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   lainy (lain@lain.com)'s status on Saturday, 23-May-2026 02:13:50 JST lainy
   electric underground analyzes the pragmata gameplay. spoiler: he's not a fan
   
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZLQR6kMM2g
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     Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (wandereruber@poa.st)'s status on Saturday, 23-May-2026 02:24:54 JST Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer

     in reply to
     they haven't made a video game for more than ten years
     this is going to be good!
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     Late Stage Mall-Emo Realism (emoisdeadandsoami@mastodon.bv.linksjugend-solid.de)'s status on Saturday, 23-May-2026 02:45:17 JST Late Stage Mall-Emo Realism

     in reply to

     @lain
     having gameplay in a video game is pretty controversial these days

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     Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (wandereruber@poa.st)'s status on Saturday, 23-May-2026 16:26:48 JST Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer

     in reply to

     • Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer
     it was good
     is there a term like blackpilled but about the arts instead?
     Everything is just so ass now what the hell.
     And I think because movies and books are so bad at giving (certain) people what they would like, while challenging the audience in *their* medium-appropriate way, they go to different media. In this case to get to the story and characters they like, they go to a game instead. And said game is then also really really bad at being a game. So it just perpetuates slop.
     
     Grim.
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     lainy (lain@lain.com)'s status on Saturday, 23-May-2026 16:37:26 JST lainy

     in reply to

     • Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer
     @WandererUber Yeah, I don't really know how or why this happens. Maybe it's just audience drift, with people who liked resident evil 4 when they were 15 and had tons of time now pretty much want something similar but easier so they can play it through over two days even with wife and kids. It also used to be that you had story-driven games, which were point-and-click adventures, and action games, which didn't care about story at all (carmack said that a video game story is like the story in a porn movie).
     
     sadly i think that even now that everyone cares a lot about story in games, video game stories are mostly complete trash. i played a few games that were praised for their story recently and came away with the impression that the average gamer has never read a book (or even a few short stories) in their life.
     
     for me the 'actionable advice' around all of this is that i try to pay more attention to people like electric underground, write conscious, moviewise, house of tabula... not even because i mostly agree with them, but because they have taste, knowledge of the subjects and actual demands when it comes to quality that go beyond "well i had fun with it". especially in the movie and game review scene, so many people don't do any kind of analysis, they just say "i liked it" or "it was shit", just in more words. or they are so captured by the norms of the day that they can't say anything interesting even if they tried (like red letter media every time they describe how to "fix" a movie, which always involves rewriting it to be exactly like some 1980s/1990s cliche).
     
     there's more than enough good books, movies and games out already to last a man a lifetime, so, beyond the social aspect, it's mostly an issue of curation. now excuse me while i go play some parryslop because i actually think ninja gaiden is too hard.
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     Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (wandereruber@poa.st)'s status on Saturday, 23-May-2026 20:43:10 JST Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer

     in reply to
     >audience drift
     >people who liked resident evil 4 when they were 15
     >want something similar but easier
     That's not what I would call "audience drift" and I'm not sure it's what happened here. Original fans are the ones complaining they ruined the mechanics. The actual drift was that people who never played the originals have come in. That's my understanding of RE specifically. I haven't played a single one because it always looked mad boring to 15 year old me.
     
     Besides that though, there's still the whole issue of mechanical elegance vs raw difficulty. If your mechanics are elegant you can scale in either directions, if they're not, you're locked in baby-mode.
     I don't think I'd like it much when I tried a new entry of a (real, skill-based) game and they just let me win even though I haven't acquired the skill. That's just boring.
     That's why I think it's mostly new people coming in and not the existing fan base. (Plus "they started saying it publicly in front of cameras")
     
     >video game stories are trash
     I don't know what you played but I see the potential. It can never be a good movie-story or book-story for economic reasons and because of "ludo-narrative dissonance", much-maligned term.
     
