Where the Water Tastes Like Wine - American folk tale adventure where you wander through the US

[Blaine]

(anybody want to discuss the over-purchasing and investing of farm equipment by American farmers in between 1900-1919??).

I do, but probably not with the people who developed that game.

 

[sser]

(anybody want to discuss the over-purchasing and investing of farm equipment by American farmers in between 1900-1919??).

I do, but probably not with the people who developed that game.

I mean, if I were to guess it's more of a circa 2018 version of "Great Depression."

 

[MRY]

Have you played Andrew Plotkin's games? Hadean Lands in particular might be the best IF/puzzle/adventure game I've ever played.

I've played all of his free stuff, but not Hadean Lands. I sort of lost my patience for IF around 2005 and haven't played much sense. He's a genius implementer and two of his games have simply jaw-dropping twists:

Spoiler

Spider & Web when you realize what is going on in the interrogation chair and trigger the explosive, and Shade when just as the player has shifted from "I want to get X and not cause sand to appear" to "screw it, sand everywhere!" the narration changes the same way -- amazingly perfect mimesis

But all the same, I never really connected with his games and often found them too sprawling for my feeble intellect / deficient attention and just drifted away from them.

My highest echelon of IF would probably be Photopia (for maudlin sentimentality), Metamorphoses (for a tight puzzler with compelling writing), Spider & Web (for the twist), and Anchorhead (for best Lovecraft, great research, and the fact it could create so much tension from entering "z" into a parser [in the bone pit]). But that's all pretty idiosyncratic, there are lots of other great pieces of IF, and I'm really middlebrow and easily influenced by groupthink. (Notwithstanding these qualities, there were a host of IF classics [not commercial text adventures, talking about the golden age of TADS/Inform] like Worlds Apart and Varicella that never worked for me.)

being a full-bore polarized progressive doesn't entirely preclude the ability to write and design computer games, but it's usually a bad sign. Those who can pull it off are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Eh, I mean, "full-bore polarized" lets you "no true scotsman" every counterexample, but basically every great IF writer is extremely progressive, as are many Codex-beloved RPG designers (like Chris Avellone). That said, with the population of bad narrative game makers, perhaps left-wing politics are over-represented (though, as I said, in IF that representation is close to 100% for good makers, too).

I'm surprised it cost so much or had that many people working on it.

I'm not surprised. Games are expensive to make, and that guy made a big fuss about paying people "real" amounts, like hiring SAG-AFTRA voice actors. For Fallen Gods, I pay people outrageously low sums, and I'm certainly in the four figure range. I don't think it'll hit six figures, but who knows?

The impression that games are really cheap to make is driven in considerable part by games that are developed essentially for free because the developers are all working part-time for back-end compensation. This doubly masks development costs, since such developers may not care about money (and thus collect less) and in any event are deferring their compensation in a way that is harder to calculate.

 

[Blaine]

Eh, I mean, "full-bore polarized" lets you "no true scotsman" every counterexample, but basically every great IF writer is extremely progressive, as are many Codex-beloved RPG designers (like Chris Avellone). That said, with the population of bad narrative game makers, perhaps left-wing politics are over-represented (though, as I said, in IF that representation is close to 100% for good makers, too).

There are 1990s-era polarized progressives, and then there are CURRENT YEAR polarized progressives. That genteel earlier generation of progressives is very tolerable (in fact, I reckon I'd have been considered a progressive circa the early 2000s) and usually capable. The new generation is not.

I see the Chris Avellones of the world as tragic figures: genuinely well-meaning people caught between the much more admirable progressive views of yesteryear and neo-progressive idiocy, walking a tightrope as best they can.

 

[sser]

I'm not surprised. Games are expensive to make, and that guy made a big fuss about paying people "real" amounts, like hiring SAG-AFTRA voice actors. For Fallen Gods, I pay people outrageously low sums, and I'm certainly in the four figure range. I don't think it'll hit six figures, but who knows?

The impression that games are really cheap to make is driven in considerable part by games that are developed essentially for free because the developers are all working part-time for back-end compensation. This doubly masks development costs, since such developers may not care about money (and thus collect less) and in any event are deferring their compensation in a way that is harder to calculate.

I don't think that's a solid argument here, though. It's a story-book game with short stories (with short text) and a barebones interface/system to go from story to story. Just seems like mismanagement to me.

 

[MRY]

I don't think that's a solid argument here, though. It's a story-book game with short stories (with short text) and a barebones interface/system to go from story to story. Just seems like mismanagement to me.

