shrekfan246 said:
Not to parrot your own earlier post, but I like the way you think, sir.
Shrekfan-senpai noticed me!
Kidding aside, thanks.
It's been said before in the thread, but Duchamp's urinal and ready-made art in general needed a while to be recognized as such. For years, people looked at the guy's disconnected piss-receiving device and wondered what the fuss was about. Anticlimactic finales in video games might have to pass through the same period of acclimatization before people look at Firewatch or games with similar aesthetic conceits and admit their endings make sense.
As I've said, I'm not interested in trying it out. Denied expectations don't justify the asking price, neither does offering patronage to a team that's pushing interactive narrative delivery down a new path. Someone else might disagree, however, and say Firewatch has enough artistic pedigree to make the price tag feel strangely low. That's fine. Art being subjective, I'd say gamers tend to put their money where their personal subjectivity happens to stand.
I mean, SuperHOT makes fun of the whole "innovative shooter" notion and really does poke fun at our habit of sticking superlatives on anything we even remotely like, but if our own critics at The Escapist can look at Layers of Fear and call it a masterpiece, then someone else liking a product that's short on traditional mechanics really isn't surprising.
Michael Prymula said:
The Witness sounds like a pretentious piece of crap, I avoid it for the same reason I avoid all those damn Oscar bait films.
I've already spoken at length about how I feel about The Witness, but I'll just quickly reiterate that if you want something that has a similar scope but none of the preachy annoyances, I'd recommend any one of the following:
Myst series: world-building is king, so the focus is laser-tight and there's zero pretentiousness on offer.
The Room series: see Myst, but with a darker, slightly Lovecraftian and definitely horror-inspired tone. No preachiness at all.
The Talos Principle: heavier themes, but the presentation stays clear. The game tackles heavy subject matter like the nature of consciousness and of Humanity in general, but it stays palatable. The religious allegory never feels heavy-handed and instead frames the game's structure extremely well.
Portal series: otherwise known as "The Source Engine has a Physics Engine, let's Fuck Around with It". Zero pretention, terrific world-building that's joined the Valve-verse's canon, occasionally pitch-black and sardonic humor. Parenthood and motherhood are tackled, but only in the bylines.