Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
most multiplayer shooters to me, they’re typically filled with the most vile shit you’ll ever hear coming from an 8 year old, and the adults are just as bad and should know better.
competitive shooters like Rainbow Six Siege or Counter Strike are also really bad in casual modes, especially if you’re a new or lackluster player. You’ll be flamed, team killed, and your teammates will try their absolute best to ruin your entire day over a hobby
Trying to get into those as a newbie is miserable dor all those reasons and also because, unless maybe if you get in right when the game first comes out, your competitors will be far more comfortable with the mechanics and have memorized the maps and so on. It’s especially bad if you’re a newbie to multiplayer shooters a whole, even if you’re good at single player shooters. It becomes and exercise in: spawn, die, respawn, die… Super frustrating to begin with. And then people insult you. Noooot something I find worth bothering with for a thing that’s supposed to be enjoyable in my free time.
It’s like that with every competitive game.
You see other people playing it and think “wow, that’s cool. I wanna try it”, only to be welcomed by what you just described. Your success then depends on whether you have a hard skin to endure the bullshit, or if you’re social enough to have others play with you that won’t dismiss everything you do so easily. More often than not we don’t have the patience/ability for either.
Where baby’s first swear word becomes baby’s first racial slur! Does Mommy know you talk like that on the PSBox?
competitive shooters like Rainbow Six Siege or Counter Strike are also really bad in casual modes, especially if you’re a new or lackluster player. You’ll be flamed, team killed, and your teammates will try their absolute best to ruin your entire day over a hobby
I would be fine with all of that if they didn’t also have the power to kick you from the match
“Competitive” multiplayer games in general. I miss it when multiplayer games were just fun and not streamlined misery simulators where the attitude is everyone is an idiot except yourself.
I know it’s popular to fart on Overwatch 2, but even when the original came out I thought it was so fucking dull. The No Man Sky quote “Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle” can very well explain the hero roster of that game.
I’d rather do a barefoot pilgrimage to Jerusalem than play CS:GO, League of Legends, Overwatch, Fartnite, Valorant, etc.
Team Fortress 2 is unbalanced and janky, and it’s 1000x more fun than any of those games. It even proved that the competitive crowd could do their own thing that suit their needs, instead of ruining a game to the ground with “balance” and unfun gameplay.
I can relate to this very much. I love Team Fortress 2 - it has just enough of that random hilarious stuff in almost every match that makes you laugh. I think it’s a huge part of why the game is still alive and broke its player record recently.
streamlined misery simulators where the attitude is everyone is an idiot except yourself.
Too real (talking mostly about CS:GO as I that’s the one I have most experience with on your list). It’s… occasionally fun, especially if your team gets into a slighly less casual mindset and plays it a bit more tactically.
But it often ranges down to the collective team just getting mad all the time and throwing various accusations around for seemingly the fun(?) of it. Fun match? Maybe, sometimes. All the time? Absolutely not, thank you.
Over the years I’ve started reaching more and more for co-op instead (Deep Rock Galactic, PlateUp!, Alien Swarm, Minecraft, Unrailed, …) and it has been a lot of fun, both solo and with friends.
Co-op games are definitely the only fun I’ve had in multiplayer for the longest time. Toxicity can still be found (Looking at you Payday 2), but overall they are a more wholesome, chill and more importantly FUN experiences.
This is gonna be a deeply unpopular opinion but the Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time is my least favorite game I ever played. I like rogs but never owned a nintendo and my friend was always raving about it so I finally played it a few years back and I just hated it. The gameplay didn’t feel good which I expected given it was still the wild west of 3d graphics but the thing that really annoyed me was how much sitting and waiting you had to do. All enemies are just sit, wait, dodge, hit in the right spot, repeat. Plus everyone wants to talk to you to tell you everything about the gameplay instead of just letting you figure it out. I found the whole experience frustrating.
