Vanity games - The Room and I am here now, but (un)playable

[Illuminati Order Official]

so the game is bad

I'd say "Bad but better than most modern quirky RPGs about depression and trooning out".

 

[Rockzo]

Ego trips? Yeah, there was one video. Drowned God.

The guy does a good playthrough of the game. Essentially it's a 90s point and click from a conspiracy theorist with actual budget behind him. His wife was schizophrenic and was cited as the reason he ended up committing murder suicide some years later.

This came from that game:

 

[peachlover669]

Undertale - faggot earthbound romhacker who read too many SP00KY creepypastas tries to make "muh deep and edgy" ripoff of his favorite game, and makes absolutely sure to force his gay and faggy worldview onto the player

*deltarune
undertale was actually good about not letting the author fuck himself over suprisingly

 

[Asian tech support]

Drowned God.

My older brother had this game. I bet the disc is still in its original box somewhere at my parents'.

 

[Juan But Not Forgotten]

Big sorry for the long post ahead!

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Death Stranding - ex-Konami developer with delusions of grandeur thinks he's the next Stanley Kubrick by making a walking cutscene simulator with a retarded story

Well, can't argue with that. I would like to add that his response to the backlash was basically "filthy gaijin loves shooters", but guess what? His Uber Eats simulator has shooting and it fucking sucks!

Mighty No. 9 - ex-Capcom developer Keiji Inafune (Mega Man, Dead Rising) basically had his own Daikatana moment and thought he could carry this terrible game based on recognition and ripping off his own (superior) franchise

I am not sure it can qualify. Don't get me wrong, it is bad "better than nothing", but it is more like a cashgrab. Unless he was acting like a mini tyrant during the development and fought with people online.

Daikatana

The good thing we got from it is that John Romero said it made him very humble after his ego got massive after Doom.

Yeah, I forgot that one. But you know what? At least he learned from that. Fuck it, if John Romero ever launches Kickstarter to get money for proper Daikatana, I am in. He should do it right after the documentary about making of the original though.

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Oh, God, yes! I forgot this one, because Neil wasn't a novice, he had several games under his belt. But still imagine treating your team so badly that they leak the entire plot just to get back at you and then openly asking people to not buy your game if they hate dykes. I am surprised Cuckman wasn't at least demoted after this.

Fez

Fits almost all the criteria of the OP.

• Author is obviously an egomaniac or at least terribly narcissistic.
  • Check
• Had no previous experience in the field and just one day decided to crush it with his marvelous never seen before idea.
  • A 2D platformer that can rotate in 3D. Followed by having a ARG. Check
• Usually takes a role of an idea guy behind the project, but can also do some stuff for it.
  • The game was allegedly stolen from his co-dev, and lacks the ability to make the promised sequel alone, so cancelled it. Check
• Refuses to actually learn or take criticism to heart due to the reasons listed above.
  • Threw a big tantrum and cancelled the sequel, along with other tantrums on social media. Check.
• Lots of drama, fights and departures behind the scenes thanks to constant clashes between author's ego and the voice of reason from the team.
  • Was the premise of Indie Game: The Movie, of which his co-dev was edited out where possible, and censored when not. Check
• All of the above leads to the end product being rushed, underdeveloped or sometimes just canceled.
  • Fez 2 was cancelled. Check
• If it gets released and meets a wave of criticism, the author either goes DFE or most likely starts slapfight tournament with his critics everywhere he can.
  • Massive social media tantrums, before leaving the internet 4 evar! Only to quietly return as a musician to see if anyone would notice before disappearing again.

For some reason I thought "well, at least Phish is a competent developer", but after this... Yep, this is basically Anonymous Agony, only as a platformer and stolen. Only thing it lacks is a self-insert. Didn't Phish basically said he would off himself if Fez fails?

Revolution 60

I don't know much about this tbh, but it was Brianna Wu's game.

I think, John made this one just to prove that he is a developer. Well, I'd say he failed.

 

[BiggestKai]

"Bad but better than most modern quirky RPGs about depression and trooning out"

To this day I have no idea what people are referring to when they keep saying this. My reference point for indie RPGs being crosscode or lesser budgeted CRPGs like Encased, Age of Decadence or Underrail

 

[Juan But Not Forgotten]

What about Tell of Tales? For sure they inserted their worldview into their trash games, but what about ego? I think, they quit making games during Gamergate, but did they have slapfights over their quality?

