What are the most pretentious games ever made?

[Sand Mega]

There's a free demo and here's the difference between the demo and the full version:

Yup, here it is

Weirdly, clicking it from the developer's page on steam only seems to redirect for the full game, I don't think it can be downloaded anymore

 

[Sand Mega]

Another bit of hilarity is that three popular tags for the game are "anime", "meme" and "funny" lmao

 

[Pissmaster]

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People like to make fun of Gone Home, Fez and depression quest. But I think the granddaughter of all hipster pretentious art game crap is Braid. It's an alright puzzle platformer with super Mario bros references. But game journalists and homosexuals in the video games are art crowd circle jerk over braid being deep because the ending is a text screen references the Manhattan project. Braid is such hipster trash. Even college humor made fun of braid for sniffing its own farts back in the day. Yes, that college humor.

Came here to post about Braid. I posted a big rant about it last year, how it spearheaded the whole "games are art" thing, and this godawful Penny Arcade comic:


Braid is a game that aCkShUaLlY mAtTeRz and is totally worth your fifteen bucks because youre a faggot retard thats gonna squander it on stupid shit anyway!!!!!!!!

(Also, this "game that matters" doesn't matter enough to get any kind of Steam UI modernization, nor a price drop)

Yup, here it is
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Weirdly, clicking it from the developer's page on steam only seems to redirect for the full game, I don't think it can be downloaded anymore

Oh, I remember downloading that way back when. I think you could walk up to the bench and sit down on it, and the demo ended there.

 

[Sand Mega]

Honestly I think this genre of games about depression is more oversaturated for how generic they are to eachother, mostly represent the struggles of the average twitter user instead of anyone else, but wanted to hear what you think about this:

Save 51% on Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk on Steam

A short story about what sort of challenges everyday little things can be. Help the girl buy milk, be the first not to disappoint her.

store.steampowered.com

It's story about mental health, it's short lenght, having meta commentary and the fact it's a visual novel would be prone to make me dislike it, but it has such a "charm" to it that I can't hate it. Wonder if someone felt the same way

 

[Mexican_Wizard_711]

Every Indie Game Made by An Indie Dev

 

[Gamepads]

i'm surprised no one has said Dear Esther yet. it feels like it was the game that sort of kicked off the pretentious walking sim genre and it's still by far the worst one i've played. at least it's pretty good looking for a source engine game?

That's the retail version. Dear Esther was originally a free HL2 mod, and fucking ugly to boot. I got suckered into it wondering why the fuck it was rated so high on ModDB back then. Turns out even back in 2011 those websites would felate the crap out of the pretentious stuff.

The general look does highlight the lack of skill. HL2: Lost Coast came out in 2005 to showcase HDR, and Mod Dear Esther in 2011 is fuckin' bleak in comparison.

 

[Finger Pistols]

Any of the David Cage games. The guy wants to make movies but is trapped making games "Where your choices matter". Spoilers, they usually don't since there is only one right path/ending for you to choose. The topics that he tries to bring up are so badly written and ham-fisted too. His games want to be something greater, games that have heavy and complex topics but they struggle to even be coherent.

If you want to play a game where choices do matter and has great writing just play Disco Elysium. It genuinely surprised me how a simple interaction at the start of the game could have some severe repercussions on my skill checks later in the game. How depending on my choices and abilities I could solve the case in many ways. Even if I failed some checks there were still many other doors to open up or leads to follow. How your skills could interpret information differently depending on how developed or underdeveloped they were. There's a great video by the youtuber Uricksaladbar comparing a David Cage game to Disco Elysium that I do recommend if you are interested in the topic.

 

[ColonelCadaver]

Honestly I think this genre of games about depression is more oversaturated for how generic they are to eachother, mostly represent the struggles of the average twitter user instead of anyone else, but wanted to hear what you think about this:

Save 51% on Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk on Steam

A short story about what sort of challenges everyday little things can be. Help the girl buy milk, be the first not to disappoint her.

store.steampowered.com

It's story about mental health, it's short lenght, having meta commentary and the fact it's a visual novel would be prone to make me dislike it, but it has such a "charm" to it that I can't hate it. Wonder if someone felt the same way

Nigger game made by snowniggers for trannies.

