Maitimo

The Ocean House Hotel in Vampire is amazingly well done. There's no over-reliance on lazy (and frequently highly visible) sanity meters and dumb meta tricks like pretending your save has corrupted or whatever - you know, stuff that goes out of its way to remind you you're playing a game and pull you out of the experience - just raw atmosphere and some clever scripting. The hospital's really good too.

Based on the anecdotes of other victims, I'm not convinced this is a complete explanation.

And the world collectively shrugs. I don't know many people who're even aware it's still a thing and no one who's excited for it, despite having friends who are Bioware diehards willing to excuse even DA2. If you can't get your base excited, why even bother?

Enslaved did far better than it deserved to, probably due in no small part to massive price cuts shortly after launch (and sustained more or less indefinitely thereafter). The kindest thing you can say about it is that it demonstrates possible value in tiered pricing for boxed releases, since clearly the market decided it was a £20 product.

And Ninja Theory should be grateful to still be in business; not many studios get to work on major properties after three successive failures.

In fairness, you've got to build a war chest to finance the crazy. It's better to do it this way, I think, since no suits will be looking to rein in the team's excesses if they self-fund their madness.