What are the most pretentious games ever made?

[wtfNeedSignUp]

A game I replayed few years ago and feel like it deserves a lot more shit is the Talos Principle. The game was released on the onset of the Walking Sim "genre". The plot is that humanity went kapoot and had an algorithm trained for an AI to inherit the earth afterward, you play as as an AI that needs to do puzzles for ten year olds with literally god telling you what to do and Satan patching in to your comms to converse "philosophies" with you.

With God the twist is that listening to what he says means you are a dependent bug minded religious AI that deserves to be deleted, and acting against his saying (that you don't have any reason not to besides genre savvie-ness) means you are a ubermensch independent atheist TRUST THE SCIENCE bro and you get to inherit the earth. Now jump into a fire since dad god told you not to do it and you are far smarter than him.

With Satan it's even worse, he will ask you about your values only to then act as if you need to act by your top value always irregardless of the situation and call you a hypocrite when you inevitably fail in that arbitrary test. For example say you think equality is good means you are an hypocrite for saving children over old people in a crisis because they should be the same priority. You feel the fedora tipping every conversation, and you need to be a complete idiot to think morality isn't a complex algorithm that changes all the time and can be triggered to get specific responses.

 

[Daddy's Little Kitten]

Also Pez. The game is decent, but the creator is a pretentious prick. We don't 'deserve' a Pez 2 apparently, whatever that means...

Fez actually hurt. The game was good, but the creator was being such a bitch soyboy, he turned me off the game.

Hoa. Indie cute puzzle platformer. Has no enemies, gameplay is basically collect X 5 times, open seals and go to new area, repeated ad nauseam. Platforming sucks. The story basically boils down to pollution bad. The end sequence pissed me off because your controls are inverted. I hate that shit.

 

[Sand Mega]

It's sad that so many indie games are being made by pretentious art pricks instead of people who want to make fun games, a quick google search even reveals it became a fucking meme,
even for redditors (here is an example)

 

[Dysnomia]

Gone Home is just a baby's first asset flip. Nothing more. People went apeshit cause it had a lesbian relationship in it. Heck to this day I hear people calling it GotY...

Also Fez. The game is decent, but the creator is a pretentious prick. We don't 'deserve' a Pez 2 apparently, whatever that means...

I played Gone Home because I, like many other early players, were duped into thinking it was a horror game. Because it had some very misleading marketing. When you get to that seance stuff you start thinking that the whole family is dead and then nope. Red herring. Turns out your lesbo teen sis ran off with her AWOL from the military girlfriend. A foolish relationship that will never last and will land people in prison. There's something kind of fun about going through items in a house. You can look at a lot of useless stuff. It's just that the devs were not creative enough to do anything with it. It's a mystery but it's not a good one. Putting lesbians in it only ups the woke factor. It doesn't make it a good game. It doesn't deserve the praise it gets. Sadly, that praise opened the floodgates for more games just like it. Point & clicks/walking simulators need a good story to carry them. You are playing a story with interactive environments. It's ok if the gameplay is a little off sometimes. But the story has to be at least halfway decent.

I love Fez. I hate Phil Fish. It's such a shame such a cute, fun game was made by this pretentious hipster fuck who can't handle people saying mean things on the internet.

 

[Sand Mega]

Also does anyone know if this game is an example, I was attracted by the artstyle, but it looks pretentious and a review I saw seems to backup that claim

Dujanah on Steam

apolitical

store.steampowered.com

 

[Toolbox]

The Static Speaks My Name. Cringy art house indie bullshit about schizophrenia or something.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Ecco the Dolphin and Pyre


I was hyped for that game because it was a story-driven game that wasn’t a walking sim. Too bad the gameplay sucked (according to reviews).

The gameplay does suck in the sense that it's a walking sim with steps added, but it would be fine if it had strong storytelling, which I don't feel like it really does. A lot of vignettes, many of which are amusing, but mostly very forgettable, and I just found that I was looking forward to playing it like I'd look forward to doing dishes and I made myself stop. It also doesn't give you a vignette, only a description, for the embellished versions of the story, which kind of kills half the point.