 

[Mista House]

Bioshock Infinite - muh heckin racismos bad

TLOU2 - is any explanation needed
Borderlands series - definition of tumblr tier humour and repetitive gameplay.

Hearts of Iron 4 - this one due to the fans, the paradox forums for HOI4 are a gold mine of autism. My friend regularly shitposts on there and is consistently amazed when people fall for very obvious bait.

Outer Worlds - not only was it incredibly preachy it was equally boring and small

High on Life - Rick n Morty the game, just as pretentious as the tv series

Daikatana - John Romero will take a fat shit on your face

Portal 2 - up its own arse from the beginning

ME Andromeda - colonisation is....... le bad!

Battlefield 1/5 - ww1 and ww2 were full of strong bipoc women chud

Call of Duty Vanguard - ww2 was full of strong bipoc women chud

Depression Quest - you too can now roleplay as Zoe Quinn (sex for reviews DLC coming soon)

2022 Saints Row reboot - Saints Row but without the bits that made the series good.

 

[Sand Mega]

Nigger game made by snowniggers for trannies.

Didn't find that much tranny content, but don't know about the sequel though

Am skeptical by the fact it's bundled with an obviously tranny game just by looking at the artstyle alone (and the pretentious title too)

 

[Slav Power]

Portal 2 - up its own arse from the beginning

This is the first time I hear this kind of critique about Portal 2. Care to elaborate?

 

[Sand Mega]

Every Indie Game Made by An Indie Dev

If you want to find a goldmine of pretentious indie games go look at Itch.io, this might be a good category to start finding ones

Top games tagged artgame

Find games tagged artgame like Paper Cages, missed messages., good morning!, Planetarium, I woke up next to you again. on itch.io, the indie game hosting marketplace

itch.io

 

[NoonmanR]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned YIIK, the game is straight up just about an author's self insert that can do no wrong, is longwinded, outright mean and very stupid, and he hypes up this "cool meta narrative in a post-modern rpg" that completely falls flat on it's face as a result. The game inserts literary references and uses writing that screams "I'm in college and I just found a thesaurus" writing.

YIIK baffles me in just how much the author doesn't understand any of the complaints he's getting. Like that Alpaca scene, people complained it was painful and goofy and somehow that translated into turning the fucking thing into JRPG God.

Anyways, Bioshook Infinite is fucking up there man. Gaming journos were creaming themselves at how sophisticated this fucking game was back in the day but I'd argue they gutted out the shit that made it Bioshock and turned it into a generic FPS. The morality system was almost completely removed, save for one Confederate soldier you can spare, but the game makes it a point in telling and showing you how it was a complete waste of time(if you don't kill him, he ends up lobotomized) because you can't sympathize with the enemy(TM). It's like that for everything else though, you aren't allowed to make any meaningful choices because the developers can't handle that people would have differing opinions. The gameplay is just a series of shooting galleries, with the guy you're touting along being a glorified medkit/ammo bag dispenser, occasionally you'll fight a special enemy such as the fireman, who's basically just a whiny big daddy you have to shoot in the chest or the KKrow Knight that likes to teleport around and poke you with a sword. Interspersed with all that is a bunch of corridors and hallways where they slow down your walking speed and make you take in all the story, again, typical FPS/modern game bullshit that makes the whole package bland, with the only thing standing out being the visuals. The main character is forced to do all of this shit to wipe away his debt, but at the middle point of the game the girl creates a portal to a new reality they enter, and it's not AT ALL clear if they could even return to it, which should completely dissolve any motivation he had for this shit, but the debt shit conveniently never gets brought up again and the game becomes more about reclaiming an airship from the commies lead by a random black woman and killing the leader of the neo confederacy. Speaking of, the racism shit doesn't make any logistical sense, if these white people were so hateful, and so hellbent on creating their own hwite utopia away from the US government and they had fucking robot servants to do the work for them - the fuck do they need the blacks there for. Either they would've all been killed off or they just plain wouldn't be there to begin with, that shit only exists so they can tug at your heartstrings and feature enemies in KKK garb without it looking retarded. The ending is also miserable, it implies the main character is so evil that every incarnation in every reality had to be killed by army of their own collective daughters, including the one who as far as we saw didn't do anything wrong, and then the DLC further cements this by implying another incarnation of him was also the villain behind bioshock 1.