"It should be possible to make a fully voiced, professionally written, custom-engined, animated vidya with 2D and 3D animations for much less than $140k" is what seems like a not persuasive argument to me, to be honest, it's just an assertion that isn't borne out except in work-for-free projects or outsource-to-Ukraine projects. Even glancing at the game, it's clear that its engine is more complex than FG's, its art would be costlier (there's more of it, for instance), and the voice actors are union members and Sting (?!). It's a slickly made game, and he also hired a bunch of professional writers to write for it. It apparently has >200 stories, which each have multiple variants. I have no idea how it plays, I can't be bothered to try to figure it out, but it's really, really easy to see how quickly those costs would add up.

If your point is that he could've made the game cheaper by doing it in renpy with anime art and amateur voice acting, I'm sure you're right, but that would be a totally different game. If your point is that it's insane to spend $140k on a game with those features, who knows? The game managed to get coverage in the mainstream press (The Washington Post!) and win a bunch of awards. It's not like he spent $140k developing that Mitsoda visual novel. He clearly picked a game that got close to being "anointed" as must-play for commentariat, but he fell short. If he'd gotten there, he would've made his money back and had his vanity project. Hard to fault him for that.

Don't get me wrong. I bet a master project manager could've made that game for less than $140k. But not for $10k.

 

[sser]

I don't think that's a solid argument here, though. It's a story-book game with short stories (with short text) and a barebones interface/system to go from story to story. Just seems like mismanagement to me.

Don't get me wrong. I bet a master project manager could've made that game for less than $140k. But not for $10k.

I'll do it for half

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

He hired Sting to do an American accent and Sting was so good that no one knew it was him, which kind of defeats the purpose of hiring a rock star to do your voice acting.

Mismanagement seems to be a very kind way of putting it. Although I think the issue is less about bungled execution and more about a fundamentally flawed vision. He had every reason to believe this game would be for an incredibly niche audience:

It’s a brand-new genre, experimental in nature, and heavily dependent on content — most of which I can’t create myself. That means it was expensive to make and to test, and at the best of times sales would be limited to people who were on board not just for narrative games, but for experiments in narrative games

I struggle to believe that this only became obvious to him after the game was released. In any kind of publishing, step one is know your audience. With that in mind, investing $140,000 of cash and $360,000 of foregone wages comes across as a pretty questionable decision. It's as though he believed that with good enough art, voice acting and writing he could will an audience into existence out of whole cloth. Sure, if the game had sold he'd look like a genius, but who was going to buy it?

Yeah, it would have been a very different game with a shoestring budget. But if WTWTLW didn't have gorgeous art, great voice acting and a good soundtrack, would it have been worth making in the first place?

On some level, he seems to have known he had a stinker on his hands ahead of time:

The biggest complaint from reviewers after the game launched had to do with the pacing, particularly in the later parts of the game. The reason for this is simple: we didn’t play it much. While we had a full QA team, they were focused on finding functional problems. When all the systems were in place, it was very late in development, and playing through the game took 10–20 hours. If you make a 10–20 hour game, guess how long it takes to playtest? And so I only managed to do a few full playthroughs of the game near launch. I didn’t make time to send the game to friends and colleagues, either — it was changing so rapidly and I had so very much to do.

Jesus! When you spend three years making something that's a real labor of love, not showing it to your friends is a major red flag. I don't begrudge the guy his faux-surprise; the postmortem is probably selling more copies than that Washington Post review.

And the questionable decisions continue. Here's part of his update to the postmortem:

On that note, I wanted to give everyone a peek into our plans for the future of the game: this week we are going to be releasing a patch with new features to assist in learning how to play and cover many of the topics that were missing or not covered deeply enough in our original tutorials. Next week, we plan on a patch to fix some of the content distribution through the game, and make late-game exploration more rewarding. And then in May, we’ll be releasing new content — a whole bunch of new vignettes and the stories that result!

Hope springs eternal...

 

[Grauken]

...and stupidity is infinite

 

[MRY]

Mismanagement seems to be a very kind way of putting it.

This is a different kind of mismanagement than "the exact same game could be made for much less than $140k."

Sting

It's not about the players recognizing his voice, it's about getting visibility for the project.

I struggle to believe that this only became obvious to him after the game was released. In any kind of publishing, step one is know your audience. With that in mind, investing $140,000 of cash and $360,000 of foregone wages comes across as a pretty questionable decision. It's as though he believed that with good enough art, voice acting and writing he could will an audience into existence out of whole cloth. Sure, if the game had sold he'd look like a genius, but who was going to buy it?

