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- Feb 4, 2013
You are objectively incorrect. Sucker Punch.
Let's Sperg Revolution 60: Game of the Year Contender
- Thread starter Smutley
- Start date
You are objectively incorrect. Sucker Punch.
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- Jun 15, 2014
lol
At least that movie was visually pretty, despite being pretty stupid.
Which is more than I can say about Sharkboy and Lavagirl: 3D. To this day I have no idea what the fuck was going on at any point in that film.
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- Jul 31, 2014
I hate that movie so fucking much oh my god.
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- Jun 15, 2014
I think that's the movie that made me realize how everything Jerry Bruckhimer was actually just shit. Only took four movies but I'd already been on the fence when I wanted to like Game Over so hard (I was pretty much target audience at the time) but it just fell apart at the end, and then Shark/Lava comes along and it looked like an even shitter Game Over.
Of course, that's still a better track record than Briana Wu, here, since De-evolution Shitty looks terrible in every way and only goes more and more downhill as Smutley so generously shows us. I do honestly want somebody to rip the source code and give me a text file for me to utterly deconstruct it and examine its guts CSI Autopsy style.
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- Jun 27, 2014
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- Dec 7, 2013
Did you not read the rest of the thread? She's a collage dropout who doesn't even know 101 lvl philosophy.
Can't fail something you never fucking finished. Willing to bet it wasn't even something rigorous like the physical sciences or music composition.
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- Apr 15, 2014
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- Jul 24, 2013
Oh my goodness, yes! All bad games should be welcome, even the old school ones.
I'm putting together a list of awful shit I have on steam, btw (and finalizing the present I have for you all). That big list I'll make in to a poll available for you guys to vote on while I do a couple plays through something... VERY special. It'll have some slight interaction too so everyone prepare your butts. Here's a hint.
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- Feb 25, 2013
MELON!
As a side note I really think you should do a playthrough only speaking in Smiths lyrics.
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- Apr 15, 2014
When I said Old School I meant Real Old School: terrible tabletop games.
Seriously, a few pages consisting of a forum game of Racial Holey War could be hilarious. Especially if we mock the hell out of the concept (all the nazis are inbred yokels or 2edgy4u 14 year olds. Or Tyce knock offs).
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- Jun 27, 2014
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- Jun 27, 2014
I actually did like a serious review of it once. I could post it if you want.
I also did a mocking one in the old Gamergate thread.
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- Dec 17, 2013
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- Sep 27, 2014
I'd like to read it. I tried to play Depression Quest, but it was boring as hell. I actually do honestly appreciate games that attempt to do something artistic or meaningful, but they also have to be good games, and Depression Quest just was not good.
- Joined
- Jun 27, 2014
Transcribing now:
Jaimas' Review of Depression Quest said:Hoo, boy. Where to start with this one.
Some time ago, a friend of mine (who shall remain anonymous) dropped me a link to a game called Depression Quest, then ran away snickering like he'd just tossed a smoke bomb into my bathroom or hurled my shoes over a telephone pole an hour before work. I initially had intended to avoid commenting on it, due to the giant, biblical shit-storm brewing that was the scandal its developer got involved with, and that whole "Gamergate" thing, but as time's gone on, I decided I may as well review the damned thing properly.
Depression Quest is a browser platform game developed in Twine. In this regard, it's comparable to other browser games like Kingdom of Loathing or Ferion, except that Depression Quest is less like those and more like an interactive Choose-Your-Own Adventure book. This is not, contrary to what many might think, a necessarily bad thing. Text adventures have been around for generations. My first played video game was The Wizard's Castle, and that was a fricking great game. I intend to be as fair to Depression Quest as humanly possible in this article, not merely because of the kerfluffle its developers seem to be engaged in, but because it looks at a pretty big topic (Depression), and, as someone with Depression, I feel my review can give some analysis to the game itself. As such, Depression Quest will be reviewed the same way I would review a text adventure or visual novel.
I don't really have an image for Depression itself, so have this image of Dark Souls' novelization.
Let us begin.
The game itself covers the trials and trifles of a nameless protagonist, who you take the role of. Despite a girlfriend and a reasonably successful job, your character is suffering from undiagnosed depression and possibly other issues. Your character goes through day-to-day living, trying to find a way to better his lot and make sense of a world that makes little. You have some ability to influence the general story as your character tries to deal with a condition that is increasingly sapping their will, and work your way to one of a few different endings based on your choices. The game plays with this extremely seriously, and shows at least a reasonable amount of knowledgability in the subject matter. Much more can't be said about the story without spoilers. And no, there isn't an An Hero ending.
Please stop making that joke. I heard it 20 times during the creation of this review alone, and it was funny for exactly three of them.
How Depression Quest handles the protagonist's increasingly off-kilter mental state is actually quite clever: by hedging off various choices throughout the game. Beginning when your symptoms first start to really manifest, your character is increasingly unable to perform the most productive and/or useful options. The condition worsens over time as you go without treatment, giving a stark and rather unusual portrayal, via mechanics, of one of many ways Depression can manifest.
This is one of the flickering banners at the bottom of the page. Get used to seeing these.
Whilst this mechanic is an interesting take on the matter, and indeed, could be seen as a very interesting idea in a CYOA game like this, it's also handled very, very poorly. From the very start of the game, a flashing bar at the bottom of the screen lets us know we're depressed, not on meds, and so on. The problem this presents, and one major way this hinders Depression Quest, is that Depression's symptoms aren't anywhere near that obvious. The game has a lot of potential in such a situation - by removing those stupid bars alone, a player would have much more reason to get invested, since it would be on the player to figure out why their choices are so restricted.