 

[Oliver Onions]

Darkseed is a literal author self-insert because you play as the digitized writer himself, Mike Dawson, and he spends most of the game being an overly verbose dickhead and having comically inappropriate reactions to all the things going on around him.

I'd also include The Witness, because it's the most pretentious game I've ever played. It's fun for a while until you reach the point of 'what am I thinking?' puzzles where the solutions are so up their own ass even after looking them up online they sometimes still don't make sense.

I Get This Call Every Day

I still get angry about this game because I think that's a really cool title for a psychological horror game, wasted on some dude's shitty Newgrounds project he only made so he could hang out with real game devs.

 

[Smashed & Slamed]

I can do you one better.
Terra Invicta.
The examples given here usually are of mediocre games with dogshit stories ruined by the Author. Terra Invicta's vanity is found not just in the narrative but the gameplay. And not in something as simple as stitched together gameplay features that don't belong. It is found in a more insidious way.

Terra Invicta is a miss mash of games. Clearly the idea of an Idea Guy. The premise is that you are now in charge of a secret organization privy to the incoming arrival of an alien race to subjugate earth. Your goal is to respond to this event in a manner appropriate to your specific faction. To get to that point you control a handful of secret agents with the goal of subverting world governments and gathering resources to utilize in pursuing your goal.
Eventually you will gather enough resources to start making space craft and space stations. Which are controlled by a separate mechanical layer.
Eventually space will be more important than Earth and your focus will shift. But not your gameplay. Even when you are in the late game and are controlling dozens of fleets made up of hundreds of craft and engaging the aliens broadside to broadside you still need to babysit your 5 secret agents and still need to counter the enemy's agents that will do things like destroy space stations that are years away from you in a fit of autistic rage.
There is no automation, no phasing out. It would be like being forced to micro scouts in a Civilization game after you researched the Atom bomb.

People have informed the devs since day one that this is retarded, and they have just shoved their heads in the sand and ignored everybody.
In fact the devs instead of finishing their game, or fixing bugs or making their game not dogshit at it's core spend every waking hour nerfing any tactic or strategy the players use.
"Game is played by mostly Eurofags that just spend the early game making Gross Europa/Russia"
Nerf them.
"Smart players manage to rush outposts on the Moon"
Nerf them.
"Smart players manage to make fortresses on Ceres before the Alliens get there"
Nerf them.
"Players manage to stack bonuses on their agents to force the AI of valuable nations like Kazakhstan"
Nerf them.
The Devs have made it clear that there is only one way to play the game. And should RNG suck your only response is to start over.
Prior to making this game the devs made the Long War 2 for XCOM 2 War of the Chosen and Long War 1 for XCOM Enemy Unknown(the remake). I don't know why but mod makes are always the biggest piss babies when they turn devs. I guess doing it for free gives them a massive holier than thou attitude that carries over to commercial products.

I pirate the game every 6 months just to see how much shittier it gets, laugh at it and then uninstall.

 

[Michael Wade]

The Stanley parable.

its cool that they got a half life 2 mod on the console, but man does it it get old to play a walking sim where a funny British man mocks and belittles you for hours.

Look I get it. Games are very railroaded and give you the illusion of choice, but it's not satisfying at all mock the concept and not even attempt to provide... Something else to contrast it. If you were given a voice or choice to respond In some way to the narrator besides taking other paths it could have been special. It could have been stimulating. Instead it feels like I'm being lectured.

Bards tale had a better back and forth then this.

 

[Illuminati Order Official]

To this day I have no idea what people are referring to when they keep saying this. My reference point for indie RPGs being crosscode or lesser budgeted CRPGs like Encased, Age of Decadence or Underrail

All those are high quality games that can easily rival Infinity-era classics. I meant stuff like YIIK, Heartbound, Actual Sunlight or one I can't remember but was one of the most pretentious things I've seen on Steam.
There is a thread about such games if you want to research the subject:

https://kiwifarms.st/threads/quirky-indie-rpgs.170876/

EDIT. Remembered the pretentious one, it's titled "An Outcry".

 

[Battlecruiser3000ad]

What about Tell of Tales? For sure they inserted their worldview into their trash games, but what about ego? I think, they quit making games during Gamergate, but did they have slapfights over their quality?

Gotta post this whenever ToT is mentioned

 

[Judge Dredd]

What about Tell of Tales? For sure they inserted their worldview into their trash games, but what about ego? I think, they quit making games during Gamergate, but did they have slapfights over their quality?

Ego in the sense their games are pretentious trash. Doing the usual fake "smart people" thing of name dropping certain authors and including certain themes.