Stardew valley - it sells itself as a harvest moon inspired farming Sim but as someone who grew up playing a lot of harvest moon, I really can’t help but be super disappointed in it. Harvest moon games have a complex and more importantly moving relationship system - you start to go after one marriage candidate, the others will pair themselves up and have kids alongside you. People move in and out and you need to really get to know people in order to progress the game and unlock things. Stardew valley? Super flat in comparison. All the candidates you don’t marry feel super flat once you lock yourself out of them. There’s not much locked behind friendship so there’s less reason to get out there and really work on befriending everyone.
Also fucking combat - it’s a supposedly nice and peaceful farming Sim, yet combat is an unavoidable part of the game. I didn’t sign up for combat! It’s not fun it’s just annoying.
I actually have a mod for Stardew where the other NPCs have relationship progression with each other if I don’t get in the way!
I’ve been doing a challenge run on Stardew where I never ever engage in combat or go into the mines. Going pretty well, actually, except for the part where I get stuck on acquiring any quartz. Aside from that I think I completed the rest of the Community Center and a lot of what the game has to offer. It’s possible to avoid combat and still have game to play.
Still, don’t force yourself to play if you don’t want to—this isn’t an “I addressed all your concerns about why you dislike the game, so you have to go play it now with the mods I mentioned for your dislike to be valid anymore” type comment (and I didn’t address the part about Harvest Moon requiring you to develop relationships to progress and unlock things while Stardew doesn’t absolutely require relationships to progress… although relationships will also unlock things). I’m not trying to insist that you have to try Stardew with 384828 different permutations of mods before you’re allowed to say it’s not for you.
Pretty much all the new AAA games. Kind of lost interested the moment games stopped being innovative. It’s nice to have super dooper realistic looking game and millions of small details but I still haven’t seen a game that would really improve on the game play in the last 20 years. They are still full of simple rules and mechanics. For example, 20 years ago it was common to have the “enemy spotted you but just hide and don’t move for 3 seconds and they will move on” rule in games and it pisses me off when new AAA games do it. Modern games are full of this shit. “If you do A in situation B, C will happen”. Just learn the rules and beat the game. There are more rules, more details, animations are nicer but I still find it boring. It’s still just a bunch of fixed rules, NPCs still move like robots, you can still see the algorithms behind everything. I prefer to play an small indie game that actually tries something new than AAA game that tries to build ‘realistic’ world and fails at it.
I agree. I can always see through the mechanics of a game and usually break the economy too and I’m rich beyond belief usually.
Have you broken Starfield’s economy yet? I’m poor af
As a patientgamer it’s against my religion to buy at game this early for such a high price.
I’ve got one - Hotline Miami 2.
Hotline Miami 1 was such a fantastic game. Frantic, high energy, fun, good art style, a confusing at best story but that’s not why you played it. HM2 was full of off-screen instant kill bullshit that you literally could not prepare for in any way other than to die to it a handful of times before you memorized enemy positions off-screen. In the first game, you could always see threats before they could kill you. Not the case in the sequel. “You died and there’s nothing you could have done to prevent it” is a bullshit mechanic in any game.
I loved the first one, but couldn’t get into the second. Didn’t really like the other characters too.
Deeprock Galactic.
On paper it’s everything I like in games. But when my friends invite me to play, I get bored so much, that I have microsleep episodes. It’s so incredibly boring I can not understand the hype at all.
Even as someone who enjoys it, I also feel it’s overhyped and not for everyone. You’re just doing the same 8 mission types over and over. The only progression is unlocking new weapons and skills/overclocks for said weapons to use in the same missions. And whenever there’s a new event, there’s no actual theme or anything, you just do those same missions yet again just to get a cosmetic for said event, and the actual missions themselves don’t change in any way.
I think it’s one of those games that you play when you specifically have a craving for it. Otherwise, playing it non-stop does get boring after some time
The binding of Isaac. You just do the same thing the whole game. You shoot stuff, and gather stupid RNG items. That’s it, such a boring game
I bought ARK because dinosaurs. That is the only thing it has going for it. The core gameplay loop is watching a progress bar fill up.
