What video game insists upon itself too much?

Death Stranding. Love it or hate it, it absolutely insists upon itself.

Death Stranding for sure

The Game presents itself as this surreal work of art that symbolizes how the human beings are apart of each other and how we must build bridges to Connect with each other? I dont know maybe i dont got the Game right or maybe the setting is in the way of the story or message because it really came out as pretentious

(I got a little theory that Hideo Kojima thought of this as a movie but for contractual obligations he remembered this is a videogame so It must have interactive elements so the Game came after everything else)

Seems like some people ITT don’t know what it means and are instead using it as overrated

Life Is Strange series. First one is alright. The spin-off too. The rest are up their own ass.

Tetris The Grand Master, especially 2 and 3. It’s fricking *Tetris* and it has modes with names like “The Absolute Death”, plays hardcore gabber techno at 200BPM, and has ominous-sounding but incomprehensible slogans like “永遠より永い一瞬との闘い” (The battle with an instant that is longer than an eternity).

And us fans love it.

while I actually like the game, and decent chunks of its pretty flawed but ambitious story, TLOU2 definitely falls into this camp a bit, it’s brutal, frank and well-executed, but it’s never saying anything as profound as it thinks it’s saying. the way it posits on revenge and regret is honestly fairly basic,

the closest it gets to a profound point is more of a metatextual one and I’m not sure it’s intentional. and that’s when it comes to challenging a player’s bias towards familiarity (in that Abby’s actions aren’t any more immoral than Ellie’s or especially Joel’s but you’re likely to hate her much, much more because of the game’s perspective and residual familiarity from the first game)

The Last of Us Part 2. The player doesn’t have any agency to stop doing violence. To be fair that was the point of spec ops the line

The last of us part 2. It leaned too hard on the bleak tone and the moral messaging making it seem more like a statement than a game.

Heavy rain. The man that directed the game wanted to make movies but sucked too much so he made his bad movie ideas into very bad games then refused to stop smelling his own farts long enough to admit that he was wrong.

Not Dark Souls?

The last of us part 2

Definitely TLoU2. That game seems to believe it’s elevating video games to a higher artistic sphere when it’s oozing the energy of the 4th season of a TV drama that should’ve ended the year before but was surprisingly renewed.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of smaller indie titles also fit the bill perfectly. Usually the ones that try too hard to “deconstruct” a genre or a trope while offering absolutely nothing else apart from the “Huh, my expectations were subverted for a millisecond” moment. Something like YIIK: A postmodern RPG but also stuff like, for example, Gone Home.

Y’all might kill me for this but Red Dead Redemption 2, I love the game but it is absolutely the definition of this phrase.

THE FUCKING LAST OF US

Last of Us 2

Okay, so from what I’ve gathered from this comment section, any game you don’t like the story of insists upon itself too much

Call of Duty 6. They put up Kris Lindahl likeness billboards up all over 35 in Minnesota to promote the game.

There were a bunch of indie games that came out a decade that fit the bill. Journey, Flower, Limbo, and Fez come to mind. Not saying they were bad games but they definitely liked the smell of their own farts.

Stanley Parable

This post has finally allowed me to put to words exactly why I cannot stand any games Hideo Kojima has ever made