- obviously there’s the fact that her critiques of DE are so unabashedly surface-level that you cannot tell if she’s actually played the game or read a plot summary/review of it.
- but there’s also the fact that she’s proposing a supposed improvement on what DE is with her own prompt, which in-and-of-itself is the lowest form of critique in my eyes–‘what if you had an entirely different idea?’
- and then the prompt itself is a doozy:
- she somehow found a way to both critique DE for being unimaginative with its scenario/having a white man protag and propose, in alternative, the absolute whitest possible scenario imaginable
- in the implicit shift from a grimy Eastern Europe to a comfy Western Europe, she’s managed to gentrify her scenario proposed in a critique about diversity
- she wants to keep disco elysium’s, unexamined by her, ‘wonderful writing’, while stripping it of all the rawness and deliberate confrontation that is at the heart of it that would conflict with the idyllic nature of her scenario and her stated opposition to griminess
- her idea of a more diverse story, if we’re taking it as she’s presenting it, is swapping a white guy with a white gal, which, I mean, diversity win, I guess.
- the fact that this is the most generic, safest-possible indie game idea imaginable. I could go on itch.io and find 50 of pretty much that game. this is the idea that like 50% of developers have when they’re thinking of a quick point-and-click game for a game jam.
i could go on, but the most scathing possible point I could make to this tweet is that this person is a BAFTA Judge
Aha! I think this is what bothers me the most about these sorts of “cozy” Stardew Valley-esque indie games. Everyone is just an idealised version of a person and they all get along really well. There’s no conflict, no assholes or jerks. Everyone is just happy and friendly, and that’s boring and unrealistic as fuck.
I think that’s kinda the point, games like Stardew Valley are for when you just wanna turn your brain off a bit and enjoy a comfortable atmosphere
I don’t mean Stardew itself, I mean a lot of “Stardew like” sort of games. Quite a few characters in Stardew are jerks to you, or seem like generally unpleasant people until you get to know them. A lot of games trying to recreate the atmosphere of Stardew miss that, and have every character acting like your best friend as soon as you meet them, just overly familiar and friendly, it feels really insincere.
Stardew Valley has an incel character nobody likes and some vet with PTSD from shooting too many brown kids in the face.
That’s probably what annoys me the most about this tweet. If anything there’s a bit of an excess of cozy cute indie games right now, everyone is trying to be Stardew. Feels like a bit of an over correction from the “dark gritty” stuff from a decade or two ago.