I also got ARK for the dinosaurs. I’m fine with watching a progress bar fill up, so I hope I didn’t waste my money.
I have 2,500 hours in Ark.
The thing is Ark isn’t a dino game, it’s a scifi survival/exploration game. You start from nothing and work towards conquering the island and discovering it’s secrets.
I really hope you like it. To me it is best played with friends on a private server, or a server with good rules and active admins.
Got into super breeding. Maxed out damage and health and got a lot into speed on my rexes. Its very rewardimg being able to 1 or 2 shot a 150 rex. Takes like a month+ to get anywhere with it. That rex with those stats took like a year of breeding
Before I say this I do admit I am in the wrong, and that an overwhelming majority of people love this game, and I understand that on an objective level it was both ground breaking and excellent.
I cannot, for the life of me, enjoy breath of the wild due to weapons breaking. I played maybe 5 hours? I got excited when I found a cool sword, and then proceeded to never use it because I was afraid to “waste” it. (and repeat that with new weapons, to save which I have to go find some little seed people to have more inventory slots?)
I understand that they want me to try new things, but for me, for some reason, it just wasn’t fun. I want to be excited when I find new loot, not anxious. Maybe it’s because I grew up with Diablo-like games, where accumulating loot was the fun part, but I can’t seem to enjoy it when the game takes toys away from me.
You are not in the wrong for not enjoying a video game. A person’s level of subjective enjoyment can and will differ from objective quality.
That’s a fair point, I just know it’s a common contrarian take and wanted to distance myself a little from that. I meant that I am aware I’m in the minority on it, it’s not a purely bad feature, just one that doesn’t work for me.
I loved BOTW as a generic open world adventure game. It was probably the worst “Zelda” entry outside of the CD-i games though.
I just pretend that it wasn’t one at all.
The weapons breaking thing along with incredibly repetitive and boring enemies made me avoid all fights not absolutely necessary.
The boss fights - few and far between though they were - were good.I had hoped that the new one would fix all of the previous one’s issues but as people like us are in the minority it seems that they kept the formula the same. I’m not sure if I’ll even play it.
They did address it in the new one.
Now weapons are all (mostly) shitty, but you can accumulate up to 999 each of powerful attachments to your weapons. If your powerful silver bokoblin sword broke, find another shitty weapon and attach one of the silver bokoblin horns to it that you have. Attaching also makes the durability significantly higher.
Thank you for sharing… but this doesn’t inspire confidence.
Better? Maybe. Good? Not really.
I’m sure I’ll eventually make my way to it, but I’m in no hurry to play it.
Maybe when the Switch 2 comes out?!Maybe I didn’t explain it properly. I did hate the BOTW system but really enjoy the new one. You still feel like you need to switch your tactics up regularly but you don’t need to go hunting for good weapons anymore.
Well that sounds a lot better!
Terraria, it’s a hot take I think but I just dislike it so much.
I dislike the controls, the appearance, the sorta jank, I just find it to be a more boring Minecraft and Minecraft can already be boring. I don’t understand the love for it and I think it ruined a friendship with a group that really only wanted to play that and league of legends
I don’t dislike Terraria per se, and I highly respect the dedication of both the devs and the community to it.
However, each time I try getting into it, I would make a basic house, spelunk a cave… and then forget about the game for a while. I don’t know why, but I just have trouble with games where you have to set your own goals
Yeah I had no concept of what to do in Terraria.
I am fine with games not telling me what to do cause I love Tunic and Outer Wilds but also there is still a somewhat obvious somewhat linear story available if you want it. The “do it yourself sandbox” games struggle to draw me in fast enough for me to not get bored and confused of learning an entire games worth of mechanics and optimization for no payoff before I put it down. And never pick it back up.
Oh man, I thought I was the only one. I’ve tried to get into it so many times, but I can never enjoy it. I enjoy Minecraft, though.
In other unpopular news, I hate DOTA also. Friends tried to get me into it so many times, and I played a bunch of matches, but found it super overwhelming with all the different heroes and choices and found the entire gameplay boring.
