What are the most pretentious games ever made?

[Cable 7]

Dys4ia by Anne Atrophy. Enough said.

 

[Almighty Space Duck]

To echo a few others in the thread. Anything involving David Cage. Pretentious nonsense but good to laugh at/RP as someone with a sub 70 IQ

Shut your whore mouth, sinner. "Keep Your Rifle By Your Side" trumps any flaws it may have.

Nor did I get any fart-huffing vibes from it. It left me wanting more redneck wars. My biggest complaint with FC5 is that the Resistance points forced the story to progress too quickly, and that you can't go half a mile in any direction without getting in a drive-by with Peggies.

The only redeeming thing about Far Cry 5 was the play through Tex and Dep did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf_cQyWaxmI

Otherwise Far Cry should have stopped after 3 / Blood Dragon.

 

[Jaimas]

Dys4ia by Anne Atrophy. Enough said.

That is cheating for the same reason bringing a Neil Breen movie to a bad movie competition is.

 

[Sniperwoof]

Ok new rule AAA or AA games only. Posting those hipster indies on Steam that are made solely for the purpose of being ironic or a metaphor for depression/troonism is cheating.

 

[mrs thickness]

maybe my definition of pretentious is a little twisted but either way disco elysium just came across as insanely up it's own ass, and i just got fucking sick of it after a while. at least david cage games are really, really funny

 

[This Is Violence Now]

Braid, Dear Esther, Gone Home.

 

[Radola Gajda]

Detroit Become Human was one of the worst offenders I've played in this category. It starts out alright, running with a fairly generic 'humanlike AI becomes conscious and develops feelings' plot. Towards the end of the game it devolves into an insane Antifa/BLM simulator where the US government literally, and I do mean literally, goes full 3rd Reich on the AIs and you have to stop the comically evil US soldiers/cops from murdering every AI in the country for the crime of wanting civil rights.

After I finished the game and was trying to find explanations for the bizarre conclusion I discovered that the director and the studio are French, and was like 'oh.'

Only saving grace of this one was fact that it allowed you to do "wrong" decisions and fail quick time events. And still progress story.
So it was pretty entertaining to play it fuck up everything and watch fireworks

 

[Raging Capybara]

It's hard to compete against Red Dead Redemption 2.

- Game probably cost 1 billion dollars to produce.
- Painstaking realistic and slow animation to absolutely everything your character does, including picking up an item on a shelf, which takes a good 8 seconds.
- Very long, bloated, and "cinematic" cutscenes involving dozens of different characters.
- Tightly scripted events leading always to the outcomes the devs wanted giving the player no free will.
- Convoluted controls. Anything that would be very simple to do in any other game, becomes a chore in RDR2 because its animation needs to be autistically realistic.
- Dramatic, dark, and melancholic all the way through. Remember, adults can't enjoy fun things.

I would say The Last of Us 2 was the most pretentious game out there, for similar reasons, but I never played it. But looking at footage and reading commentary it appears the game has genuinely fun gunplay. So I decided to nominate RDR2 instead as the most faggy game of all time.

 

[Croaking Spider]

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

Spoiler: A spergout on Daikatana

I went through and played this with some fan patches to make the game more bearable (removing AI companions, weapon tweaks, etc) and I see it in a different light then I used to. Some of the set pieces and color choices look great, and the weapons, although not all useful, were creative. They definitely leaned more into a multiplayer deathmatching balance because that was his forte.

Daikatana was a real marker for the end of the Two John saga at id. It was his first game after they finished Quake and his departure from the company. Even though Quake 2 did alright and ran on an extremely well-crafted engine on John Carmack's part, it lacked a lot of character that Quake 1 had.

Likewise, Daikatana was an ambitious idea idea and has a lot of John Romero's creative taste, but it lacked the stable engine or optimization wizardry that had gone into the games that he worked in tandem with Carmack on.

When you put Quake 2 and Daikatana side by side, it paints a good picture of what was lost in that transition period at id. Quake 2 is a tight and well-polished game with more toned down environment palettes and enemy designs from the first game, and is considered by some as the beginning of the "glorified tech demo" period (see: Doom 3, Quake 4, Rage).

Daikatana is a game with striking color palettes and asset designs that runs on spaghetti code, when it decides to run at all. The AI pathing is dogshit, some of the weapons are useless, and having the whole game essentially be an escort quest is quite shit, especially combined with the prior two issues.

Daikatana is undoubtably trash, but it's important trash in the same vein as E.T. on Atari helped to begin the video game crash of the 80s.