Yeah, it would have been a very different game with a shoestring budget. But if WTWTLW didn't have gorgeous art, great voice acting and a good soundtrack, would it have been worth making in the first place?

But, obviously, there are some kinds of games that depend on their presentation to work. And the genre he's working in is one of those.

It's not like "contemplative left-wing art game with thin gameplay" is some kind of ZOMG-I-never-heard-of-such-a-thing business proposition. They've been running hogwild with those for years, and he was one of the folks who cashed in on it. Consider Gone Home, Firewatch, Depression Quest, all of those weirdo dating sims like Dream Daddy or whatever. It's easier for him to now say that it was a crazy, couldn't-possibly-succeed proposition, but ex ante, I'm not so sure.

Far and away the hardest hurdle with Steam is getting coverage. When you get coverage, presumptively you'll do all right. His game got unbelievable coverage. That it bombed is somewhat inscrutable, but is partly owing to sites like Destructoid not behaving as anticipated and not giving it 8.5/10 "pushes new boundaries in narrative in effable ways" kind of reviews. [EDIT: Ha. Turns out Destructoid gave it exactly that review. Bad example.]

Also, the $360k in forgone wages is just make-believe money.

The biggest complaint from reviewers after the game launched had to do with the pacing, particularly in the later parts of the game. The reason for this is simple: we didn’t play it much. While we had a full QA team, they were focused on finding functional problems. When all the systems were in place, it was very late in development, and playing through the game took 10–20 hours. If you make a 10–20 hour game, guess how long it takes to playtest? And so I only managed to do a few full playthroughs of the game near launch. I didn’t make time to send the game to friends and colleagues, either — it was changing so rapidly and I had so very much to do.

Jesus! When you spend three years making something that's a real labor of love, not showing it to your friends is a major red flag. I don't begrudge the guy his faux-surprise; the postmortem is probably selling more copies than that Washington Post review.

I have some sympathy for him because what he's talking about is a problem with Fallen Gods, too. Maybe FG will fail for the same reason. But it doesn't have a gameplay loop that can be meaningfully tested without content. The content takes forever to produce, and because it's procedural to boot, you have to have a large percentage of the content prepared in order meaningfully test it.

Now, it's not my intention to rush the game out the door when we hit that stage, but that's because I'm not in a hurry and because Primordia made perfectly clear to me what kind of press support I can expect. (Except for from this prestigious magazine.)

To me, the three parts of this story that are remarkable are:

(1) The press's stab-in-the-back to this guy at his moment of victory. All they had to do was given him the same loving treatment they gave to Hatoful Boyfriend and Around the World in 80 Days or whatever, and he would've made his money back. Or not lure him in with glowing press-release coverage.

(2) That the game has done so abysmally given the coverage it did receive.

(3) That his post-mortem doesn't ascribe the game's failure to gamers' failure to appreciate his work of art, but rather to his own shortcomings.

The parts of the story to which I have become utterly inured are:

(1) That merely making a progressive not-game and being in the indie game in-crowd makes you confident that you can sell hundreds of thousands worth of copies of a game that no one has actually bothered to play first.

(2) That there is a complete disconnect between what the "elite" gaming press and indie award circuit says is great and what gamers like. (Incidentally, this isn't some insane quirk of gaming, the same is true of books, movies, etc.; but for a long time it wasn't true of gaming.)

(3) That many game developers have very progressive politics that they proudly display, including in how they present themselves.

Those things might've been cause for excitement five years ago, but today they seem banal. Like I said, the remarkable part of this story is that the gaming press didn't push the game and that he handled its poor sales so maturely.

Beyond that, I dunno, it just seems like the guy had a vision for a story-telling game, spent his own money on it, achieved renown but no sales, and isn't tantruming about its failure.

 

[aratuk]

Is it stabbing him in the back, though? Is it a betrayal for the press to *think* the game looked like it would be good, to write about their anticipation based on marketing material, trailers, maybe a rough demo, and their knowledge of the developers, only then to play the final product and discover it wasn't all that great?

Critics often have high hopes that turn out to have been misplaced, and it's nice when they're honest enough to admit it. I don't think glowing expectations should necessarily translate into rave reviews.

