Let's Sperg JAIMAS RE-PLAYS A TERRIBLE GAME: DEPRESSION QUEST - A Long Time Coming.

Jaimas said:
Yep. The story is substantially funnier than that though!

Tale of Tales had a massive PR buy-in with the usual suspects, specifically Polygon, Kotaku, and the rest of the Anti-GG Journo brigade. If you're unfamiliar with Tale of Tales' body of work beyond The Graveyard and the title I'm about to cover in-depth, they are responsible for these fucking pretentious-as-shit "art" games that exist solely to be Indie Dev bait. Most are light on gameplay and big on the WTF, including seminal chat-and-violence-free-online-game Endless Forest, oblique "your character just got raped" game The Path, terrible puzzle game Vanitas, topless prepubescent reference to Saint John the Baptist Simulator Fatale, and Acid Trip simulator Luxuria Superbia (see if you can spot several of the usual subjects in the trailer for that one). What these games all have in common is an insane level of pretentiousness and a 4-7 dollar price-tag. Also the fact that most of them are virtually zero effort and usually feature less than six minutes of actual gameplay.

Like many works directly financed by Indiefund (read: a money-laundering service for the usual suspects that funnels money into indie game promotion under the guise of contests like the IGF, who picks the winner beforehand), Tale of Tales was an indie darling that got its foot in the door because it was ever so enlightened. Its new game, Sunset, was going to be a big deal, putting in more time and effort than any Tale of Tales game before, and even getting a decent voice cast. Unfortunately for Sunset, its core concept was still shit, and, more importantly, it came out right after a critical event:

Steam instituting a refund policy.

Tale of Tales' average game length of 7 minutes was never going to get away scot free again. Sunset was a bit longer and more involved, but ultimately moved less than 4000 copies in its first two months - half of which were fucking Kickstarter backers. The game did extremely poorly outside of niche demographics because it breaks one of the cardinal rules of walking simulators (don't have a much more interesting plot going on where the player can't get to it). The best fucking breakdown of the game was Bro Team Pill's, where Brote calls what is going to be in the game about 20 minutes in advance before refunding the game:


Tale of Tales' response to this was anything but elegant:

WYIk2Hz.jpg


@AnOminous put it best, but Tale of Tales basically only made games for themselves and assumed they're smarter than everyone else when in reality, the average customer is way smarter than they are. They really did learn to resent and even hate their potential customers, and when it boiled over, the result was this masterpiece.
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It's like, jesus guys, you made a game that flopped. Get back on the horse. Could you imagine if Wayforward did this when Shantae on the GBC flopped?

Funny coinky dink, Sunset was gonna be the game I was gonna request, but 1) I wasn't gonna pirate it because of viruses, 2) it's not worth 20 dollars, and 3) you just played through Depression Quest. I've already put you through enough. To quote the greatest game ever made, "Go and rest our heroes."
 
DragoonSierra said:
@Jaimas In all honestly the best thing to do to dispel everything that 2nd to last paragraph is simply make a game thats better than hers
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Gotta be honest, I am convinced there are enough of us on the Farms with game experience we could make a game. But it would have to be a subject that wasn't too :autism:. 4chan managed it somewhat with a few games they've made but their concept weren't entitely chan culture.
 
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"Seek help from a professional and work with them to improve your life." Wow, great strategy, genius. Didn't see that coming.

In real life, people don't always do that, probably because untreated depression makes it easy to procrastinate. Fine, but how do you make a game where everyone knows how to win?
 
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ColorfulCassowary said:
It's like, jesus guys, you made a game that flopped. Get back on the horse. Could you imagine if Wayforward did this when Shantae on the GBC flopped?

Funny coinky dink, Sunset was gonna be the game I was gonna request, but 1) I wasn't gonna pirate it because of viruses, 2) it's not worth 20 dollars, and 3) you just played through Depression Quest. I've already put you through enough. To quote the greatest game ever made, "Go and rest our heroes."
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Perhaps someday.

Cibele is higher on the list though, because it's basically "Nina Freeman Gets Her Tits Out: The Video Game."
 
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DragoonSierra said:
Then do it.
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I reiterate: A parody game of Chelsea's magnum opus (featuring notorious meme music) was made in less than a day using Twine. It was called Oppression Quest and it was making fun of the nonsense she was involved with that led to GG and her attempts to cynically bilk attention off of it. The idea (according to its maker) was to show that a game like hers really didn't take a huge amount of effort.

Sadly, the site was taken down years ago and no one's bothered to mirror it, but a lot of videos and such covering it are still around.
 
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knightlautrec said:
Gotta be honest, I am convinced there are enough of us on the Farms with game experience we could make a game. But it would have to be a subject that wasn't too :autism:. 4chan managed it somewhat with a few games they've made but their concept weren't entitely chan culture.
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Are you referring to Katawa Shojo?
 
They've also made games like Risk of Rain and I guess Minecraft.

I remember playing this for like 2 minutes and noping out cause it was intensely boring and the music made me depressed. So I guess it did the trick of conveying what depression is like I suppose?
 
Jaimas said:
I reiterate: A parody game of Chelsea's magnum opus (featuring notorious meme music) was made in less than a day using Twine. It was called Oppression Quest and it was making fun of the nonsense she was involved with that led to GG and her attempts to cynically bilk attention off of it. The idea (according to its maker) was to show that a game like hers really didn't take a huge amount of effort.