Without changing the core game completely (because I have an idea for WTWTLW rip-off that would be a narrative RPG based around being a WPA writer), it needed to either make the survival mechanics meaningful (failure states, interesting ways to influence the three bars) or can them completely, speed up the walking speed, add more shit on the world map and possibly interactions with it (even if just as a way to visually "play" with the map), and much better writing, and the problem is "much better writing" is like saying "do what you did but actually good this time."

Spoiler: WPA

During the New Deal the government sent out WPA writers, often spoiled rich kids, to collect interviews from old-timers. Most of our primary sources of slaves come from that (someone who was 20 when the Civil War broke out would have been 88 when the Great Depression began) and a lot from pioneers and Indians too. It's a period of time that exists in this surreal bridge of what I think of as "classical" America of cavalry charges and scalpings into the modern America of cars, planes, and big bands.

The biggest problem mechanically (so not just "I find your writing boring") is probably that the faggy wolf tarot card story casts you as an immortal being but the mechanics still want you to eat and sleep and spend money and then it gives you no real challenge or reason to engage. But if you have an actual human on an actual mission (the boss wants 300 bear asses interviews by this time) then you can make drama out of it by having the player have to manage resources, like Oregon Trail, trekking across a vast country. Things like the engine on your Model-T dying can turn into epic adventures when you fall in with the locals working at their sawmill to earn the money to repair it and become deeply invested in their personal dramas, or you start hitchhiking and riding trains and fall in with the hobos, or Bonnie and Clyde take you hostage and you go Patty Hearst with them. "Walk Across America," autobiography of a 1960s New York suburbanite that set off on a multi-year trek down the Appalachian Trail to New Orleans, is an example of that kind of thing, just much less dramatic, much more mundane.

It's something I'd actually consider working on because I figure I need to practice short story writing to ease myself into longer forms (I wrote a lot as a kid, good for my age, but not as an adult) and while it's a great challenge to make artwork it's easy to make a text adventure.

Pyre is very overrated.

 

[Table Country]

Pathologic is very pretentious and the actual gameplay is boring as hell, but it balances it out by being incredibly compelling.
Most of the pretentious games I've played have already been mentioned in this thread, so I'll just say Far Cry 5 sucks and I wanna kill the writer for wasting my time.

 

[Soycast Guy]

Spec Ops: The Line is pretty damn pretentious. War is bad and yes I've seen Apocalypse Now. I didn't feel bad about dropping phosphorus on people. They might as well make a game where I go to Vietnam and press F to rape a brown woman. Jokes on them I had a lot of fun acting out war crimes.

Spec Ops: The Line was really fun. It’s what gave me my love for war crimes.

 

[IDanceonTrannyGraves]

What Remains of Edith Finch

 

[Soycast Guy]

Bioshock Infinite was the first time I've ever felt I was playing a game from inside it's own asshole so that one.

Bioshock Infinite is a fun game that’s made worse by pretentious messaging.

It's sad that so many indie games are being made by pretentious art pricks instead of people who want to make fun games, a quick google search even reveals it became a fucking meme,
even for redditors (here is an example)
View attachment 4748326

The result of anyone being able to make a game now. You get some really good stuff, but it’s all in a sea of pretentious, faggy, copy and paste garbage that’s always about the same “muh mental illness” story. We get it. Daddy didn’t love you and you wanna kill yourself because people said mean things to you on the internet.

 

[Dan of Steel]

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.

it's required by law for me to post this video every time yick is brought up:

All really good answers ITT, but I think the first one that both made me realize games could be pretentious garbage as well as terribly disappointing is Metal Gear Solid 4. I love Kojima's games. Snatcher, Policenauts, Metal Gear 2, and obviously MGS1-3, but MGS4 is just dogshit, and that's been my feelings on it since 2008. I knew it was gonna be a rough ride when I fell asleep during the hour long opening cut scene. Everything about it is such a huge miss, from the heavy-handed "FPS GAMES BAD" to all the dumb (but admittedly entertaining) shit with Liquid Ocelot, and the awful retread B&B unit boss fights. I've played it several times, and I want to like it because obviously there was a ton of love poured into the game, but it wasn't needed. The Metal Gear story got wrapped up nicely with 2 and MGS3 was just a great sendoff for the fans and worked fine as a prequel.
But 4 was a mistake, and thankfully I feel like time has vindicated my opinion, as generally I see more and more people say "Yeah 4 kinda sucks" as well as "wow MGS2 talks about a lot of shit that's really prescient for a PS2 game".

its still better than death stranding tho lol

 

[Weebburner]

Everything made by david cage.

