this is an update to this piece from 2021 about how some games, even if people like them, i found hard to get through or care about. it’s on the request of a friend who wanted to see it updated and i’m not doing much rn so yeah.
in the og i made a statement about why it’s important to recognise you might not enjoy something other people like, for various reasons. i still believe that. but, that piece had a tone i think is like therapy talk, because i was therapising both myself and the cultural tendency to feel bad if you ‘don’t get it’.
i’m not your parent. do what you want. i looked back at the list and here’s any of the games i did finally get round to finishing.
. undertale (turns out it’s pretty good)
. subsurface circular (i really didn’t enjoy this game since its writing pissed me off)
i didn’t finish the others yet.
as i think about it now i played maybe hundreds of games in the past 4 years, and probably finished maybe a handful. that’s because i don’t think it’s the be all and end all of engaging with the medium. there’s many games i’ve not finished but enjoyed and many i do plan to finish… like, Dragon’s Dogma i’ve never finished but that game’s great.
i also don’t really care if people think something is good quite as much anymore. i think i was, and branded myself as, a hater of award winning indie games because most of them annoyed me when i played them. that’s because i was in an environment (indie games twitter) that inflated the importance of these products. and to be honest that list was also a bunch of 90s-00s games that had some cultural esteem inflated again by their success.
of the list final fantasy vii is the one i can probably get on board with, having been in conversations around the series and kind of, understanding the pace and turn based mechanics a bit more. i think i appreciate the mundane aspects of that type of play more. i do adore design that mixes abstraction and detail in the way that ffvii does. maybe the talos principle too, if i ever want a puzzle or whatever. honestly, why rule out any of the others either.
aside from papers please lol, and life is strange.
do i have a new list in me? i don’t know, maybe i don’t care about the principle of it anymore. i haven’t got those pressures on me mentally to say that something artistic is ‘good’, like, i can just ignore things. and i don’t really care to rule out finishing stuff… okay, i’ll look at my steam and shit…
– card games, okay those i don’t like i think… Inscryption, Neon White… didn’t finish. (i liked inscryption well enough im just literally so bad at card games, neon white was kinda insufferable, again these were around the twitter games era i skipped on in ’22 tho)
– NORCO, i just, didn’t like enough to carry on with. but maybe i’ll revisit it because i enjoy the art… (again in the ’22 set of, game twitter orbit)
– In Other Waters, and Citizen Sleeper… there’s something about the sauce that’s missing from the sci-fi for these that makes them dull to me… (again again in the ’22 set)
so like, a bunch of the games that it felt obligatory to buy to support my peers. basically. not even my friends. and it turns out business isn’t community. it’s business. and that is perhaps my update, and my feeling on the matter, as of, 4 years later.
“…there’s always more to play, more to read, more to see and do.”
GlitchOut 