The No-Show List<\/h3>\n
(I only bring this stuff up because I know someone will ask “But what about Game X?”.) <\/p>\n
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<\/div>I wasn’t excited about Last of Us Part II<\/i>. Shit, the last thing<\/b> I wanted in 2020 was a game that wallowed in sadness and misery. I skimmed through the cutscenes on YouTube and I’m glad I skipped it. I have a very specific<\/strong> hatred of revenge stories that end the way this one did. Hoo boy. It would have made me miserable while I played it, and angry when I got to the end. On top of that, there was a bunch of nasty flame-war business between fans, haters, developers, and game journos over this one. Yuck.<\/p>\n I wasn’t excited about Ghost of Tsushima<\/i>. I don’t know why. I know everyone loved it. The screenshots look amazing, it has beautiful music, wonderful atmosphere, etc etc. I just wasn’t interested. Maybe this is related to my general fatigue with fantasy settings. Yes, I’m sure the forests of this Japanese game are stylistically different from the euro-forests of Witcher 3<\/i>. The peasants wear different clothes, the swords have a different shape, and the politics are different. But I’m done. No more horseback riding for a while. Let’s do something with robots and spaceships. Please.<\/p>\n Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales<\/i>. The last Spider-Man game took my top spot in 2018<\/a>. During my retrospective on it<\/a>, I commented that the game had stuff I lovedThe web-swinging, the open world, the characters.<\/span> and a lot of stuff I hatedThe feud between the writer and the gameplay designer where neither seemed to have respect for what the other was doing.<\/span>. While I liked the game, I had a long list of things that I felt really needed to be addressed in the sequels.<\/p>\n Then in September Sony showed off a gameplay demo<\/a> that made it clear they were going to double down on everything I hated: Quicktime events. Cutscene stupidity. Combat that focuses on the stupid overpowered weapon wheel at the expense of the brawling mechanics. Generic space marine goon villains.<\/p>\n Horizon: Zero Dawn<\/em> came to the PC back in August. I’d heard good things about it from its Playstation launch back in 2017. I nearly picked it up, but then I saw the PC port was plagued by technical issues. There was eventually a patch and the game seems to be on solid footing now, but by the time that happened we’d already entered the end-of-year deluge and I had more new titles than I could reasonably hope to play.<\/p>\n It’s too bad this thing didn’t launch a little sooner, and a little better. I really could have used this one in those slow summer months when nothing was coming out.<\/p>\n EDIT: Forgot to mention the FF7 Remake<\/em>. I own it. I just need to hook up my PS4 again. <\/p>\n Okay. That’s enough excuses. Let’s talk about my disappointments for 2020…<\/p>\n I wasn’t sure if I should put this one at the bottom of my best-of list or at the bottom of my disappointments list. This game had a few great moments. Seeing regular human beings react to our protagonist was fun. The art in the last chapter of the game really knocked my socks off. The core gameplay loop is just as strong as it was back in 2016<\/a>.<\/p>\n On the other hand, Marauders<\/a> suck. These things are a fun-killing chore and I have no desire to tangle with them ever again.<\/p>\n At first I thought this was a “git gud” problem. I just needed to figure out how to beat them without getting my ass kicked and I could go back to having fun. So I stuck with it until I got a feel for how you’re supposed to fight them. Now that I know what I’m doing and can kill them reliably, I can say these foes are definitively 100% hot garbage.<\/p>\n The trick with the Marauder is that he’s immune to EVERYTHING. Shoot him, and he ducks behind his shield. Splash rocket damage? Shield. Hitscan weapons? Shield. You don’t get to damage him until he allows it.<\/p>\n If you want to damage him, then you wait for his eyes to flash like he’s a Mario boss or something. So you just stand there like a turret, waiting for the light to blink so you can hurt him. It’s like playing a game of whack-a-mole, except there’s only one mole. It manages to be difficult without being interesting. There’s no depth or complexity or layers. Read the strategy guides and they all tell you the same thing: Super-shotgun. Here you’ve got this huge arsenal, a bunch of mobility options, and some special moves, and none of it matters. You just use the one weapon and the one strategy: Wait for the light to blink and knock a chip off his health bar.<\/p>\n Oh, maybe you want to use the BFG? This is literally what this weapon is for. You save up the BFG ammo so you can brush aside troublesome foes. But nope! He’s magically immune to that too. You HAVE to play whack-a-mole. You don’t like whack-a-mole? Then you don’t Like Doom Eternal, because once he’s introduced, there’s a Marauder on every level.<\/p>\n At several points last year I’d see a Doom Eternal meme, laugh, and then think, “Hey. I remember this game had some cool moments. Maybe I should give it another go.” But then I’d remember the flow-breaking tedium of Marauder fights and change my mind. I don’t have time for that kind of dumb bullshit.<\/p>\n On top of this were some additional out-of-game annoyances. I got the game through Bethesda’s ridiculous storefront, and that went about as well as you would expect<\/a>. But what killed it for me was when Bethesda rolled out some rootkit anti-cheat bullshit<\/a> that installed itself without asking. As someone who played single-player and never cared about fighting randos on the internet, I didn’t appreciate having something so dire installed on my machine without consent or even notification. That would be bad enough for a regular publisher, but allowing the people who caused Fallout 76Yes, different developer, but the same publisher. And ultimately the publisher gets the final say in whether or not something is good enough to ship.