 

[Dan of Steel]

Everything made by david cage.

David Cage is the definition of pretentious but I enjoy his games for how uniquely awful they are in his own special way. Few things have made me laugh harder than when in Heavy Rain when you can just refuse to take the groceries from your wife.

 

[Mr.Miyagi]

A game I replayed few years ago and feel like it deserves a lot more shit is the Talos Principle. The game was released on the onset of the Walking Sim "genre". The plot is that humanity went kapoot and had an algorithm trained for an AI to inherit the earth afterward, you play as as an AI that needs to do puzzles for ten year olds with literally god telling you what to do and Satan patching in to your comms to converse "philosophies" with you.

I like The Talos Principle, so I'll play Devil's Advocate for it, because while I can understand why some people might find the writing to be pretentious, I don't really agree that it's at the level of other games listed so far, and I don't think it's as bad as described. At the very least, you can straight up ignore everything outside of the puzzles, which makes it more interactive than a walking sim in my eyes.

Spoiler: Talos Sperging

With God the twist is that listening to what he says means you are a dependent bug minded religious AI that deserves to be deleted, and acting against his saying (that you don't have any reason not to besides genre savvie-ness) means you are a ubermensch independent atheist TRUST THE SCIENCE bro and you get to inherit the earth. Now jump into a fire since dad god told you not to do it and you are far smarter than him.

The reason for going against Elohim and entering the Tower is really the same for you as a player and the player character: you want to know what's going on. In-universe, the designers wanted to make sure that the AI was capable of curiosity and independent thought, not because they hate religion, but because making a successor to the human race that has no volition is just making a thoughtless machine or a slave. So for the Extended Life program to end, one of the AIs has to prove cognizant enough to be capable of complex problem-solving, but also have its own will.

Elohim's ending is "bad" because it continues to delay the process, which has already failed over and over to the point where the world around the player is starting to decay and corrupt. While Elohim isn't a directly antagonistic character, he knows that success means that the entire program will end, and he'll be wiped out, and he goes from commanding you to not enter the Tower to pleading with you not to end the world, but eventually comes to terms with it at the end. Directly going against his advice can also lead to you dying (like going out of bounds, or the characters who give up and choose to do nothing) and needing to be iterated, so it's not that you're being reward for being spiteful towards him. Allegorically, I think he's more of a demiurge than a Yahweh, since it's clear that his motivations are selfish, and his existence is only over a limited world, rather than being all-powerful.

With Satan it's even worse, he will ask you about your values only to then act as if you need to act by your top value always irregardless of the situation and call you a hypocrite when you inevitably fail in that arbitrary test. For example say you think equality is good means you are an hypocrite for saving children over old people in a crisis because they should be the same priority. You feel the fedora tipping every conversation, and you need to be a complete idiot to think morality isn't a complex algorithm that changes all the time and can be triggered to get specific responses.

The Milton Library Assistant/The Serpent is specifically trying to put you in "Gotcha!" moments by presenting lines of arguments that turn your words against you and present you with limited choices for ethical dilemmas and philosophical questions that can't just be "solved." It's not the game writers trying to convince you that morality is this simple set of rules and that your own personal ethics are stupid, it's that the character wants to make you doubt yourself and feel that you have no idea what you're doing and are incapable of reason on your own. He wants to worm his way in and encourage you to climb the Tower so that, when you transcend, you'll feel that you have to let him transcend as part of you, since he's also aware that the world is crumbling around him, and that you and the other Children are the only way he has out. It's self-serving deception, and you have the ability to either outright reject him (as per Elohim's advice) or to turn his words back around on him near the game's end and prove that you're capable on your own.

I also don't think that the puzzles are at a ten-year-old's level, unless you're only going for the green/easy ones. The red ones you need to climb the tower, along with the hidden puzzles, are decently challenging. The Road to Gehenna DLC starts at the red level and gets even harder, so it's a good post-game challenge.