Another issue brought up with this mechanic is that it doesn't offer any other methodology other than meds+therapy (at least from my playthroughs) to get through the Depression, when many people with Chronic and/or medically untreatable Depression have to find their own way to deal with it. The game, being rather short (I beat a first playthrough in about 20 minutes), doesn't have the room for that kind of coverage, and it's really not clear whether this was due to limited resources/time, or simply lack of knowledge on the subject. Either way, the game suffers a bit for it.
Depression Quest has other problems that hamstring it as well. In terms of presentation, it's poor. There's nothing wrong with using Twine - programs like it exist to help Artists and such create their own works. The problem is that a number of the design choices are astoundingly lackluster. The same color palette is used, without any alteration, on every page. There are photos at the top that show things vaguely related to the subject at hand, but rarely, if ever, are these items ever something you absolutely need to see. The game uses almost no visual media whatsoever, which isn't a strike against a game that's predominantly text like Depression Quest, but is a frankly confounding decision when one takes note of it - if the photos are at best tangentially connected to the scenes in the game, the question must be asked: why include them?
This image of a sink is shown when the protagonist's mother comes to visit. It has zero relevance.
There are other issues as well, and foremost among these is the music. Depression Quest features a dissonant piano music loop that sets up a mood of isolation and curiousity, all at once. The problem: It's essentially the only song in the game, it loops constantly, and the only thing that shakes up its monotony is really, really jarring synth stingers intended to add weight to scenes. These stingers and the looping music become very irritating very quickly, and represent a serious issue with the atmosphere - rather than be immersive or supportive, the music is distracting and off-putting.
It's very clear that Depression Quest came mostly from the heart, and with a very modest budget behind it - but the choice of how this soundtrack was used is not to Depression Quest's benefit. More music would have helped this game immensely, but what this game truly would have benefitted very much from would be layered music, a tactic done since the NES era, but which is well-known for its use in games like Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and Destiny, wherein a basic melody is played, with other parts layered on or removed to completely change the tone and mood of the same song. With this tactic, Depression Quest could have shown a lot more subtlety, allowing the player to pick up on subtle nods of the protagonist's internal distress through the audio alone.
Perhaps the saddest place Depression Quest falls short, however, is its writing. On the whole, it isn't awful, but this is a game wherein the fundamental rules of "Show, Don't Tell" is openly defied. The game throws huge blocks of text at you, most of which are the sort intended to get across how big the problems your protagonist has are. This is fair enough, but for a story espousing to be about getting across what Depression is like, this is an unforgivably badly-missed opportunity. The objective in this should have been to allow the reader to interpret things of the story and their condition as the game went forward, but we're never given that chance - we are told how we feel, why we feel that way, and there is nothing for the player to interpret or analyze deeper meaning from. Again, I can't say for sure what the reason behind this critical shortcoming is, but it's really apparent, especially because the writing would be reasonably good were it not for this singular problem.
When people dismiss Depression Quest for a percieved lack of quality, it's very easy to look at such claims and be dismissive of them, given that it's a currently-freeware browser game with a tiny team and arguably an even tinier budget. When people say the game could be re-created by someone with knowledge of HTML in the span of a day, they're quite correct, but that's missing the point on the most critical issue, which is why Depression Quest falls short of the mark. After all - Depression Quest itself was never swinging for the trees, as it were.
Analytically, this is not a game that could not have been done more competently with a bit more foresight and effort, and I just spent several paragraphs explaining how in the above. Whether due to a need to get it out in a specific timeframe, budget shortfalls, or simple incapacity, Depression Quest falls well short of the game it could - and more importantly, should have been. It would not have taken much to turn an already interesting take on Depression into a much deeper, more analytical, and overall better take on it with the correcting of the various issues I mentioned in the spots above. I've certainly played way worse educational games and way worse text adventures and visual novels, but Depression Quest's shortcomings are simply too obvious and too strong in all the wrong areas, making it - objectively - a pretty bad game. All in all, it's an interesting idea, but little more than that, and whilst it may come across as interesting or insightful for some, there's just not enough crunch to make it recommendable.
And on that thought, I leave you.
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2014
IIRC, Depression Quest went up on Steam Greenlight around the same time it was fully made public that Robin Williams had taken his own life due to previously unknown but severe depression issues, suggesting ZQ may have rushed this game to greenlight to hopefully cash in on the whole depression-is-currently-a-topic thing in the media at large.
When it didn't get approved, that's when she resorted to forcing social engineering by accusing Wizardchan by way of abusing her connections in the gaming report circles.
Though as you point out, DQ is freeware, so why ZQ wanted to push DQ so hard when she could have just let the moment slide and not unintentionally spell doom for the secret cabal of SJWism in gaming is a question that puzzles me. But that's getting off topic about another game that, ironically, is STILL apparently better in some respects than R60 here.
When it didn't get approved, that's when she resorted to forcing social engineering by accusing Wizardchan by way of abusing her connections in the gaming report circles.
Though as you point out, DQ is freeware, so why ZQ wanted to push DQ so hard when she could have just let the moment slide and not unintentionally spell doom for the secret cabal of SJWism in gaming is a question that puzzles me. But that's getting off topic about another game that, ironically, is STILL apparently better in some respects than R60 here.
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- Oct 9, 2013
Short skirt, blonde/strawberry blonde, weird eyes, red protrusions from head...
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- Jan 17, 2014