The XCOM TPS that suffered development hell and was quietly shat out was a much better time than this shit ever hoped to be.

 

[Colon capital V]

Any of the David Cage games.

The only redeeming factor behind Heavy Rain is this shit here:

 

[Mista House]

This is the first time I hear this kind of critique about Portal 2. Care to elaborate?

Wheatley is unbearable as a character, the writing comes off as smug rather than sarcastic in Portal 1.

 

[Dollar Store Sentai]

Nearly all Walking Simulators fall into this, only two I can think of off the top of my head are The Beginners Guide and SOMA.
Sadly horror games have slowly slid this way as well, with their "story within a story" lore dumps the FNAF popularized

 

[Slav Power]

Wheatley is unbearable as a character, the writing comes off as smug rather than sarcastic in Portal 1.

I think Wheatley being unbearable was kind of the point of the character, but yeah in retrospect the writing wasn't good. A whole bunch of quips and very tryhard humor like "the part where he kills you" where everything tells you that including the achievement, GLaDOS doing the "I'm a potato" quip.

Portal 1 wasn't even that big on actual storywriting, but Portal 2 tried to do a whole bit of world building and indeed, the writing was off in that. Half-Life didn't seem to suffer from that since it had a different writer, or rather one writer, Marc Laidlaw. Portal 1 had two writers and Portal 2 had three writers.

 

[Sand Mega]

I think Wheatley being unbearable was kind of the point of the character, but yeah in retrospect the writing wasn't good. A whole bunch of quips and very tryhard humor like "the part where he kills you" where everything tells you that including the achievement, GLaDOS doing the "I'm a potato" quip.

At the time this wasn't that bad and maybe some considered it funny, but now all games have an annoying characters like Wheatley with annoying quips and the part where Glados turns into a potato has devolved into "lol, so random" humor, everytime I mention this I just remember this video

Millennial Writing

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ShreddedNerdJoin the Discord: https://discord.gg/mn4E8CPsgXHave you noticed this trend? Cringeworthy writing i...

www.youtube.com

 

[CuzinEd]

Never played it but I would say Death Stranding. I know enough about the game to know it's pretty pretentious. But look who made it. I am sure Kojima will be a source of more overly pretentious shitty games. Then he will whine about how no one bought them. This will keep going till he goes broke.

Flower on the PS3 was the last straw for me. Just reading the Wikipedia article fills me with embarrassment. Spiritual successor to Flow done as a Chinese guy's master's thesis at USC.

Between politics in games as subtle as a shovel upside the head and the nonstop flood of pretentious nonsense starting in the mid-2000s, plus my interests going elsewhere, video games completely lost me right around then.

I never owned a PS3 back then, but I remember that game. It's from those years where the games are art fags were a thing. I don't know what happened to those people. Anyway I bought Flower on the PS Vita a few years back and I even bought it on Steam during a sale for $2. It's better with a mouse. But it's casual game as they were called back then. A game for filthy casuals.

 

[starborn427614]

At the time this wasn't that bad and maybe some considered it funny, but now all games have an annoying characters like Wheatley with annoying quips and the part where Glados turns into a potato has devolved into "lol, so random" humor, everytime I mention this I just remember this video

Millennial Writing

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ShreddedNerdJoin the Discord: https://discord.gg/mn4E8CPsgXHave you noticed this trend? Cringeworthy writing i...

www.youtube.com

It's really a case of whether you prefer 1 or 2's style of humour, I wouldn't really say one is better than the other. I prefer 2 since the deeper story allows for greater characterization.