It is very odd that games can win awards on a preliminary basis, before they are even finished.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

MRY I can’t speak for the western civilization defense squad, but I’m coming from a place of profound disappointment as someone who very much wanted to like this.

A1: the dolchstoss thing is no mystery. This game had an awesome elevator pitch. At a cursory glance it looks like it should be incredible. But play for a couple of hours and it’s just a drag, which is why I refunded. Every second spent on the overworld map walking to the next vignette is aggravating. It really breaks up the flow for no discernible purpose. And the actual vignettes are anemic. The campfire segments where you get lengthier stories seem much better—I only watched these on YouTube—but they are a far smaller part of the game than they should be.

So the intelligentsia saw some very promising footage, probably the very best stuff, and wrote glowing stories about the game. But when reviewers actually played it, there was a sense that this was not the game they were promised. Why would they then give it super positive reviews? Honestly, I don’t even necessarily think that would have helped much. TTON got incredibly glowing reviews and it was also a huge flop relative to its budget.

Say what you will about Dream Daddy or Hatoful Boyfriend, I’m pretty sure they steer very close to genre conventions, right? And those conventions exist for a reason. I’m all for experimentation and it’s unfortunate that this guy took a big risk and it blew up in his face. That said, while Dream Daddy is not my bag, I imagine the experience of playing it is pretty much what people expected it would be. I probably would not have refunded WTWTLW if it had played like an interactive comic book. Gone Home and Firewatch play very differently and I don’t think they’re that analogous except on a loose conceptual level, which the developer knew going in. Actual exploration or even just 3D movement makes a big difference.

A2: when you make an adventure game with no adventure, and a narrative game with no narrative, an ambient game that breaks its own ambience, it doesn’t matter how much coverage you get or how glowing it is. I’ve had serious journalist friends talk about this game with me over the past year, bringing it up out of nowhere. They seemed to think it looked cool, but they haven’t bought a game since they were teenagers. I don’t know how else to say this beyond that it’s less than the sum of its parts. Generating buzz may be important but in the end you still need to generate a quality product. This should not come as a surprise to you of all people. Didn’t Primordia do okay despite the lack of buzz? I think perhaps this calls for less cynicism about exposure. Quality matters. This should be heartening.

A3. He may yet pull a Colin McComb. In this case more cynicism is required. I see the postmortem as his smartest piece of marketing yet. He hasn’t given up on selling copies so he’s not gong to blame the philistines for the game’s failure, at least for now.

And not to be pedantic, but three years of unpaid labor carries an enormous opportunity cost. 360k may be a bogus figure, but the guy’s labor is worth something.

 

[Heretic]

OT

western civilization defense squad

I know you meant it ironically, but I love it and I'm stealing it for future use :]

 

[Grauken]

True, I want a t-shirt

 

[MRY]

So the intelligentsia saw some very promising footage, probably the very best stuff, and wrote glowing stories about the game. But when reviewers actually played it, there was a sense that this was not the game they were promised. Why would they then give it super positive reviews?

Why, indeed? Surely such a thing has never happened in this golden age of candor and integrity.

The odd thing, anyway, is that the reviews aren't universally bad. If you go on Metacritic, it has glowing reviews from sites that I actually consider more oriented toward gameplay. Thus, it's all the more surprising to see mixed reviews from, say, Polygon and RPS.

Generating buzz may be important but in the end you still need to generate a quality product. This should not come as a surprise to you of all people. Didn’t Primordia do okay despite the lack of buzz? I think perhaps this calls for less cynicism about exposure. Quality matters. This should be heartening.

Primordia came out in a different era (my understanding is that something like six times as many games came out this year on Steam as came out when Primordia did) and got quite a bit of exposure, though many negative press reviews. Don't get me wrong, quality matters too, and it should, but exposure is a big deal too.

And not to be pedantic, but three years of unpaid labor carries an enormous opportunity cost. 360k may be a bogus figure, but the guy’s labor is worth something.

This form of analysis is both right and wrong.

It is right when responding to the argument that it should've been possible to make games for tiny fractions of what companies spend. ("Look at Primordia! It was made for free!") But it's wrong, or misleading, as well.