You sound like me lol. Perhaps you’d like Core Keeper? The first game I found that scratches that minecraft itch like no other since I stopped playing minecraft long ago. I found sidescrolling in Terraria no good for me, liking the top down perspective of Core Keeper much more. Just wish you could create more than one storey in a structure somehow. I’m no developer but surely it can be done.
Interesting! Thanks for the recommendation. Sounds pretty co. I’ll definitely check it out
I tried Dark Souls once, I think it was DS3. I can’t figure out what would make it fun for anyone.
The thing about the From Software games is that they’re (mostly) fair. Most action games give the player a huge leg up compared to the enemies - the boss has a glowing weakpoint that can be revealed with the item you found in the dungeon - or you’re a badass cyborg assassin vs rank and file goons.
In Dark Souls, you’re just a stubborn dude with a sword - and even the lowliest enemy can take you out if you get careless. But everyone is playing by the same rules, it sucks when an enemy staggers you and hits you while you can’t move - but you can figure out how to do the same to them. And the bosses really are doing everything in their power to make you dead.
The satisfaction of Dark Souls comes from meeting those challenges head on and beating them at their own game - or being clever enough to bypass or weaken the obstacle. It’s not for everybody, and it’s certainly not for anybody all the time - but it’s pretty awesome when you get to be David finally taking down Goliath.
I just wrapped up the last one on my list: Sekiro.
It wasn’t as hard as everyone makes it out to be but that could be due to my having previously gone through Bloodborne and learned how to be aggressive.All of their games are superbly fun but it did take me a lot of tries for it to click.
I started out terrible at them - and frankly am still nothing special - but am super glad that I persevered.
While I have other favorites as well, the Soulsborne will always rank at the top of my list for gaming perfection.
I’m gonna come out swinging: not even a game, but two entire fucking genres:
-
Battle royales. I am like 90% convinced that gamers have been tricked by some dark psychology that has somehow convinced them that these games are worth playing. I don’t know whether it’s because the quality of FPS games has been so low for so long that today’s gamers have never really played a properly fun shooter or what. Battle royales are 75% downtime. You spend so long fucking around parachuting in to the map, walking around, collecting stuff, bla bla bla, interspersed by just a few moments of action, and when you get killed it usually doesn’t feel fair, it’s because a whole other team showed up right as you were already fighting someone else and put you in a nearly impossible situation.
-
MOBA games are just RTS games with the best bits taken out.
It’s ok to dislike a game or a game genre without having to pretend everyone else who does is wrong or lying about it lol. I personally enjoy games of both of these genres from time to time and nobody is forcing me to 🤷🏼
I didn’t say that you’re wrong or lying at all! Like, MOBAs aren’t for me but otherwise I have no problems with them. But for Battle Royales, yeah, I said that I thought that they trick people, like they’re intentionally really manipulative. For example, loot boxes - they’re fun, but manipulative. Know what I mean?
Well that’s kind how you comment came off to me lol, but i don’t really get how people who enjoy those genres were “manipulated” though? some people are just gonna be into them and some aren’t, that’s normal.
Battle royales seem to be specifically designed to exploit human psychology to maximise the amount of time that a person plays the game by having specifically timed dopamine releases and manipulating game matchmaking to keep players playing for longer than they would have otherwise. Have you ever felt yourself thinking “damn, I should stop playing, but I want a win first?” That’s exactly what I’m talking about.
Not really, i haven’t felt that. I don’t really care if i win or lose, just how fun and engaging the match was, and i don’t really mind the “downtime” between combat encounters either because i enjoy looting.
I feel like maybe you’re over-thinking it a little bit? i can see some of them doing what you mentioned, but i don’t see how that would be something specific to battle royales.
I’m glad you enjoy the game and I’m not trying to take that away from you, but I just have an “ick” for that genre, it feels abusive in a way I can’t really put my finger on. And yeah for sure I am overthinking it, this entire thread is an invitation to overthink video games ;p
I think people just like the competitive-ness of a battle royale. People like to win and nothing says “winner” more like being the last survivor out of 100, you know?
