According to Steam, I'm only 2 hours into the game but it felt like a whole miserable life of listening to white noise among those black rectangles in a bleak graphomaniac limbo. It's as if Night in the Woods was very ugly and devoid of absolutely any stories about people. Instead, it has oodles of insufferable unnecessary information nobody will ever care about. A whole, I would say, Babylonian wink-wink (because these authors sure like winking a lot) Library of data about who lived with whom and who lied to whom in whose childhood and who dumped whom and also reading this all doesn't make you feel invested in the slightest but I guess since the developers have read House of Leaves they have decided to also make everything artsy and vibey but since it's so ugly it's not vibey because very often I couldn't really understand what these heaps of rectangles were supposed to represent. And I don't think this is a good quality for a game so obsessed with museums and exhibitions and all these hipster-ass ruminations on the language of media and cameras and narratives and (kmp) interactive experiences where exhibiting dog houses and plaster statues of horses in a tangle of wire should mean something metaphorically and have something to do with art or philosophy (and also I was probably fed up with this during my gamedev study a bit too much). I appreciate the attempt to make a game ergodic in the same way literature can be, but this content can kill any interest in any experiment with the form ever.
What I want to say is that KRZ and NITW are very illustrative in how wordiness and literariness have less to do with the quality of the story or the game than some think. The authors of the former really, really don't want you to miss out that they did their homework of watching Lynch and reading Pynchon while the latter is a story about a gang of teenage furries who never have deeper ideas than "damn dis sucks jeez", but also the former is total bullshit and the latter is a damn awesome game. And I guess, Disco Elysium was a worthy synthesis in these dialectics of anti-capitalist games which are about the USA even if they aren't -- both well-told and wordy.
But a game doesn't even have to be Disco Elysium to be better than KRZ because, for what it's worth, even something as wacky as Life is Strange 1 is also better at absolutely everything, from visuals and cinematography to the writing and gameplay. Because the only thing KRZ has from a game is the small pleasure of finding locations by following directions -- something so few games implement, even with how much praise Morrowind is still getting for it (speaking of artsy games which are probably good since they get praised so much but also too hopelessly ugly for me to care about).
What I want to say is that KRZ and NITW are very illustrative in how wordiness and literariness have less to do with the quality of the story or the game than some think. The authors of the former really, really don't want you to miss out that they did their homework of watching Lynch and reading Pynchon while the latter is a story about a gang of teenage furries who never have deeper ideas than "damn dis sucks jeez", but also the former is total bullshit and the latter is a damn awesome game. And I guess, Disco Elysium was a worthy synthesis in these dialectics of anti-capitalist games which are about the USA even if they aren't -- both well-told and wordy.
But a game doesn't even have to be Disco Elysium to be better than KRZ because, for what it's worth, even something as wacky as Life is Strange 1 is also better at absolutely everything, from visuals and cinematography to the writing and gameplay. Because the only thing KRZ has from a game is the small pleasure of finding locations by following directions -- something so few games implement, even with how much praise Morrowind is still getting for it (speaking of artsy games which are probably good since they get praised so much but also too hopelessly ugly for me to care about).
medigun
3 days ago