The examples given here usually are of mediocre games with dogshit stories ruined by the Author. Terra Invicta's vanity is found not just in the narrative but the gameplay. And not in something as simple as stitched together gameplay features that don't belong. It is found in a more insidious way.

Prior to making this game the devs made the Long War 2 for XCOM 2 War of the Chosen and Long War 1 for XCOM Enemy Unknown(the remake). I don't know why but mod makes are always the biggest piss babies when they turn devs

Checks out. I never like Long War 1 or 2. I never got them to work, and spamming dozenes of guys and hoping for RNG to not screw you over is not my idea of fun.

Though your post did bring to mind two games. Subverse and Binding of Issac.

Subverse was the first big budget mainstream porn game, and from what I hear they blew it chasing cripto and not finishing any idea.

Binding of Issac is a roguelike I never liked, and hearing on the farms that the devs hate their audience for cheesing the game and ruining his big ARG reveal by datamining.

 

[Illuminati Order Official]

Ego in the sense their games are pretentious trash. Doing the usual fake "smart people" thing of name dropping certain authors and including certain themes.

Sunset isn't even the worst, it at least has some semblance of narrative which makes it a generic walking sim. I remember "The Graveyard" which is an old lady walking through a graveyard and then sitting on a bench. If you played free version, that's it. If you paid for the game, the lady can randomly die.

 

[Juan But Not Forgotten]

Ego in the sense their games are pretentious trash. Doing the usual fake "smart people" thing of name dropping certain authors and including certain themes

I mean, that would be OK if the games were good, but what do they have? A Red Hood game where you get assaulted, a game where you pretend to clean and cry over politics and a game where you walk, sit and die. Fuck, I cannot call these games even.

 

[Judge Dredd]

There was also some multiplayer game where you walk around a beach, sit at a table and drink wine while talking to the other player using random french phrases.

Fuck, I cannot call these games even.

And that might be deliberate. I don't know if it was Tale of Tales or some other company, where it came out they were making these "games" to farm money from arts grants, which is why they dried up the moment those programs were cut.

It still happens too. Dustborn was funded by tax payer money.


I don't know if it counts as it's not the devs, but the fanbase of Bioshock has to be one of the worst. Any criticism of the game, and the critic is just too stupid to understand it. You have to be smart to understand a game about shooting monsters in the face.

The works of ThatGameCompany (Flower, Journey) are like this as well. So is Gone Home.

 

[Juan But Not Forgotten]

And that might be deliberate. I don't know if it was Tale of Tales or some other company, where it came out they were making these "games" to farm money from arts grants, which is why they dried up the moment those programs were cut.

I also remember @Jaimas stating something about Steam's 2-hour refund policy introduction killing them all.