When I was in China, I went to get a pair of tailored blue jeans, negotiating down to an astronomically low price (I think it was $3.70 for custom made jeans). I came back the next day for the fitting, and they in fact felt wonderful. But the tailor had inexplicably used blue, rather than yellow or white, stitching, such that they looked like denim slacks, not blue jeans. I explained that this made the jeans ridiculous, and miraculously his order form he had written down did indicate yellow stitching. He agreed to give me a 15% discount. I said I wanted a 50% discount because they looked so absurd. We argued for about 15 minutes, and one of my arguments was that if he didn't sell these custom-tailored jeans to me, who could he sell them to? No one in China had my build, even foreigners typically aren't as tall. He replied that he could simply unstitch them, recut the fabric to fit someone else, and sell it to them. "But think of the opportunity cost!" I shouted. "The what?" he asked. "Your time has value." "My time costs me nothing, I don't have to pay myself." At this point, I pedantically explained opportunity cost to him. The explanation took about 10 more minutes, at which point he agreed to a 25% discount, I took the jeans, and wore them for years, drawing scorn and ridicule, but damn were my denim slacks comfy.

I mention the story because the meta-analysis is that I spent about half an hour of my limited time in China fighting for an additional $1.20 discount (44 cents to $1.85), achieving ultimately an additional 49 cent discount, and spent a non-trivial portion of that time explaining opportunity cost to the tailor.

Applying that lesson here, how can a smart dude who has racked up almost 1,000 lengthy, persuasive, careful, thoughtful Codex posts in less than a year credibly argue (via a such a post) to a bozo with almost 3,500 longer and dumber Codex posts that we have to put a half-million dollar value on this guy's "opportunity cost" for the time he spent making his game? It's one thing if he spent four years working in a salt mine or something, but this was a passion project.

Finally, I would again say that the whole notion that the game is a failure (as opposed to financial flop) is wrong. If Fallen Gods sold 5,000 copies but was described as the future of story-telling by the Washington Post, I would be delighted. I'd be even more delighted if a million people played it, and the Washington Post didn't say a thing about it. It's easy to be the fox with the grapes, but the fact is that having your work heaped with accolades that non-gamers understand, not to mention being the belle of competitions around the world and being able to hang out with celebrities and stuff, is not sour; I'm sure it's very sweet.

Every day a bazillion games fail on Steam; many of those games fail after significant investments of money, and no one even notices. This guy's game also may have failed on Steam, but along the way he got a bunch of rare and extraordinary experiences. Figuring out whether that was worth $140k of his money is impossible to say without knowing whether he's got a trust fund or not.

 

[agentorange]

who cares

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Why, indeed? Surely such a thing has never happened in this golden age of candor and integrity.

The odd thing, anyway, is that the reviews aren't universally bad. If you go on Metacritic, it has glowing reviews from sites that I actually consider more oriented toward gameplay. Thus, it's all the more surprising to see mixed reviews from, say, Polygon and RPS.

The really positive reviews read more like literary criticism. For example: "The map itself covers the full span of the United States, from coast to coast and from border to border. Travelling around is slow-going—mostly walking, with the occasional train ride or hitch hike—but that's a very deliberate move that instills that sense of travel and transience. You can walk slightly faster by whistling, which involves a simple rhythm game. That might seem like a small addition, but it's hard to describe the thematic impact of slowly walking along a barren highway in the Midwest with just your whistles as company." That's one way of putting it.

I think the guy at GameCrate has a more accurate take: "When I wasn’t clicking through a wonderfully written choice-drive story, playing Where the Water Tastes Like Wine was painful. Moving around the overworld is atrocious and all of the non-story elements do little else other than slow down and negatively impact the experience as a whole."

My assumption is that the incredibly positive reviewers simply didn't play the game for long enough to get frustrated. Or they have an inhuman amount of patience.

Applying that lesson here, how can a smart dude who has racked up almost 1,000 lengthy, persuasive, careful, thoughtful Codex posts in less than a year credibly argue (via a such a post) to a bozo with almost 3,500 longer and dumber Codex posts that we have to put a half-million dollar value on this guy's "opportunity cost" for the time he spent making his game? It's one thing if he spent four years working in a salt mine or something, but this was a passion project.

As far as the codex goes, it's a disease, at least on my end. I assume your posts are a byproduct of the cybernetic enhancements that let you work full time while making two different games.

In the postmortem he talks about how the game's commercial failure has caused him real financial hardship, albeit not life destroying financial hardship. Presumably he would've been doing something for a living if he didn't make this game; it was a full-time job. The idea of opportunity cost falls apart when you apply it to labor versus leisure, but it's very useful for looking at two different jobs or investments. If you left your job to make Fallen Gods full time for the next year, it would be insane not to count your foregone wages as a cost of development (surely you would hear a lot about this from someone in your family, unless they are the most supportive people in the universe).