     
     >it's mostly an issue of curation
     too much noise! Democracy, God that failed, so on and so forth
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     lainy (lain@lain.com)'s status on Sunday, 24-May-2026 00:15:19 JST lainy

     in reply to

     • Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer
     • pettanko
     @pettanko @WandererUber biggest one was “to the moon”
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     pettanko (pettanko@tsundere.love)'s status on Sunday, 24-May-2026 00:15:21 JST pettanko

     in reply to

     • Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer
     @lain @WandererUber >i played a few games that were praised for their story recently
     what games were those?
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     lainy (lain@lain.com)'s status on Sunday, 24-May-2026 00:15:44 JST lainy

     in reply to

     • Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer
     • Johnny Peligro
     • pettanko
     @mischievoustomato @WandererUber @pettanko that has excellent plot and backstory
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     Johnny Peligro (mischievoustomato@tsundere.love)'s status on Sunday, 24-May-2026 00:15:45 JST Johnny Peligro

     in reply to

     • Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer
     • pettanko
     @pettanko @lain @WandererUber the meet n fuck series i reckon
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     pettanko (pettanko@tsundere.love)'s status on Sunday, 24-May-2026 00:37:15 JST pettanko

     in reply to

     • Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer
     @lain @WandererUber ah, those kinda games
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     lainy (lain@lain.com)'s status on Sunday, 24-May-2026 00:37:15 JST lainy

     in reply to

     • Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer
     • pettanko
     @pettanko @WandererUber plenty of others that are just as bad.
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     Cheetah Meld (pingviini@pleroma.shunderdo.me)'s status on Sunday, 24-May-2026 01:10:04 JST Cheetah Meld

     in reply to

     • Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer
     • pettanko
     @lain @WandererUber @pettanko The appeal of a Kan Gao game is to see if it manages to successfully tearjerk you despite all the RPG-maker nonsense and playtime padding
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     Cheetah Meld (pingviini@pleroma.shunderdo.me)'s status on Sunday, 24-May-2026 01:10:50 JST Cheetah Meld

     in reply to

     • Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer
     @lain @WandererUber I just made peace with the fact that really the best you can hope for in a video game story is that it doesn't clash too heavily with the gameplay and succeeds in establishing a vibe.
     
     The absolute peak achievements in video game stories (outside of interactive fiction) are on the level of middling Hollywood scripts or YA fiction, or graphic novels. I'm okay with that, if the gameplay makes up for it, or if the story is a mystery and the gameplay (or part of the gameplay) is to figure it all out by exploring interesting locations - and I'm not able to accurately guess where it's all going well before the credits roll (but it isn't random nonsense either).
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     lainy (lain@lain.com)'s status on Sunday, 24-May-2026 01:11:28 JST lainy

     in reply to

     • Cheetah Meld
     • Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer
     @pingviini @WandererUber one story heavy game I played recently and I liked a lot was the point and click “the drifter”, which managed to get a great synergy between story and gameplay going in the endgame.
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     Cheetah Meld (pingviini@pleroma.shunderdo.me)'s status on Sunday, 24-May-2026 01:16:13 JST Cheetah Meld

     in reply to

     • Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer
     @lain @WandererUber I loved the demo, it's been sitting near the top of my wishlist for a while now
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     Cheetah Meld (pingviini@pleroma.shunderdo.me)'s status on Sunday, 24-May-2026 01:21:27 JST Cheetah Meld

     in reply to

     • Cheetah Meld
     • Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer
     @lain @WandererUber Since you just admitted that you do have the patience for point-and-click, a really obscure but pretty-good-for-a-videogame-story-one is https://store.steampowered.com/app/1360390/Cats_and_the_Other_Lives/
     
     It tries to be (and succeeds to a surprising degree) a Robert Altman style ensemble drama, but the player character is the house cat, so you experience the story entirely by just being in the room with the human cast by accident, just doing cat things.
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     lainy (lain@lain.com)'s status on Sunday, 24-May-2026 01:21:43 JST lainy

     in reply to

     • Cheetah Meld
     • Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer
     @pingviini @WandererUber thank you very much! I’ll check it out!
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     Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (wandereruber@poa.st)'s status on Sunday, 24-May-2026 13:27:53 JST Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer

     in reply to

     • pettanko
     there's ones that actually have well-made stories and there's a lot that are just journobait. For example, the story of Halo isn't exactly nobel prize territory, but it's not any less competently executed than garbage like Firewatch and tearjerkers like To The Moon.
     Since it is a traditional "boy's story" and Halo is skill-based (in a broadly electric-undergroundian sense) it will never be considered like that by the critical mass of journos.
     
     insert the cuphead tutorial video
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