THANK YOU to Yahtzee for at least acknowledging "pretentious" as overused and having lost most of it's meaning. At least he took the time to actually define it properly and explain what he meant by using the word, because it seems so many critics refuse to do that. Labeling something you don't like or don't understand as "pretentious" has just become, in my eyes, an annoying shortcut for people to dismiss something without explaining exactly what about it fails to work, and just distracts form the issue at hand. Talking about how the story elements don't add up or are cliché is valid criticism. Talking about how how the gameplay is too simple to match the kind of grand ideas of it's stories is valid criticism. Just labeling a work as "pretentious" and turning up your nose at it without explaining why is not. It's just being an ass.
I still wish Yahtzee wouldn't have used the word though. It just seems to devalue the actual game design issues. Plus, I don't think it's quite fair to label a piece of work as "pretentious" in the first place, that term seems like it would be better used for a work's creator. A game or other work doesn't really have any sort of intention to mislead I think, it's just a collection of, for lack of a better term, "text". If a game fails in someway to deliver it's message, or fails to endear an emotional connection, or has some objectionable segments, or just fails to make sense, well, there you go, those are problems in the "text", inherent flaws in the game's design. Calling something "pretentious" automatically seems to me like you are saying there is some intent in the game to trick you somehow, to make you like it under false pretenses. But a game with flaws is just a game with flaws. The marketers and developers of the game, yeah if they are trying to market it to you as something it's not, get mad at them. They are the pretentious ones. But people need to chill out and realize when dinky experimental games are in fact dinky experimental games, and when they are not.
Then again I don't really know what The Talos Principle is marketed as, so I couldn't say in that game's case. I just know it doesn't look overly interesting to me so I am going to skip it, and I think that is okay.