think Kojima games as they released are bad, supposedly, according to his staff, his writing was such an incoherent mess that once his editors finished trying to make any sense of his writing they basically had an entirely different story on their hands.

Granted, I can't for the life of me recall where I read this, but I can certainly believe it

artiste-types often need tard wranglers to keep their zanier ideas in check (e.g., George Lucas) so It wouldn't surprise me if Kojima had some as well.

I'll add a game to the list:

View attachment where-the-water-tastes-like-wine.webp
Where the Water Tastes Like Wine
​

Published in 2018, this is an archetypal artsy fartsy indie title - that I won't dignify calling a game. As so so proudly stated in its press kit, the developer's founder was the lead programmer on Gone Home (the infamous walking simulator that became a media darling which in part heralded the Gamergate backlash) and as such it is unsurprising that there is scant gameplay to be found here. Rather we are treated to a vision of 20th century America during the great depression where I'm sure the writer will regale us with hamfisted stories about how capitalism and Jim Crow are le bad (I'm assuming because I wouldn't be caught dead "playing" this "game"). However, unlike the early indie game boom, games journo dickriding, through the form of brownnosing articles and no-name awards, no longer commands customer attention and as such this title completely flopped on release (the devs even admitted in a post-mortem of the title that it was a financial failure) despite receiving plenty of the aforementioned (Even the money they wasted on getting a celebrity cameo from Sting did nothing to bolster their sales, how shocking! ). One can only hope that all pretentious games suffer an undignified fate such as this following their market release...

 

[M3xus]

I'll nominate Sunset to the list.

The game has the gall to put you in a criminally underused setting for video games (in the midst of a revolution during the 60s-70s in an unnamed South American country) and then makes you play not as one of said revolutionaries, but as a goddamn maid. You're given the choice to clean "coldly" (which is just cleaning up and nothing else) or "warmly" (adding personal touches like a lit candle to a table, for example), with the caveat that you have a certain amount of time to clean. As you clean, you hear about the revolution over the radio and TV.

It's poetic it came out right as Steam Refunds became a thing and it flopped thanks to word of mouth quickly spreading that it wasn't much of a game, so it didn't even have strong initial sales. At least it gave us the legendary chimpout from Tale of Tales when they announced they were closing down after it was a massive flop.

 

[std::string]

This game is one of those "READ THE LORE" types where it doesn't have an actual story, just a bunch of ""environmental storytelling"" you need to figure out the meaning of after you've come to terms with the godawful controls.

I hate when devs do this because it's usually not done very well. The biggest problem being that you actually have to FIND everything to piece the story together.

I still have no idea what was really going on in Saturnalia because I'm sure there's shit in the mines I missed. You have matches that give you like a three foot radius of light and a paper map to help you navigate. Also the map is wrong in some cases. Good luck hunting everything down.

 

[Mnutu]

Analogue: A Hate Story
View attachment 5997159
You can read about the sheer pretentiousness of this game on Wikipedia, but to summarize, it's Handmaid's Tale but with Space Korea and AI waifus.

The tranny who wrote this, Christine Love, gave an interview with Kotaku where he complains about getting drunk while writing the game. Personally I believe the game was his fantasy, where he could be a victimized woman only wanted for her womb, an empowered girl boss, and finally a cute waifu. What's more gender affirming than that?

This is late, but I have a burning hatred for Chris. Way back when I used to scour the Ren’Py site for WNVs I played “Don’t take it personl, babe, it just ain’t your story” probably because it reminded me a little of “Deiz”. What a fucking shit show of a story. All I really remember was the main canard of the teacher having access to his students private messages and the message was “it’s totally good for the teacher to snoop on his students private messages and meddle in their lives”.

 

[X Prime]

Maybe a decade ago someone would have shilled for him but he really pissed away his audience goodwill.

The fall started when he pandered to trannies.

First it was The Missing, then it was Deadly Premonition 2.

Many such cases!

 

[des Pudels Kern]

I'll throw my hat in and say Gris. Limited run games printed it and now it's "selling" for $50 despite the fact that this is barely a 5 hour puzzle game about having a miscarriage or your mom dying. Funny enough you can't die in this game. I played it, and I was laughing the whole time with all these red statues of women crying. Maybe this says a lot about how much the feminist mind virus has actually infected my brain, but I could only think "man this lady really hates her period."

It's not the MOST pretentious game ever, and for $1 it's not terrible, but it is too obvious that you're supposed to feel bad for women.

 

[ChucklesTheJester]

The fall started when he pandered to trannies.

First it was The Missing, then it was Deadly Premonition 2.

Many such cases!

Isn't Deadly premonition SWERY, and not Suda51.

 

[Colon capital V]

Fallout New Vegas, simply due to the fact that I can't get these goddamn video essays out of my YouTube recommendations. @xXx: State of the Union you are right, this shit sucks

Oh fuck, speaking of essayslop.

I watched gameplay footage of this DOOM mod and while it's an interesting trip on it's surface to experience, the fact that brain-damaged, fart huffing faggots on youtube treat this shit as if it's high art or that it's """""deep""""" and """""meaningful""""" shows that TYD needs to happen.
It's an interesting experience the first time around when you deal with exploring and seeing it progresses as you go along, but I don't see how this is any different from the hundreds of other DOOM mods that try and invoke certain fear or storytelling outside of the forums posts that you NEED to read in order to get the full story. Such fucking astroturfed trite.

 

[Hepativore]

I couldn't agree more with his review. I've played The Witcher, Subnautica and Morrowind, so I have a high tolerance for dogshit combat if there are other things I like about the game, but in SCORN it was so terrible that I'd run past the enemies whenever I could, though I could only do that sometimes since it's hard to maneuver around enemies in a narrow corridor when you have no evasive actions.