If Fallen Gods sold 5,000 copies but was described as the future of story-telling by the Washington Post, I would be delighted. I'd be even more delighted if a million people played it, and the Washington Post didn't say a thing about it. It's easy to be the fox with the grapes, but the fact is that having your work heaped with accolades that non-gamers understand, not to mention being the belle of competitions around the world and being able to hang out with celebrities and stuff, is not sour; I'm sure it's very sweet.

If WTWTLW was a side project, I bet he'd feel the same way. As it is, man cannot live on Sting alone.

 

[MRY]

"Sting is my name; I am the hipster's bane."

People do all kinds of silly things for years of their lives, especially ultra-progressive types. For instance, he could've gone to be a WWOOFer, traveling the world as a volunteer organic farmer:

He spent his time on this instead. I am quite confident this will prove to be a money-making proposition for him in the long term, as when he joins Bioware it will be a major news item.

real financial hardship

Where does he say that? He says:

I am going to be OK, at least for the moment. I don’t own a house, so I didn’t mortgage it to ship this game (being a millennial pays off!). I’m only responsible for myself, and I didn’t spend the last of my savings ....

Spoiler

I grew up in a small resort town in Colorado, and began working on video games when I was a teenager.

If only The Onion had written something about this.

Instead, I decided to drastically lower my cost of living and move somewhere more affordable than San Francisco. I will try to continue doing independent game development in some form or another, but not depend on making much money from it.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm fairly certain that if you can afford to live in San Francisco for four years while spending $140k on a game and earning nothing, and still have comfortable savings and no debt when you're done, you're doing just fine financially. Let me put it this way: He spent $100,000 less, and about the same time, on WTWTLW compared to what he spent getting his college degree, and surely this was a much more valuable piece of experience for a game development career.

Again, I think you crazily underestimate what he has achieved in terms of brand-building here. He's a celebrity developer now who made one of the tiny number of games that got national mainstream press attention.

 

[Infinitron]

lol white people

I'm fairly certain that if you can afford to live in San Francisco for four years while spending $140k on a game and earning nothing, and still have comfortable savings and no debt when you're done, you're doing just fine financially. Let me put it this way: He spent $100,000 less, and about the same time, on WTWTLW compared to what he spent getting his college degree, and surely this was a much more valuable piece of experience for a game development career.

One of the things I'm interested in that there seems to be very little data about - is there at all "indie-to-AAA" jobs pipeline? Is indie development seen as good work experience for joining an AAA studio? Do indie developers often join AAA studios? You'd think they do, but you don't seem to really hear about it.

 

[MRY]

It's not an easy thing to follow because a lot of indie game credits don't get picked up on Mobygames, and most game jobs are essentially anonymous. Especially because the indie games we hear about are the ones that make a fortune, and on those there's no reason for the developers to go anywhere. Who can say whether some coder or artist on some random Metroidvania wound up a coder or artist on some Ubisoft project?

Thinking just of writers, Jonas Kyratzes pops immediately to mind. He's the writer on Phoenix Point, and wrote for The Talos Principle, after doing small politically conscious adventure games. Alexis Kennedy is another. Isn't he working at Bioware? Cassandra Khaw. Not sure if any of these count as AAA employment though.

 

[Lord Andre]

I would've bought this shit even though it's obvious it has 0 actual gameplay just because I like "Americana" type faggotry. Like meeting the devil at the crossroads or fucking with your boots and pants on in New Orleans because... it's fucking New Orleans.

But I watched a bit of a let's play and the writing is over-descriptive garbage the likes of which I haven't seen since the train-wreck that was the Planescape Numenera bullshit.

Like "the sound flies above your scalp ringing red, loud and square in your ears, on your tongue it tastes like dick cheese..." - this sort of metaphorical masterpiece...

And within the first 5 minutes there was already a story about 2 faggots living in a lighthouse... which doesn't necessarily bother me but it seemed a bit front-loaded. One should wait at least until the tutorial is over before springing the ol' faggots in a lighthouse routine.

 

[laclongquan]

The problem, as always, is not the faggots in lighthouse. The problem never is political agenda.

It is political agenda done wrong, force fed to players and call it good, that is problem.

 

[lightbane]

Why so much discussion for an obvious trashy hipster game?

 

[Heretic]

Schadenfreude.

 

[laclongquan]

Lament for possibility lost?

Because face it, all others look slightly hopeful, save for the artsy arts and worse writings.