Nah, that’s not really it, imo. If that was the case then they could just stick 100 people in a lobby and get them to square off 1v1 in a tournament until there’s one winner.
I swear that battle royales are specifically designed for precisely timed dopamine release to make players have longer play sessions and to encourage addiction
I swear that battle royales are specifically designed for precisely timed dopamine release to make players have longer play sessions and to encourage addiction
You’re really just describing live service games though, of which most battle royale games that come out in the modern era are a part of. Pretty much any AAA online multiplayer game is going to be about encouraging addiction and dopamine release. I think why battle royale games seem to be at the forefront of this is because they are inherently online multiplayer games. You couldn’t really make a true “battle royale” game before the prevalence of online multiplayer without some major concessions.
Battle royale games happened to be the industry darling back in 2017 which is why so many AAA studios rushed to carve live service models out of them. If you pay close attention in the coming years you may notice that this will likely again happen to whatever new burgeoning genre takes the industry by storm. They already did it back in the early 2000s with MMO’s.
Yeah, you’re not wrong - I guess the difference is that when it comes to battle royales, the medium is the message. I don’t give a shit about levels, ranks, customisation options, skins, perks, etc. in Call of Duty, so all of those manipulative tricks they pull in that area don’t really achieve much. But for Apex Legends, the manipulative shit is the game itself.
If that was the case then they could just stick 100 people in a lobby and get them to square off 1v1 in a tournament until there’s one winner.
And you think battle royales have too much down time?
I don’t play them because they’re all prey to the modern aggressive cash grab bullshit most online games are, but most of the downtime you’re discussing is actually active and engaged. You need to be consciously making a decision during the parachute part to decide where you want to land. All the “collecting” is constantly under stress, because if you aren’t aware of your surroundings at all times, you could be dead. The whole game mode has a tension to it that most others don’t, because dying in death match doesn’t cost you anything but 10 seconds to respawn.
Lots of games had duel modes without downtime, when your duel ends, you get paired up with another player whose duel ended recently. It’s a few seconds at most usually.
I never felt particularly stressed during the collection segment, just bored, and from the other guy who wrote that he likes that time to mess around with his friends, I don’t know that your experience is universal.
That feeling of tension that you describe was absolutely present for me playing traditional deathmatch. The drive to want to win was strong enough to make me give a shit about the game. Especially if it was like, a clan match or something.
I highly disagree with the 2nd point
I hate RTS because there are so much going on everywhere at the same time that I just can’t handle it. You gotta master your production while scouting while repelling raids while strategizing to see what kind of army the opponent is building while exploring the tech tree and… damn how did they just send an army of 50 fellas??
MOBAs allow me to fully focus on the moment and whatever I’m doing instead of being perpetually late on the actions that need doing
Yeah, I understand that, and I guess they’re not for everyone. I’ve got pretty severe ADHD and I love the “everything happening everywhere all at once” feeling that RTS has
Imo theoretical #RTS development just stopped after StarCraft and total annihilation.
Sup com is my favorite but nobody really tried to reimagine what “RTS” should mean.
Not like COD -> Doom(2016) did for fps.
So both perspectives are valid and deal with unsolved problems that are unfortunately just hard and not profitable to solve.
Are you a more eloquent me? This is exactly what I feel about both Battle Royales and MOBAs. How and why? I just don’t see it. I have friends who enjoy both genres and I’ve talked to them many times and asked them to explain why they find it fun. I still don’t get it. Dark psychology indeed. That’s the only thing that explains it for me.
Ahh, for some folks, MOBAs are RTS games with the worst bits taken out!
RTS games are currently in a big slump (nobody’s really making them, and the player base on the ones that exist has seriously dried up) because most people only like half the game.