Another shitty thing these devs did was pull a switcheroo on the art book that came with the deluxe version. Originally it was in a .pdf format but then they changed it to some other bizarre format without telling the buyers and later they said the .pdfs were only for certain orders or some other nonsense like that. I tried to read the book in this new format and the text was completely broken even though I tried three different readers. Ultimately I had to pirate the .pdf to get a readable copy.

The story and the puzzles suck too. There were two whole areas cut from the game (they're mentioned in the artbook), and one area was meant to show the conflict between those baby-looking things in the biomechanical suits and the rulers. If I'm gonna stick a baby in a juice press I'd like to know why. As for the puzzles, the most complicated one is the first and it's not all that hard once you figure out where the dick and pussy-shaped objects go. The rest are baby tier.

SCORN was such a major disappointment as it was one of those things that had a lot of potential and a lot of things going for it, yet it completely botches the execution...sort of like an M. Night Shyamalan movie. The game was stuck in development hell for awhile, then had a lot of hype surrounding it, and while the environments were highly detailed and well done, the game felt unfinished. It is almost like the development team spent all of the budget on the graphics and completely forgot about the story or gameplay.

It also seemed like the game was unsure what it wanted to be and did not do any of the things that it tried well. It seemed like it wanted to be a walking sim but it was really short and seemed more like a demo, a puzzle game like Myst, but the puzzles were actually quite sparse and simple to solve, the FPS combat mechanic seemed half-assed as there was not a lot of enemy variety, and while the weapons you got were cool-looking, you hardly ever needed to use them, and you are stuck with using the grenade-launcher once you get it towards the end of the game.

None of the lore was explored within the game itself, including the story behind the moldmen and homunculi which you would only be able to learn by reading the concept art book.

I wanted to like SCORN, but it just felt very short and unfinished and more like a demo rather than a full-game release. I doubt there would be enough interest to convince them to do this, but the development studio should go back and work on the game some more and then re-release it after some work.

 

[Hweeks]

Oh fuck, speaking of essayslop.

I watched gameplay footage of this DOOM mod and while it's an interesting trip on it's surface to experience, the fact that brain-damaged, fart huffing faggots on youtube treat this shit as if it's high art or that it's """""deep""""" and """""meaningful""""" shows that TYD needs to happen.
It's an interesting experience the first time around when you deal with exploring and seeing it progresses as you go along, but I don't see how this is any different from the hundreds of other DOOM mods that try and invoke certain fear or storytelling outside of the forums posts that you NEED to read in order to get the full story. Such fucking astroturfed trite.

Not only that, but the twist is it's a gay love story... bleh...

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

The fall started when he pandered to trannies.

First it was The Missing, then it was Deadly Premonition 2.

Many such cases!

Like ChucklesTheJester said it's SWERY, and despite the sin of going way too hard into trannies and DP2 being shit I still think the latter two games had a lot of soul.

 

[X Prime]

Shit you're right, I mixed them up. And I was nuts for both Deadly Premonition and No More Heroes.

Don't toss out an off-the-cuff shit at trannies after just waking up, fellas. As fun as it might be.

 

[ChucklesTheJester]

Shit you're right, I mixed them up. And I was nuts for both Deadly Premonition and No More Heroes.

Don't toss out an off-the-cuff shit at trannies after just waking up, fellas. As fun as it might be.

Don't worry about it. One is pretentious dev who is way too into surrealism, and the other one is a pretentious dev who watched twin peaks.

 

[X Prime]

Don't worry about it. One is pretentious dev who is way too into surrealism, and the other one is a pretentious dev who watched twin peaks.

I wonder what SWERY made of Season 3 of Twin Peaks.

Not only that, but the twist is it's a gay love story... bleh...

When I did some digging back in the day, it looked like it might actually be stupider than that. See here:

It could be.

It turns out that the author's ex-wife has confirmed the S+A grattifi refers to her, her name being Amy, and they have recently divorced. She specifically noted her husband is "dead to (her)", she's sad about the divorce, and that he still lives in the house, while otherwise praising his technical skill and how smart he is.

https://www.tiktok.com/@bananapantsamy/

https://archive.li/fd5wL

Kotaku wrote an article wondering why people were ignoring the angle that it's all about this divorce:

https://kotaku.com/doom-2-free-mods-myhouse-download-gzdoom-goty-1850616515

https://archive.ph/yo9ys

One thing that sticks out to me: couldn't both angles be true simultaneously? This being a story about a troon-out or a troon friend dying ruining a marriage would kind of explain everything.

To bring it back to Doomworld, supposedly they shut down the thread for awhile for digging too much into this sort of thing.

 

[Gog & Magog]

Wow, 25 pages and no mention of Rain World? I'm impressed.

Is it me or is the game too difficult? I could never survive long enough to make it to the next level. I like playing the game but the mechanic of erasing all your progress if you die too many times is bullshit.

 

[Dysnomia]

Not only that, but the twist is it's a gay love story... bleh...

So it's Gone Home: Doom Mod Edition? I'm nauseous already.

 

[std::string]

Is it me or is the game too difficult? I could never survive long enough to make it to the next level. I like playing the game but the mechanic of erasing all your progress if you die too many times is bullshit.

Hold up plebian. They made the controls bad on purpose. You just don't understand.

Nevermind that a lot of platformers made with Unity have the same floaty shit going on.

 

[Sleazy Car Salesman]

Bioshock Infinite is a fun game that’s made worse by pretentious messaging.

That's every Bioshock game.

 

[ChucklesTheJester]

That's every Bioshock game.

Would you Kindly?