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by BiteCode_dev 702 days ago
It's actually a golden age for fun video games, because we are swimming in new beautiful, engaging, original titles every year.

Some things really take you by surprise as well.

I never saw Inscryption, Disco Eliseum or Hades coming, and I think nobody did.

And even oldish games still have great value. I still play LoL or Isaac, and they are as good as they were on day 1.

Plus, you get the Switch then the Deck refreshed portable gaming experience. The latter made emulation so nice as well.

With terrific communities, insane speed runners, devs coming up with crazy new concepts and hardware that never stop to get better, it's hard to complain except that with a busy life, you will see only 1% of those masterpieces.

3 comments

> I never saw (…) Hades coming, and I think nobody did.

I don’t think Hades came as a surprise to anyone who was already a fan of the devs from Bastion and Transistor.

Come on, Bastion is nice but nowhere as sophisticated as Hades. Neither the gameplay nor the replayability would have let you think the team had the ability at the time.

As for transistor, the story is basically "futuristic world is being destroyed by virus-type-invaders and your sword/companion is the key to beating it", with a predictable end and almost zero character dev.

Being able to make ok games doesn't translate to the skill to make a masterpiece.

It was a quantum leap.

It would be like saying you can deduce Divinity Original sin 2 would be amazing because you played the first one.

Inscryption is a must play.
I will remember it forever, it's a unique experience.

But it's such a weird combination of aesthetic, story telling and gameplay I have to assume it prevents a huge part of the gaming population from enjoying it.

If anybody read those comments, DO NOT LOOK THE GAME UP if you plan to play it. Go blind.

I binged it during the time I was trapped in my room with COVID. You're right, it is a very weird game(s?) in the best way, it's literally sent me off on a card game design jaunt that's still ongoing haha. And I found myself loving the characters of the, what was it, ocelot and the wizard apprentice who is glad to have any kind of STIM-U-LA-TION?
I disagree. Sure, there are fun games, but they're so hard to find among all the crap
The noise/signal ratio is worse for everything today: movies, music, tv shows.

But "finding good games requires a tiny bit of effort to me" is a first-world problem.