Seriously. When did devs start getting praised for cutscenes and cinematic slow-walking over compelling gameplay?
Happened when games went mainstream and Joe Everyman who lives down the street wanted to be told a story just the way his movies do it. The nerds who care about gameplay are vastly outnumbered and out-wallet-voted by the "broader demographic". Games may be mainstream now, but mainstream knowledge of games holds games'
stories as their primary artistic offering to the world, and the main games news rags have long held artistic merit to be the point and pinnacle of what gaming should be. We basically have the double curse of an ignorant public and a maliciously ignorant press. Doesn't take Einstein to figure out what happens after that. Spoiler:
Death Stranding and its "difficulty for moviegoers". (It is very, very far from coincidental that both Hideo Kojima and David Cage were aspiring filmmakers before they went into video games.)
I could go on a whole rant about the relative age of vidya and its relationship to its immediate predecessor art form, film, and how it's extremely similar to the relationship film had to
its predecessor, theater, and how we are right now in the middle of watching art-cred whores trying desperately to use a new medium in ways suited to the old in order to
appear more artistic (by existing standards recognized by the public) instead of actually
being artistic and doing new things in new ways...but that'd take all day. Suffice it to say there is more art in
Noita than there will ever be in TLoU2, because unlike TLoU2,
Noita isn't trying to be a film with button prompts.