 

[Dialtone]

All really good answers ITT, but I think the first one that both made me realize games could be pretentious garbage as well as terribly disappointing is Metal Gear Solid 4. I love Kojima's games. Snatcher, Policenauts, Metal Gear 2, and obviously MGS1-3, but MGS4 is just dogshit, and that's been my feelings on it since 2008. I knew it was gonna be a rough ride when I fell asleep during the hour long opening cut scene. Everything about it is such a huge miss, from the heavy-handed "FPS GAMES BAD" to all the dumb (but admittedly entertaining) shit with Liquid Ocelot, and the awful retread B&B unit boss fights. I've played it several times, and I want to like it because obviously there was a ton of love poured into the game, but it wasn't needed. The Metal Gear story got wrapped up nicely with 2 and MGS3 was just a great sendoff for the fans and worked fine as a prequel.
But 4 was a mistake, and thankfully I feel like time has vindicated my opinion, as generally I see more and more people say "Yeah 4 kinda sucks" as well as "wow MGS2 talks about a lot of shit that's really prescient for a PS2 game".

its still better than death stranding tho lol

I enjoyed 4 for the most part, but I didn't care for the Mr. and Mrs. Smith vibe that Johnny and Merrill had going on during the last act. Nor did I enjoy the B&B fights as a lot of them were just retreads of fights that were done better in previous games. I do like some of the themes of conclusion and viewing it at the time of release and the fact that the GWOT had been going on for 8 years at that point, the anti-war message holds a bit more meaning. Now that I think more about MGS4, it's really just a few good ideas in an overly long game. I think the best parts were probably all in the Shadow Moses stage tbh.

 

[Serbian Peacekeepers]

Spec Ops: The Line is pretty damn pretentious. War is bad and yes I've seen Apocalypse Now. I didn't feel bad about dropping phosphorus on people. They might as well make a game where I go to Vietnam and press F to rape a brown woman. Jokes on them I had a lot of fun acting out war crimes.

As someone who has a great dislike for SO:TL i don't think by itself that its all that pretentious, the whole idea of retelling Heart of Darkness but in the context of a modern military action game is interesting, the issue is the people who dick ride it as the 2nd coming of Jesus.

SO:TL is a 5/10 game with a 7/10 story, but since it tells a somewhat meta story people act like its some masterpiece when it isn't, its a third person cover shooter from the early 2010s with heart of darkness slapped on it. The Mortar scene is the most infamous example of the game railroading you into doing a bad thing and then going "you are bad", but without its reputation it wouldn't really matter, of course it was built around you just firing without thinking, but when you know the entire game is a War Bad game, you know what tricks it will play.
SO:TL is not a pretentious game in my opinion, its a ok game with a pretentious fanbase.

 

[Molesting the Decapitated]

Probably any of the last 3 Splinter Cell games. I feel like Chaos Theory really over inflated the developers' egos and they felt like superstars in the industry from there on out

 

[Reticulan Joe]

I'm going to give a shout out to The Stanley Parable. It's really groundbreaking stuff... if you're totally unfamiliar with the idea of the fourth wall being broken, or basic cultural criticisms of American life. If you're familiar with both of those things, it's just sort of mildly clever, and very impressed with itself.

Braid. Not because it's terrible in and of itself, but because it seems to have kicked off a whole movement of indie, "Let's fuck with the mechanics! WE'RE SO DEEP!" development, and if it wasn't what kicked the movement off, it became the poster child for it.

Echo of the Wilds is peak indie self-suck. You can find "Reddy Berries" (red berries) with a description of "Oh yum berritasty... with a lashing of jammy blood." The game's text is full of this off-kilter, pseudo-dream-logic, pseudo-childlike, pseudo-profound writing style. And yes, it's all done in clumsy pixel art, which is entirely on-brand.

As an aside: If you really want to see an example of unusual, yet evocative writing, check out Caves of Qud, which is actually a pretty fun (though still very pixel-art-retro) roguelike.

 

[Iron Jaguar]

The latest Far Cry. I gave up after about half an hour and I won't be going back to it.