The people who love the micro end up going to MOBAs like League or Smite. The people who love the macro end up going to 4X/Grand Strategy like Stellaris or Crusader Kings. The market of people who equally enjoy both aspects is pretty small. Like, I’ll never buy a bag of Chex mix again, now that I know I can get a whole bag of just rye chips.
To make the scene even more anemic, the skill cap right now is so high. I know several people (including me) who tried to get into Starcraft 2, only for their first random opponent to be a person with 20,000 APM who thinks a match lasting longer than two and a half minutes is a slog. It’s not even possible to learn from your mistakes when you get stomped that hard, that fast. But the single-player part does nothing to prepare you (other than maybe letting you figure out what the buttons do), and it’s going to happen just about every time (because the only people still playing are the people who have been playing for a decade or more).
Oh yeah, for sure, 100%. I know that this is incredibly opinions based. Every time I play a MOBA, I just think how much more fun I’d have playing an RTS!
totally understandable, they’re so close in controls, but so completely different in gameplay and pacing.
Battle royal’s taught me what it would feel like to be gaslighted. Surely nobody thinks they are fun. The only sane answer is all my friends have conspired to induce paranoia in me.
Totally agree with point #1. I was a staunch supporter of Fortnite when it was a zombie defense base building game. Then everybody latched on to the battle royale and I hated it, and every battle royale that hopped on the bandwagon afterwards.
Spend 20-30 minutes collecting loot just to win or lose it all in a sudden burst of conflict… shit gives me hypertension
That downtime in a battle royale creates a really fun tension. Unfortunately, it does feel like dominant strategies emerge in that genre a little too easily, and then they become repetitive, so you don’t get that early feeling with the game for more than a few weeks.
MOBAs can take many forms, and a lot of them don’t look anything like an RTS, but they do usually give you the good parts of leveling up and becoming more powerful in an RPG over the course of about a half hour.
Battle Royals - for me, it’s about how the consequences heighten the tension, and how the threat of getting unceremoniously smashed back to the lobby heightens the victories.
Playing with friends makes the the whole experience fun. If you drop and have some downtime ‘just’ gearing up, you can chat and hang out and goof around. Then when shit kicks off, it’s just so much more impactful (imo) than a game where you’ve just died and respawned a bunch already and you can do the same again. The teamwork and communication has to be next level and it feels so damn good to win a round, especially when you’ve been on the back foot and had to claw your way out of tough fights.
No mind tricks, not fussed about loot boxes and skins, just awesome memories from when we where playing enough to get almost half decent at it.
…and now I’m missing Apex Legends, might reinstall and remember that my friends don’t play it any more
Yeah, I like Apex because when you are in a fight it’s almost entirely down to your reflexes. Not just your physical reflexes but how quickly you can adapt creatively to your immediate environment and plan your tactics at a high speed. The addicting part is the lack of knowing for certain how and when you’ll be engaged and by who, then being good enough to get yourself out when it does happen.
I don’t always like to hot drop, but when you do it can be a lot of fun as everyone scrambles for the supplies and then your team comes out on top despite having to bite and scratch your way through opponents with basically a spoon you found.
I don’t know if it’s due to having some undiagnosed adhd or something, but I find that state of flying by the seat of your pants to be kind of soothing, almost therapeutic.
Hahaha ummm yeah as for your last sentence, I finally got around to getting a diagnosis for adult adhd recently and yes, having that focus naturally demanded of your brain by something you actually enjoy doing is definitely soothing. Kinda explains all of the activities I’ve always been drawn to (intense games, sim racing, rock climbing, skydiving etc)
I would respect your opinion if you presented it as an opinion, but your comment just reads as a condescending statement towards gamers who enjoy those genres. I don’t play either of those genres either, but I respect that people do enjoy them.
I would respect your opinion about my opinion if you presented it as an opinion about my opinion…
Of course it’s just my opinion. I respect people who enjoy those games absolutely, 100%. No disrespect at all. I didn’t even say anything negative about MOBAs except the fact that I didn’t personally enjoy them. You’re taking this way too personally.
the quality of FPS games has been so low for so long that today’s gamers have never really played a properly fun shooter
Black Mesa?