Duke Nukem Forever. The first 30 minutes of the game is Duke getting his dick sucked both literally and metaphorically. It tries entirely too hard to be "classic Duke" without any of the charm of Duke 3D. It's just a lot of dick jokes and "memes, amiright?" meta humor you'd find in Borderlands 3's writing. Basically, it's cringe. Duke was always an asshole, now he's just an unfunny and unlikable asshole.

Plus, they have the absolute audacity to take potshots at franchises that have massively eclipsed the Duke Nukem franchise. "Power armor is for pussies", "I hate valve puzzles", and dead space marine jokes don't exactly land when Halo, Doom, and Half Life have collectively dunked on you while you spent 14 years in development hell.

I'm not bothered by the fact I spent money on a shit sandwich, I'm bothered that said shit sandwich tried to smugly pass itself off as gourmet.

 

[Articles and Nudes]

Her Story and that other game he made. Clicking through FMV sequences until you discover the antagonist is a literal evil twin, or demon, is not the depth it thinks it is.

Death Stranding is one of my favourite games ever made, but...yeah. I can't deny how up its own arse it is.

 

[LinkinParkxNaruto[AMV]]

Last of Us, Pathologic, Nier Automata, most indie games.

I didn't like P.T very much and i feel like if it didn't got cancelled Silent Hills would have been a wreck. Del Toro and Kojima were and still are way too far up their own asses.

 

[A Sentient Cloud]

Night in the Woods was really pretty, had great sound effects, and almost had an interesting story. Then it ends and the true villain is capitalism.

It's Reddit: The Game with a great coat of paint.

The capitalist themes are hardly subtle and run through the entirety of the game (though I would argue they aren't "pretentious" in the least). If that missed you so widely that you interpreted as some grand reveal at the end then I gotta say that's kind of on you. But fair enough, it's totally fine to not like a game.

As someone who was living in a dying opioid-ridden New England mill town much like the setting of the game at the time I played it, I dunno, it felt earned, guess it just hit me at the right time.

maybe my definition of pretentious is a little twisted but either way disco elysium just came across as insanely up it's own ass, and i just got fucking sick of it after a while. at least david cage games are really, really funny

Given that many people's definition of the term seem to run the gamut from "there are plot holes," to "I didn't like its political leanings," to "it's just a bad game," I wouldn't say your definition is unusually off the mark for this thread. (Over/underrated threads also have this issue.)

Braid, Senua, and Bioshock: Infinite all certainly meet the traditional definition of "aspiring to greater depth than it actually possesses," but Disco Elysium? That's one of the best written games of the past decade IMO, so while it certainly aspires to higher themes than your average video game, I think it actually meets them. Especially since IRL the creators ended up getting fucked over by venture capitalists.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

Ironically MGS2 got less pretentious when the ending gaslight about secret world organisations manipulating the populace via lies and memes turned out to be 100% correct

The fanbase is pretentious about the ending. They act like it was some genius "reading the future" from Kojima, but it's literally boiler plate "conspiracy theories" that Alex Jones, Art Bell and The X Files had been making big for over a decade at that point.

Metal Gear Solid is only intellectual, philosophical and original to people who literally never leave the house.

Edit: But I guess that could be said for most pretentious games.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

The fanbase is pretentious about the ending. They act like it was some genius "reading the future" from Kojima, but it's literally boiler plate "conspiracy theories" that Alex Jones, Art Bell and The X Files had been making big for over a decade at that point.

Metal Gear Solid is only intellectual, philosophical and original to people who literally never leave the house.

I think every "war is hell" game is automatically pretentious by default. It's already the most tired observations of the 20th century, but games only add to the hypocrisy by having the player enjoyment be derived from the war, leading to "war is fun but also bad". The few games that make it work usually do it by showing the transformation of the main character rather than lingering on the atrocity you are forced to do/see.

...Maybe Revengenance is alright.

 

[Book Thief]

Plus, they have the absolute audacity to take potshots at franchises that have massively eclipsed the Duke Nukem franchise. "Power armor is for pussies", "I hate valve puzzles", and dead space marine jokes don't exactly land when Halo, Doom, and Half Life have collectively dunked on you while you spent 14 years in development hell.

