What are the most pretentious games ever made?

[Strangolapreti]

but do you honestly think freaking Doom is "pretentious" ? <Stuff I don't like> does not equal pretentious.

I think the oh so deep lore that sucks ass and does nothing but making the game worse is overwritten and pretentious, yes.
I'm don't consider the whole game pretentious, just that one specific aspect of it.

 

[augment]

What deep lore are you talking about? Doom 2016 hands you the story on a platter throughout the game with the demon narrating tablets.
Doom eternal went the deep end with an even dumber plot about revenge against the gods (this has been done to death not just in games but in fiction in general). In neither case is the story trying to exude deeper meaning, or comes across as presumptious and filled with self-importance and self serving pseudointellectualism, ala Metal Gear Solid 2. I am seriously trying to see if we both played the same games or not.

 

[Quarterback Rex Grossman]

Nier Automata. Bitch ass Kojima wannabe doesn't let you save until an hour in because the save system is tied to his gay Hollywood lore involving a robot twink.

 

[This User]

Nier Automata. Bitch ass Kojima wannabe doesn't let you save until an hour in because the save system is tied to his gay Hollywood lore involving a robot twink.

Also its full of references to French pedophiles

 

[Dickus Biggus]

Since others have already said Kojima, I will add something new with all the Project Moon games. Lobotomy Corporation, Library of Ruina and Limbus Company.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I'll put an actual one that is unknown enough to be interesting - Void Stranger.

I saw some YouTube essayists talk on it and the devs' previous game (which was a bullet hell that was fine even if going against some of the rules of the genre). And what followed was dozens of levels of very basic puzzles with all sorts of collectibles and characters without really letting me understand whether I screwed myself. At about level 80 I just googled a playthrough to see if I'm getting anywhere and I was astounded by the pretentiousness:

* The game has 255 levels, because you know, variable overflow was a thing 30 years ago in arcades. A good chunk of those levels are pointless filler to waste your time.
* Those levels must be done in a single run, while the player has limited amount of retries, there is a method to get more of each pickup but it is retardedly obtuse. There are no checkpoints, there are few skips but you need to know the secret behind them.
* If you run out of lives you can choose to continue with infinite health but that locks you to a bad ending, doesn't allow you to play the last levels, and ends with a gay song.
* It's a puzzle game so it's not like there is any active skill involved besides memorization, meaning you are going to waste your time just getting back if you die.
* Absolute ton of cryptic shit todos for different endings and progression.
* Eventually you have puzzles requiring you to glitch the game to finish.
* The plot from what I gathered is multigenerational lesbian grooming and faggotary.
* The game occasionally switches to jrpg combat (the type that wasn't used for at least 20 years)/shmup.

It's like a bingo of pretentious game tropes.

 

[Peru oso donas]

Also its full of references to French pedophiles

Tbf, said character named after that french pedophile is shown to be a colossal retard full of himself, who made another robot (named after his IRL wife who was also an unihinged pedo feminist) go insane and start cannibalizing other robots.

 

[This User]

Tbf, said character named after that french pedophile is shown to be a colossal retard full of himself, who made another robot (named after his IRL wife who was also an unihinged pedo feminist) go insane and start cannibalizing other robots.

yeah it doesnt push sartre's ideas or anything

its just yoko taro being weird and putting a french figure in, because japan's a bunch of frenchaboos lol

accidentally pretentious

 

[The Ugly One]

ZPC was a fantastically shitty Doom Clone

You were supposed to care because Aidan Hughes (who did KMFDM albums) did the art and was going to make an associated movie (which he never did), and Paul Barker of Ministry did the music. The story is about some kind of god-king saving his people from fascism. I think it has about the highest gap between pretense and execution I've ever seen.

 

[UnsufficentBoobage]

jrpg combat (the type that wasn't used for at least 20 years)

This does not exactly explain what kind of combat you are talking about

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

This does not exactly explain what kind of combat you are talking about

A static screen with Attack/Magic/Items/Flee. Like old Final Fantasy games or extremely rudimentary RPGMaker games. It's also usually extremely scripted to force you to pick specific options.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

Void Stranger

Yeah my vote goes to this but for a completely different reason. It's a game about futility and endless, hopeless struggle, and oh damn does it ever want you to experience this firsthand by replaying the same huge chunks of dungeon over and over and over again until you snap. I highly suggest watching one of those long youtube teardowns on it because it's an absolutely fascinating game with tons of fun metatextual puzzlegame fuckery although most of it is best experienced via schadenfreude. It doesn't matter the dungeon is 255 floors and you have limited lives when you realize (MASSIVE spoiler; but really i dunno if it's worth playing through to figure it out firsthand) your pick-up-put-down tile wand can be used to climb across the border of the room into the UI and manipulate the numbers in your current floor/stats/lives count as they're also tiles, allowing you to go to floors that don't exist and find the other 70% of the game. If only it wasn't such a gigantic fucking slog to play through and didn't penalize you with literal hours of progress loss for simple missteps.

