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What's a game that got critically and player acclaimed that you disliked anyway? (hexbear.net)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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This is a followup to @[email protected] 's recent thread for completeness' sake.

I'll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre... in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of "doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book" puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.

So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I enjoyed the music and the co-op, but the lore of the game felt very clearly like a "secular US military in space" fighting against inscrutable religious zealots (with an Abrahamic theme) then zombies, which to me feels like Stargate (the show). Idk if that's something that scans, it just popped into my head discussing Stargate and it's cagey relationship with the religious right of the bush era (and some big name culty events like WACO, which I feel like provided some cultural energy to the Brotherhood of Nod)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The game was written in the Post-9/11 USA, so that vibe was absolutely intended. The aliens are a religious caste system that hate Humanity's freedoms, Master Chief is a based Navy Seal, etc. As time went on they started playing with the idea that the human government was really fashy but because they never fully committed to the idea and had Master Chief defect to a Maoist insurgency it comes off like they're endorsing the awful things in the setting rather than condemning them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Halo had been in development for years and came out two months after 9/11, any relation to post-9/11 politics was just a coincidence.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I have no idea if this will affect your opinion of the series positively or negatively but here's some information that recontextualises the religious themes:

Humanity are actually the descendants of the gods of the Covenant religion, and explicitly hold an honoured place within the philosophy practiced by those gods. The covenant are trying to exterminate humanity because the religious leaders are suppressing this information from the general population and using genocide to keep their secrets.