Speaking of which, I don't know if it counts, but there is a visual novel called Everlasting Summer that was made by the volunteers from the russian imageboard called 2ch. Its history of creation is another trashfire since it went through at least 3 iterations through around 8 years of development hell and in the end was leaked in unfinished state by then character artist Smolev because he though that then screenwriter/dialogue writer Anton Arkatov aka Rita tried to exclude him from the project (he probably did try though, considering all that happened next). Even though he stole parts of previous scripts since most of the art was built around them, the protagonist was clearly influenced by his life's events and the endings have him becoming a musician or writer like he always wanted. Otherwise writing was fucking atrocious fanfic tier trash and of course anonymous users had no problems with laughing at him. It went to the point where he openly challenged them to tell that to his face IRL and kept namefaging in those threads. However, because this trash was free and numbers of people reading good literature were all time low, it went popular among zoomers.
Because the rights were split between the team members he could not sell it, so he decided make his own visual novel, THE project of his own - Love, Money, Rock'n'roll. He even launched Kickstarter back in late 2014, I think. What's interesting though is that it was on 50% for a long time and then reached its goal in about 2 days before the end of the campaign thanks to several large bakers. Considering Rita then gloated about "causing butthurt to those anon skeptics", I still stand by the idea that he used his own money to push it to the goal. In about a year he released a demo of the first day and holy shit, his writing had not improved a single bit! Ok, what was it about? It is about a schoolboy... In Japan... Who goes back to the town of his childhood... But hey, he is from USSR! Which was in Everlasting Summer, set in pioneer summer camp and very heavily attributed to its success... Ok, maybe the rest is better? The romance options are his childhood girlfriend, his ex from the school, basically tsundere, yandere etc... Yeah, it's the most generic shit ever, but that wasn't the funniest part.
He first sets the release date to 2017 and of course he misses it and sets it to 2018. I mean, it took him around a year to make one day out of promised 20, so obviously he would need more than 3 years. But ok, not a biggie, another year isn't much for something that big. Meanwhile he launches a website for "his" game studio Soviet Games (the name volunteers used while working on Everlasting Summer) which is basically him + freelancers and opens pre-orders for the game, including collectable editions and shit. Ok, another year passes and there is still nothing. Not even a comprehensible idea of where the project currently is. Rita meanwhile boasts about writing 300k words total or something, doesn't matter, and pushes the release to 2019. Another date comes - nothing. He again states that "we are doing everything possible", like previous times, but in 2020 there is still nothing. Kurvapunk gets released and the comparisons start coming more and more often. "We are doing everything possible" becomes a meme among people who wait for this trash to release.
Then 2021 comes and shit finally hits the fan - people have enough. They openly mock Rita in his VK group (they did that before, but now they do it in masse under any new post) and any other social media, original bakers from 2014 start asking to return their money, people who preordered this years ago are furious. Rita's reaction? Where he always liked to mock people online, but in this situation resorted to bitch move of deleting comments and banning people where he could. Yes, bakers included. There are more and more screenshots of him arguing with people in a very bad tone and insulting them. By late 2021 this finally ends with him calling some user "a cancerous shit eating faggot" before banning him. That user had some small YT following by doing reviews of visual novels, so he jumps to his channel and openly calls people to file refunds and go to court in case of Rita denying them their money. Rita of course shits himself and promises new release date - spring of 2022. Here is a joke though - he banned me in his group in 2021 for a year when I compared his trash to Cyberpunk2077 and then year after that I came there to tell "lol, my ban ended and this shit is still nowhere near a release!" and got banned permanently. You'd be surprised but he managed to fuck up this deadline too and this stillbirth was able to release only in August.
The result? Well, they say it takes around 5 years to master something. Rita spent almost double of that and remained exactly the same. His "500K+ words" were made of dialogues like "what do you mean? - nothing! - ok then." and the entirety of those 20 promised days were extremely bland and repetitive. The writing is cringy and full of shit that belongs on fanfiction.net. The story is trash, endings can be seen from a mile away and again it all reeks of his self-inserts and regret over unrealized opportunities. Girls are bland, annoying and suffer from his inability to write people, let alone female characters. The only upside is that after being mocked for descriptions of sex scenes in Everlasting Summer, he refused to write those in his new game, but then there is another problem - why include them at all and bother with 3 hentai pics for each girl? Why would anyone want to suffer through this shit only to get some mediocre drawn porn? There were good things though, like music (not a fan, but people seem to enjoy it) and the art, but he had to role in those. In fact, he basically wasted those artists time by flooding script with his mediocrity.
But to be fair it all ended in the worst way possible. Everlasting Summer was widely mocked for its writing, but people kept discussing it, they wanted to love it. Here though it all ended with a wet fart - some liked it, many did not, but in end no one cared enough to hate it. How well it performed moneywise? Well, even aside of my schizo theories about Kickstarter (which could explain why it took so long - because he received less than a half of what he intended and had to pay artists from his own pocket) in about 6 months this game was selling on VK platform. For free. Either he got so rich that he didn't care or it was a desperate attempt to grow at least something resembling a fanbase. In any case, now just about 2.5 years after it is nearly forgotten by everyone. Hell, when I tried to google it to recall the date of release, I had to type first two words to get a suggestion.
And the best indication of complete failure of this project is the fact that after that Rita didn't try something else. Oh no, he jumped back to that one thing that got him some recognition - Everlasting Summer, but this time he tried to turn it into a book. The result was predictable - without backgrounds, characters and music his trashy writing was on full display. I believe, he quit after the first chapter or something.

 

[Grub]

To this day I have no idea what people are referring to when they keep saying this. My reference point for indie RPGs being crosscode or lesser budgeted CRPGs like Encased, Age of Decadence or Underrail

I haven't really noticed particularly but if you go on somewhere like itch.io and type in RPG a lot of weird kinda gay looking shit pops up.

 

[Jaimas]

I also remember @Jaimas stating something about Steam's 2-hour refund policy introduction killing them all.

Yep! Here's the whole story:

Tale of Tales was an extremely pretentious narrative game studio who would make games rich with symbolism in the hopes of stirring conversation and introspection. Unfortunately, what united many of their games are that, whatever poignancy their games might have had, they're made like complete shit, and are extremely unengaging. Tale of Tales had a fervent belief that gameplay detracts from a story, and while I can certainly appreciate the perspective, gaming is ultimately an interactive medium, allowing the player to engage with your story and as a result take advantage of it in a way no other medium offers.