Also the JRPG thing is literally just a joke, a character has a dream that's a jrpg battle that takes like 60 seconds.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I made a bingo card for all the elements I can think of for pretentious games

 

[Swine Schwein]

I think the oh so deep lore that sucks ass and does nothing but making the game worse is overwritten and pretentious, yes

The moment Doom guy became the DOOM SLAYER™ and people started clapping at Doom metal performances at shitty game shows it was over.

They couldn't leave it alone. The one game that was perfect the way it was.

 

[Vlad the Implier]

I made a bingo card for all the elements I can think of for pretentious games
Ver archivo adjunto 8821156

This could just as easily be "Bad Game with Good Reviews" bingo.

Nier Automata. Bitch ass Kojima wannabe doesn't let you save until an hour in because the save system is tied to his gay Hollywood lore involving a robot twink.

Got rekt in the tutorial and had to start over award

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

This could just as easily be "Bad Game with Good Reviews" bingo.

I tried to keep away from woke talking points, but game reviewers absolutely love these hack pretentious games that ape good semi-pretentious games. Especially as a lot of times they have connections to the developers.

 

[Zenos Yae Viator]

I think calling Nier Automata pretentious is retarded, its fully capable of taking the piss out on itself, Yoko Taro is both a good writer, and a nutjob who will clown all over his own shit for fun.

"Serious Plot going over existentialism" isn't pretentious, lest we fall into "everything serious" fits the bill, then you are a faggot, nigger brained, surface level critic.

 

[Vlad the Implier]

I think calling Nier Automata pretentious is retarded, its fully capable of taking the piss out on itself, Yoko Taro is both a good writer, and a nutjob who will clown all over his own shit for fun.

"Serious Plot going over existentialism" isn't pretentious, lest we fall into "everything serious" fits the bill, then you are a faggot, nigger brained, surface level critic.

People really need to stick to the definition of pretentious meaning displaying more depth, talent, meaning, intellect, etc than there really is.

Nier: Automata was a genuinely high-quality production and it implements features like mutliple playthroughs in a constructive and well-paced way.

I tried to keep away from woke talking points, but game reviewers absolutely love these hack pretentious games that ape good semi-pretentious games. Especially as a lot of times they have connections to the developers.

I think some of these features aren't innately bad, but are often implemented badly buuuut your bingo chart got me thinking though... I think there's actually two things you're bundling in here which have significant overlap:
Pretentiousness and Condescension (preachiness if you will)

Pretentious design is lazy but acts likes its deep. For example, the interracial couple in Bioshock Infinite. The J.E.W. of Ghost Story Games, Ken Levine wanted to give the player the "experience" of having to decide between doing a whole heckin' racism for self-preservation or throwing the baseball at the meanie bad racist. Jokes on you Ken! I would've ENJOYED throwing it at the race mixers and their ugly orc children if they had any. Point is, if it wasn't even going to fucking matter, then make it a cutscene. This was just lazy and gay. Although I forgive COD's "Press F to pay respects" because that was so bad it was unintentionally hilarious.

Gone Home was also pretentious, maybe not by developer intent, but definitely by the game reviewers. Its just a walking sim where, without any actual puzzles, you gather le clues to solve le mystery: your sister ran away because she's a lesbian and your dad's getting cucked. On top of that, the game is set in fucking Oregon.. is there any place in the world more lesbian frendly than Oregon?

Condescending games are ones where the developers are very obviously conveying to you that their opinions are correct and there's no absolutely no tolerance for other perspectives. They're utterly sanctimonius in their moral message and they don't really give you anything to engage with. You are rewarded for doing what the developer likes and you are punished if you don't. This is terrible for games with choices because in reality:
1. Doing the right thing is often difficult and takes courage, usully its easier to just not take any kind of stand
2. Their opinons aren't nearly brave as they think. In fact they're not brave at all. It takes way more balls to point out that your coworker is a man in a dress than to respect its pronouns.

Veilguard was probably one of the most egregious examples of condescenson. What's hilarious is that the "bigoted old mom" character actually has a word for trannies of their race and was trying to be understanding but YOU JUST DON'T GET IT MOM! I'M NON-BINARY! REEEEEEEE!

Fallout: New Vegas, and Disco Elysium are the opposite of this. The developers aren't smugly preaching to you through their game. You're encouraged to engage with different ideas and then make your own choices. If anything this makes the game even more enjoyable because you get a totally different experience as a result of your choices and you can explore both the good and bad of the various factions/philosophies.

 

[Quarterback Rex Grossman]

Got rekt in the tutorial and had to start over award

I didn't die once. It took an hour for the first level to end.

 

[Zenos Yae Viator]

I didn't die once. It took an hour for the first level to end.

And? tell us more about how you didn't understand a pretty easy to grasp (but good) game and story.