#no agency as cosmic horror i understand but the execution doesn't do anything for me

[magnuspanoptes]

re lrb i have to re-listen but there's always been a good theme of exploiting other people's trauma in the podcast, what jon does in season one as head archivist (and everyone else before him) — interrogating people's worst memories and then filing them away as data while not offering help of any sort, which is what keeps the institute running (in a literal sense obvs since it's a temple to the eye but even before that reveal this is also just true in an administrative sense), is simply a corporate version of what he does later as a terror eating vampire. the apathy has turned into a physiological urge now. and ofc jon himself was exploited by the entities, because what was guest for mr spider if not a traumatic episode which drove him in time to the magnus institute in search for answers, and where he would eventually help fulfill the web's designs.

[klysanderelias]

So I finally got around to playing slay the princess, hater alert:

It's kind of what I was afraid it would be? Which is to say, as a piece of media with Jonny Sims in it, I kind of had a certain amount of Expectations going in, which more or less were correct, and I knew it was going to be along similar lines to The Stanley Parable, which...

Not to be a dick, but I feel like there's a certain genre or style of game, like The Stanley Parable, which wants really badly to be a metacommentary, or to Say Something, in a way that really feels uncomfortable to me.

And part of that is that it's usually bound up in like, this presentation like they're the first ones to really Think About This and how they're not just making a game, but they're Making A Statement About Video Games. And maybe that's just how I feel, and not reflective at all about their intention or execution, but I always come away with this real resentment because it's so... on the face. It's so in your face. It's something that is trying SO HARD and it stops being a fun experience because it wants to be an Experience, like an indie movie that's trying to be a critical darling that's talked about in film classes for the next few decades, but in doing so is making a movie that actually kind of sucks to watch.

And in this case it's the problem of like, the game is trying so hard with the cosmic horror, and the questions of agency and destination and all that shit, that it's not fun to play through each chapter. And part of that is that it's not the sort of game I wanted - I was really hoping for something more along the lines of like, a traditional VN! Making a game like this (similarly to the Stanley Parable) where there are a lot of different routes and a ton of reactivity, basically ensures that there can't be a lot of actual content per route. You can do a route in StP in like, five minutes. I did three in 30 minutes. It's just...

I don't want to sound like I'm criticising the developers (although I am) because I understand that a) making games is hard and b) making games is expensive and the initial vision always has to give way to budget concerns, and of course c) their vision for the game might not and should not align with mine, and I can't really in good faith go 'this game sucks because it's made to someone else's tastes'-

but there is a certain point of like... slay the princess feels like the sort of game that doesn't leave the player anything to really chew over. The ideas and themes of the game are straight up dropped the table for you to turn over, and very quickly it wore out its welcome.

I dunno, my take away is 'it's not for me' but I can't help but feel like the game is trying too hard. I found myself very quickly put off by the way the game was presenting things, by the way the choices resolved, by the options I was given. It felt like they weren't confident that you'd actually keep playing, so they wanted to make sure that you KNEW it was playing with agency and whatnot from the gecko, that you KNEW it was being meta, and it just felt grating. That was my same criticism of The Stanley Parable - that it felt like I was being condescended to, that the people who wrote the game were more interested in getting their flowers for how smart they were.

And specifically it's the feeling of like, oh great, this isn't a game, it's an Experience, in the same way that going to an avant-garde high-class restaurant isn't dinner, it's a bunch of foam in mouth-shaped cups or whatever.

The thing for me is like, I have spent the last fifteen something years occasionally thinking about Song of Saya. I will probably still be thinking about Song of Saya occasionally when I'm like 50. I don't think I'm going to think about anything presented in StP a year from now. I don't think there's much TO think about.

And again, maybe I'm just a hater, I'm in a Place right now so I kind of knew it wouldn't be the best time for me to play this, but it's been in my steam library for I don't know, like a year? And I think no matter what, I was always going to be disappointed by this, because I've read a bunch of these stories before. This isn't my first rodeo with this stuff, and quite frankly I'm getting sick of rodeos. I can appreciate the technical skill, and I'm sure it's a great place to start if you've never been to a rodeo, but it's just not that interesting to me.

And also quite frankly, I've gotten into this grumpy old mindset of like, stop putting all your development time and budget into making tons of choices. I get it, it's a commentary on agency, whatever, but when you have to program and record all those lines, and of course your writing has to account for all the different options, you end up with a huge expenditure on something that really doesn't add that much to the game. You're making a VN, not a podcast, and having every single fucking line be voiced means that you can't have the traditional VN length without a AAA budget.

At the end of the day, again, it's just 'not the game I wanted', and I can't really muster a lot of criticism past that, except that I feel like the creators thought I was too stupid to understand what they were going for, so they decided to make it so clear and unambiguous that the story stops being interesting.