I think the intent of those jokes are to play up the whole concept of "Let's hide a dead protagonist of another game and have our character make a quip about them" style of Easter Eggs that was popular around the time when Duke Nukem was relevant. For example, in Duke Nukem 3D, you could find a dead space marine from DOOM:

And in Blood, another Build Engine game, you could find Duke Nukem dead and hung upsidedown in one of the circus levels:

The problem with Duke Nukem Forever's references is that, since the game took forever to come out, this style of Easter egg fell out of style, and thus the humor -- if you can call it that -- is lost on a completely new generation of gamers who don't understand the context.

 

[Croaking Spider]

I think the intent of those jokes are to play up the whole concept of "Let's hide a dead protagonist of another game and have our character make a quip about them" style of Easter Eggs that was popular around the time when Duke Nukem was relevant.

Oh, no doubt. I grew up on Doom, Rise of the Triad, Shadow Warrior, and Duke Nukem. The humor actually lands in Duke 3D because at the time, Duke Nukem could very well have been considered a real rival franchise.

The Build engine can be incredibly jank at times, but the environment effects were great, given the technology available. Ken Silverman doesn't get the credit he deserves.

Also, obligatory "fuck you, Randy Pitchford". Thanks for releasing a dogshit Megaton Edition and for leaving another black mark on the Aliens franchise games. I hope funneling all that money out of the studio to go towards your cringey Borderlands 3 was worth it.

Aliens: Colonial Marines is a whole other can of worms and I believe I already have a tome's worth of a post here already. Easily one of the top five times I have genuinely been disappointed by a game. The hype train is a scam.

 

[mrs thickness]

Nier Automata

nier melodraumata
The real shitkicker is when the ironic weeb coomers who have jerked themselves senseless to it try to tell you the gameplay systems are anywhere close to as refined as platinum's games before it, at least the ones with a budget. Imagine playing revengeance but the bosses dont react to you hitting them and you have a mashable invincibility button which cancels out of literally everything. Very skin-deep subtext, themes, references, pretty much every aspect that isn't music. Mortality isn't even a concern for more than half of the story so there isn't tension, and by the time it is a concern I didn't give a shit and definitely wasn't crying at the ending where you shoot the credits like in super smash bros.

disco elysium stuff

I lack the writing chops to articulate it but the long and short of it is that I just think the game's prose and writing style are obnoxious, and the voice of the author(s?) is very distinct and bleeds into every bloated journey-into-a-thesaurus-conversation in the game, especially the ones with yourself. It made it impossible for me to latch onto any of the characters because all I could see were sock puppets which also politely ask for your permission first before saying the word 'faggot.' Reminds me a lot of yiik in those aspects. Maybe someone who cares a lot about politics and eastern europe and philosophy gets more from it, but not me. Maybe the game's aspirations aren't pretentious, but the vibe sure is and it's suffocating.

 

[A Sentient Cloud]

I lack the writing chops to articulate it but the long and short of it is that I just think the game's prose and writing style are obnoxious, and the voice of the author(s?) is very distinct and bleeds into every bloated journey-into-a-thesaurus-conversation in the game, especially the ones with yourself. It made it impossible for me to latch onto any of the characters because all I could see were sock puppets which also politely ask for your permission first before saying the word 'faggot.' Reminds me a lot of yiik in those aspects. Maybe someone who cares a lot about politics and eastern europe and philosophy gets more from it, but not me. Maybe the game's aspirations aren't pretentious, but the vibe sure is and it's suffocating.

Fair enough, if the writing didn't strike a chord with you that's a matter of taste that you're totally entitled to.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

One thing I'll say that a David Cage game did really well was how in Heavy Rain, you can make decisions to a point where all of the protagonists die, and the villain gets away with it. It's cumbersome to pull off, and you more or less need to follow a guide to do everything just right, but I remember that ending being satisfyingly dark.

I really like parts of Fahrenheit, one thing I really liked was making the phantom sketch of the character I played as previously, realizing that I don't... remember, really. Cage had some good ideas. It was fun. Fahrenheit was some bullshit though.

Ok new rule AAA or AA games only. Posting those hipster indies on Steam that are made solely for the purpose of being ironic or a metaphor for depression/troonism is cheating.

Nope, if any game is favorably covered in AAA or AA "game journalism" it will be eligible as content for this thread. With pretentious games we're talking the "haute couture" of vidya and we only know about it because game journo retards are fawning over it.

 

[Calandrino]

Nobody remembers Braid.
View attachment 4756354

"First wave", like every video game pre-Newgrounds was a from a massive professional studio. We see again that "indie" doesn't mean independent, it just means hipster. These are from the time after hipters got into "game development" but before SJWism was in full swing. Anyway, they can all rot, Binding of Isaac too.