BlindChance said:
That really is a shame. The core concept there seemed to be full of possibility, but it doesn't seem to have figured out that a light touch is often the best approach to dark subject matter.
I don't think that's what Jim is getting at, he's calling it outright pretentious.
That said, I suspect half the problem is that every time someone wants to try and do a game "with meaning" they decide to create some dark, surrealistic, work about mortality, darkness, decay, entropy, how things go wrong, and all of that. None of which would be bad if it wasn't what everyone else was doing as well. For a while it was excusable when video games were brand new for this kind of thing, the first gothic emo kids turned developers to spout their stuff via a video game were on the cutting edge for 15 minutes, and now that the 15 minutes is passed, we're left with a lot of pretentious garbage on the level of someone sounding off behind a mic at a local coffee house, it might be tolerable if it's free (and your there for the coffee anyway) but here with video games it's the same as demanding a cover charge.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a bitter, depressed person at my core... but in general I like to get away from that, and really I'd like to see some artistic games that go in the other direction and strive to be uplifting rather than screaming "nothing matters, mortality cannot be avoided! Even the greatest works of the mightiest among us will be eroded with time...".
That said the basic premise of this game is interesting, the idea of a bit of code trying to survive it's apparent destruction within a computer. You could do a lot of things with that, taking the "Tron" concept in some new directions. Sort of like the old question (mostly in books and stuff) about whether dreams die when you wake up, and what happens if say a dream refuses to die for whatever reason and becomes real, either merging with the person (causing insanity) or manifesting as some kind of entity.
That said, I'll be avoiding it, Jim seems to be in agreement with almost everyone else I've heard say anything at all about it.