| Title | Sea of Solitude carries a copy of The Bell Jar wherever it goes |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Game reviews |
| When | July 13, 2019 |
It's probably not a good sign that some girl is reading from her diary about how her boyfriend is all moody and stuff, but I'm distracted by the fact that her footprints aren't lining up with her feet..
I was afraid this game would be exactly what it seemed like. An earnest, artsy, but ultimately boring trudge through a young person’s Tumblr poetry.
I guess this is what happens if you don’t force kids to read books anymore.
Feels like a million years since Tom reviewed a PC game, and it ends up like this.
Well, it seems it wasn’t even a game!
I really dug Submerged, that was kind of a lark and the exploration was kind of fun. I had high hopes this might be interesting but then I caught a little bit of someone playing on Twitch and no, way too emo for me.
Second game I try with the Gamepass EA thingie.
Man, it’s this thing bad. Pretty to look at it, but very subpar gameplay combined with a sophomore effort in writing, that tries to deal with heavy subjects in an attempt to give validity to the game, but don’t have the nuance and subtlety for it. Ironically the thing that made me drop the game has been the writing, not the gameplay.
At this point there is a entire subgenre of this kind of game, right? I mean, not of this quality, thanks god, I liked some of them!, but in general:
Artsy Indie game with pretty art style, kinda subpar or forgettable gameplay (when it isn’t directly a walking sim), and a somehow obscure/abstract story that ends up being (woah Neo.gif moment here) about Sad Real Life ™, usually some choice between bullying, mental illness, sexual assault, cancer, or romance break up. In some cases it’s more overt, in others it’s more hidden and symbolic.
We should make up a name for the subgenre.