Sadly, the site was taken down years ago and no one's bothered to mirror it, but a lot of videos and such covering it are still around.
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Didn't ED have a version of it here? https://encyclopediadramatica.rs/Depression_Quest_Simulator

Or is that different?
 
knightlautrec said:
Gotta be honest, I am convinced there are enough of us on the Farms with game experience we could make a game. But it would have to be a subject that wasn't too :autism:. 4chan managed it somewhat with a few games they've made but their concept weren't entitely chan culture.
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I am impressed that Katawa Shoujo did actually end up being a finished product, even if I don't like visual novels about fucking cripples in a pick-your-diability-waifu premise.

Jaimas said:
Cibele is higher on the list though, because it's basically "Nina Freeman Gets Her Tits Out: The Video Game."
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It's a good thing you named the specific title, since all Nina Freeman "vignettes" are about getting her tits out.
 
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Jaimas said:
Oppression Quest was similar to this, but copied Quinn's style exactly (with the staticky images at the top replaced by a staticky image of Melody Hensley), and the static "YOU ARE SO DEPRESSED" images with "Your Patreon is now X dollars" images.
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Actually tried the ED version. It's somewhat broken since clicking an option such as go to a wedding instead gave me an answer unrelated to the choice I picked.

Uncanny Valley said:
TV Tropes shilling for this is funny because a lot of their users legitimately hate women.
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If TV Tropes hates women, it makes all their spergings over this game and the autism holy war all the more funnier.
Would also like to see those post and get a good laugh at the irony.
 
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I really thought the point of the game was to make non-depressed people empathetic to depressed people. Even the good ending concludes with (mild) depression, and the only way to get that ending is to admit you need help. It's common to think people can just snap out of depression & that is stupid to get therapy or take meds. The game might be insightful to someone who thinks that way. It wasn't supposed to be a game with entertainment as the goal, so reviewing it like one makes no sense to me.
 
sperginity said:
I really thought the point of the game was to make non-depressed people empathetic to depressed people. Even the good ending concludes with (mild) depression, and the only way to get that ending is to admit you need help. It's common to think people can just snap out of depression & that is stupid to get therapy or take meds. The game might be insightful to someone who thinks that way. It wasn't supposed to be a game with entertainment as the goal, so reviewing it like one makes no sense to me.
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The games I cover here on JPATG are labelled games, put on gaming platforms, billed as games by their creators, and in more than a few cases, sold outright as video games. Many of these devs push their pretentious horse-shit as being something more than conventional vidya in an attempt to isolate it from criticism. In fact most of the individuals pushing these fucking things do so with the full intent of using some tactic or another to shield them from a deserved cornholing - whether the "it's just a dollar budget title" that That Really Hot Chick tried to get away with or arguing that their pretentious shit is some heretofore unseen level of insight like Laura Kate Dale's shit.

That's bollocks, all of it. You're gonna put it out there as a game, I'm going to review it as one.

In the case of Depression Quest, I'd actually be inclined to be much more gentle on it if it weren't for the conga-line of retardation that followed coverage of the fucking thing. For the moment, ignore that one of its biggest accolades (its winning IGF one year) only happened because Quinn was going to win before any contest was held (because the IGF heads were fucking personal friends of hers), the fact that she had endless fucking promotions for the fucking thing from an indie gaming press that was - provably - either financially bankrolling her, fucking her at the time, or both, and that it quite literally is the only one of Quinn's games she's ever done that had anything remotely resembling actual mainstream penetration (her fucking Jeff Goldblum Staring Contest game doesn't count).

Even if you ignore all the above, this project was entirely about Quinn, her massive ego, and her desire to be important. She didn't fucking give a damn about depression beyond her ability to cynically use it as a backdrop for some work her hipster douche friends could hipster over. I could point at what she did to Wizardchan if you want a great microcosm about how she actually feels about depression, but instead I'll punch a hole through it by lining up that this focuses on the version that Quinn had (which is closer to Dysthymia than actual Depression), and has the protagonist as a fucking relatively well-set-up person with a moderately robust support network, which, honestly, is often not how people with undiagnosed depression roll. One can describe this as Quinn writing from experience. I call it fucking laziness because a more conventional Depression diagnosis with a much more threadbare support network would have taken actual fucking effort, and we can't have that, can we?

There's just too many examples of how this game was nothing but an ego boost and a cynical attempt to angle towards relevance. Whether it's the gauche way she tried to market the game based on the death of Robin Williams (again, with help from her buddies), the fact that numerous friends of hers went to the mat declaring the game to be the single-most-important game in the history of human endeavor (none funnier than Alex Lifschitz, who quite literally ended his career defending this game and extoling its superiority to inferior games with "gameplay" like GTAV, declaring anyone who likes it to be "arrogant sacks of hot garbage that deserve to be broken on racks"), there's just too many examples of how she fully intended this to be her coming across as someone with a finger firmly on the pulse of social issues, a cynical way for her to claim she was a "game dev" while not actually accomplishing something of note.

Throw in the fact that someone was able to parody her game in every way from design to setup in less than a day and I'm not inclined to show even the slightest scrap of mercy towards it.
 
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Jaimas said:
And no, before any of you ask, there's no An Hero ending. The game makes your character chicken out if you try to go that route, and since it just makes this fucking thing drag on longer, let's push forward to where this game really starts to pick up as far as issues is concerned:
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Oh yes i tried several times but practically you can cheese the game (lol) by making SANE decisions, so as long as your take your medication, get the kitten and talk to the therapist you get the good ending, and like you said there is no way to off yourself, the most hilarious part when i played was when Zoe or her self insert said that watching Netflix is a AGONIZING experience i laughed so much at that part
 
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