My favorite example of this mindset fucking them is their narrative game The Graveyard. You're an elderly woman attending a funeral. You walk around at a pace that makes Parasite Eve 1's walking speed look fast in contrast, sit on a park bench in the graveyard, and die. That's the game. That's literally it. There's an alternate ending for the truly hardcore if, after you sit down, you choose to get back up and leave. Tale of Tales charged five dollars for this.

All of their games are like this, with your interactions boiling down to either "do thing that makes narrative happen," or "ignore it and the game ends." The Path is a game they created wherein several girls lost in the woods. They then get metaphorically raped to death by wolves if you deviate from the main road and look at anything interesting like a house or swingset. The symbolism is as subtle as a brick to the skull and it doesn't take any advantage of the medium at all - another brainless art-game.

Another game of theirs, more ambitious, is Bientôt l'été, which is a wordless game in which you're at a beach-house, on an endless beach, wherein you can walk around, smoke, and drink wine. It's an art installation masquerading as a game, and unlike Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Introspective, you don't have actual gameplay or psychedelic visuals. The only actual gameplay that this has is that sometimes, you can find chess pieces in the sand, and if you get the whole set, you can play chess with them in the beachhouse. The game was intended to be online, so that if you ran into someone else who was playing it, you could have these interactions with no dialogue and do things together in an interesting idea about human communication as done by someone who does not understand how to put game mechanics together. Absolutely bizarre.

So you've got devs who are very much high on their own supply, and are the fucking darlings of the game journalist sphere because of it. The one game they have that I would argue is actually kind of profound was Endless Forest, which was functionally an MMO with no text chat and no explanation of how to do anything in it while you played as a deer. Brote and a few dozens of people in his chat invaded at once and basically occupied the entire server while in group chat, transforming it into a legitimately surreal and oddly hilarious experience that was sufficient to get the devs to throw a hissy fit.

All of that brings us to their final game, Sunset. Sunset was intended to be their magnum opus, the game they had the balls to charge 20 dollars for. And to their credit, it is arguably their best game to date. It's certainly the biggest, applying everything they had learned. They had a massive ad buy-in with the journo sphere, and once again, they proved they don't understand video games as a medium - you play as a maid during a South American country's revolution. You clean an apartment while a vastly more interesting story is happening just beyond your reach. The day to day activities barely change; you do clean-up tasks and then journal about them and that's about all you do. What you're not told is that you're on a time limit each time, and will be unceremoniously kicked from the apartment, successful or not, when the time runs out, and you have to go to a *very* specific place in the apartment that is never marked out for you to get the daily journal entry - the only thing about the game remotely interesting.

Unfortunately for Sunset and for Tale of Tales, a short time before the release of Sunset, Lord Gaben had emerged from his slumber and enabled Steam Refunds. This absolutely fucked Tale of Tales' business model in the ass. As a team of small developers, Tale of Tales relied on grant money to pay for their game development cycle, and then they released the games on Steam hoping to lure in people who would be lured in by the presentation. Easy money. The problem is that the majority of their games can be completed in this side of ten minutes, and you've seen literally everything they have to offer. Tale of Tales' entire business model had been irrevocably destroyed by this change.

Needless to say, Sunset failed, despite their massive advertising buy-in. People tried it, saw what it was, immediately refunded it when it failed to be interesting.
Needless to say, Tale of Tales reacted to this with the decency and good taste you've come to expect:

 

[Judge Dredd]

Speaking of which, I don't know if it counts, but there is a visual novel called Everlasting Summer that was made by the volunteers from the russian imageboard called 2ch.

Oh, that reminds me. Goodbye Volcano High.


A visual novel that was hyped as a PS5 launch game I believe? It was exactly what you expect of SJW "modern audience" slop.

Goodbye Volcano High is a cinematic narrative adventure about love, change, and the end of the world. Guide Fang through their final year of high school as they try to make things right before time is up.

It has really high production quality and ad budget for what is essentially a bog standard visual novel. They even had the budget for animated cutscenes, and were promoted by Sony during E3.

The game experienced heavy delays. So much so that a 4chan parody game, Snoot Game, was released between the announcement and release. It wasn't some barely held together gamejam game either, but a full visual novel.

Of course, the devs spent more time playing the victim on discord and social media than working on the game.