I was thinking more like Unreal Tournament 1999 kind of thing. Black Mesa was a decent game though, but I didn’t play any multiplayer.
I’d recommend Quake Champions if it wasn’t dead as hell
I played the shit out of quake live a few years ago! It was really good fun.
Quake live is great. I sometimes use it to 1v1 some friends and it works great for that.
-
Ubisoft style open world games. I honestly know I’m not built to enjoy them but I convinced myself to try and finish Horizon Zero Dawn and it was a huge mistake.
For a single player game, it vigorously wastes your time. The entire game is based around crafting but each time you need to gather something you need to come to a full stop, and spend a second watching the interact meter fill before you can gather each thing you see in the overworld.
The talent trees either contain things that are not meaningfully impactful on the core experience, ie tons of talents are slightly dressed up raw damage increases. Or they are things that are meaningful, but not surprising such as silent takedowns or bullet time. Overall it feels like Aloy was designed to be kind of fun and then they hamstrung her in a bunch of different ways to give a reason for the talent system to exist, and it takes the runtime of the whole game to undo this.
Many quests do not have anything to say about the lore or characterization of the world, whether it be for individual characters or the world overall.
The first thing I do in games like that is Zerg Rush to all the towers needed to open the map and unlock fast travel.
Once you do that, the rest of the game becomes a lot easier.
Same here re: Ubisoft cookie cutter open worlds. I LOVED the first ~40 hours of Immortals and thought I was approaching the end until I realized I was less than halfway at the rate I was progressing. I have no idea how length estimates like the ones on How Long to Beat are accurate for this game; usually they’re pretty spot on for my “complete what I find fun and interesting and not much else” play style. I gave up on the game after briefly skimming FAQs to see what I had left.
papers please. i thought i was doing pretty well in the beginning, but i guess it’s built in to the narrative of the game that no matter how hard you work, your family will still get sick and die, and the story progresses by you unknowingly screwing up and letting in a terrorist. not only are you responsible for paying for your own mistakes, it only gets harder and more unforgiving with each level. i realized pretty quickly that it’s not fun at all to spend my precious free time playing an extremely punishing game about working.
It’s more of a tragic story than a game. The misery is kind of the point. If you don’t see that point or can’t enjoy that, then yeah, it’ll be terrible.
For me, my “misery is the point” game was This War of Mine. I got it just before Ukraine, but still couldn’t stomach it. My first character had a kid that was constantly crying and whimpering and I just couldn’t do it. I was bad at it—if you can be good. I couldn’t help others in the ways that I wanted to. I couldn’t stop the whimpering. Then I went out as someone else and came back and the dad and kid left. And I had to stop there for a bit.
I set it down to come back later, then Ukraine happened. Where it was hard to stomach while I knew this was hypothetical and the Euro-setting was pretty abstracted from the current reality there—though still very present elsewhere—knowing that people on the ground were looking and sounding similar to what was happening in game and seeing that in news daily just cut off any desire I had to play. It’s powerful and DEEPLY empathetic, but that spiral of misery and failure was the point and it made it in spades.
I feel these games are important, but I also know I don’t want to put myself through them. Thanks to people like you who tell me about them so I don’t have to play them myself lol
That game should be mailed directly to dictators and war mongers everywhere.
“THIS. THIS is what you want for your people? For ANY people? “
Papers, Please has 20 different endings, you can definitely follow a different storyline!
Glory to Artstozka
Fwiw, it is absolutely possible to save your whole family in Papers Please. First time players aren’t necessarily expected to manage it, though, so you’re not wrong about losing family members being the intended experience. It’s definitely a game that tries to be “engaging” rather than " fun". I enjoyed it a lot back in college, but who knows how I’d feel now that I have a full-time job.
While i agree that it’s rather punishing, but to me it feels like that’s how it works under a dictatorship. I like how i need to work toward some of the ending by breaking the law