<\/span> to make changes to your operating system is like putting The Illusive Man<\/a> in charge of your research team.<\/p>\n Yes, Bethesda removed the anti-cheat a week later<\/a>, but by that time I’d already uninstalled the game and the launcher. I wasn’t about to re-install all that crap just so I could bask in the tedium of more marauder fights.<\/p>\n This was a game with charming marketing and bland design. I liked the fun colorful trailers, but the moment-to-moment gameplay was pretty dull.<\/p>\n For me the game fell into the terrible abyss between Open-World Sandbox and Bespoke Linear Experience. The world is premade and you’re limited to a fixed progression, but you have to chase after that progression by running around an open-ish world. It’s not open enough to allow for creativity or setting your own goals, but it’s not directed enough to keep things interesting. After a few hours I felt like I was groping around, trying to find the developer’s hidden railroad tracks.<\/p>\n The reward for progress was usually a humorous little video from your outrageously irresponsible corporate employer. It was cute, but it was basically the same joke every time. And that joke was a lot funnier when Portal did it 13 years ago, slightly less funny when Satisfactory did it last year, and much less funny the third time around.<\/p>\n I got a few hours into it and gave up. Maybe I quit just before it got good or whatever, but there are only so many hours I’m willing to spend on a game before it needs to hold up its end of the bargain. Even in the long mid-year gaming drought of 2020, I never had any desire to go back and give this a second try.<\/p>\n But here we are at Rebirth, a game with no scares and no interesting ideas. How did this happen? Where did it go wrong? I believe the people that made this game are smart, hardworking, and creative, and yet this game never made me feel anything beyond irritation and boredom.<\/p>\n It’s true that you don’t want to give away too much when you’re trying to scare the audience: Don’t show the whole monster. Don’t explain everything about how it works. Leave some room for the imagination.<\/em> The best way to scare someone is to present the audience with a mysterious danger and let them scare themselves.<\/p>\n But Rebirth was so hands-off that it didn’t even bother to tell me to be scared in the first place. Your plane crashes in the desert at the start of the game. That might be scary in a practical sense, but the game never hinted that I was hungry or thirsty. Instead it just had me crawl through dark caves and then it told me I was afraid of the dark. My character would freak out if she lingered in the darkness for too long, but she never did anything to bring me along for the ride.<\/p>\n 1) Darkness itself isn’t dangerous. It’s where danger can hide<\/b>, sure. But the game never gave me any reason to believe there was a monster hiding in the darkness. As far as I could tell, there was nothing out there. Nothing wanted to hurt me, or hunt me, or punish me, or whatever.<\/p>\n 2) The darkness forces the player to focus on the light mechanics, which are absurd and illogical video game contrivances.<\/p>\n I can only carry ten matches. I must<\/b> expend matches to light the candles I find; I can’t use candles to light other candles. There are small lamps that burn forever, but I’m not allowed to pick those up. Instead I have to carry around this enormous lantern that burns fuel faster than a muscle car. You’re constantly worrying about limiting your exposure to darkness, but nothing about creating light is intuitive or reasonable.<\/p>\n In the end, my enemy wasn’t a monster. It was my own character. I’d spend too long in the darkness and she would throw a fit, pass out, and I’d wake up at a previous location with some of my progress un-done. Instead of being afraid of some unknown horror, I was pissed at my character for being a massive baby.<\/p>\n I finally gave up when I reached the building with the radio. The layout made it obvious that I needed to get into the radio room, and so I needed to blunder around in the dark to find a way up to the second floor, and then find a way from the second floor down into the radio room. Three times I found a way upstairs, and three times I found a route back down to the first. But all of the routes were one-way trips back to the start of the level. Eventually I realized I was trying to play Chutes and Ladders<\/a> with a child that constantly wanted to freak out over nothing and flip the board.<\/p>\n I wasn’t just bored, I was restless. I was eager<\/b> for something as mentally stimulating and straightforward as a monster attack.<\/p>\n Okay, I’m done bellyaching now. Next time we’ll talk about the stuff I liked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In a normal year, I’ll play a few dozen games. The top few will make the “best of” list and the bottom few will make the “disappointment” list and everything in the middle will be forgotten. But this year is weird. If you stick the two lists together, you’ll have basically everything I played. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[613],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-industry-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51552"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51652,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51552\/revisions\/51652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/div>Doom Eternal<\/h3>\n
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<\/div>Journey to the Savage Planet<\/h3>\n
<\/div>Amnesia Rebirth<\/h3>\n
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\nThis team made one of the scariest games of all time: Amnesia: The Dark Descent<\/i>. Then they followed up with SOMA<\/i><\/a>. That wasn’t particularly scary, but it had a few good moments and lots of interesting ideas.<\/p>\n
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\nThe focus on darkness as a threat was a double fail, because:<\/p>\n
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