hbomberguy

here we go

The British guy with the union jack tattoed on his shirtless chest was a good Superman villain. British Man? Was that his name? Union...Jim?

Superman fries his brain with lazer vision and tortures him and his friends.

@halexandra64 said:

I can't believe how many lies are in Planescape. It's a palace of lies. It might be the only game to be about How To Discern The Truth. Except maybe Her Story, which I haven't played.

I paused this three minutes in and went for a walk and honestly asked myself what I thought the best game was, story-wise, and concluded it was probably Planescape: Torment. Unpausing to discover this was also Heather's answer was really cool.

The best vs. favourite discussion leads to the thought that lots of game criticism is missing is the approach to the games themselves. Take for example The Witness, or Braid. You go into those primed to thinkabout them, because you know going in that they're 'thoughtful'. What goes missing is that plenty of mainstream or 'not deep' games contain discussion of very similar ideas, but because players aren't given the same idea to approach them that way, these ideas go missing.

I think Hatred is a pretty bad game with uninteresting ideas behind it, but: What if Jonathan Blow had made it? People would suddenly approach it differently enough that it might yield alternative readings than the ones we got. That isn't to say that Hatred has been done a disservice or that Jonathan's work has an over-Blow-n critical response (i swear that pun came up naturally), but it's worth considering when we're developing a reading of a game and when we're developing a reading based on how the context expects us to approach it.