This is a followup to @SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net 's recent thread for completeness' sake.
I'll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre... in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of "doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book" puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
I'm not really disagreeing with you there. I used broad strokes outside of the lines and I know it.
Again, as I said elsewhere, I actually enjoyed the Dark Souls games somewhat, including the atmosphere and themes of an old world refusing to die and a new world that is scary and new trying to emerge from it, but less so Elden Ring (which I argue, and you can disagree, was more into the "grimdark" aesthetic even if not technically precisely hitting all its checkmarks, especially the backstories of numerous opponents). My main issue is with the toxic side of the fandom overall of the subgenre and its many associated titles, where even bringing up the silly marketing edge in "Prepare To Die" can result in walls of text and personal attacks.
I don't really know what to think of Elden Ring tbh. I don't think it's a very good game, but I think the relationship between society and cosmology in it is actually really cool (at least sometimes) and way more than I can remember seeing from basically any other game.* I also really like the cult that seems to be based on idealizing achieving immortality by reversing death, where normally the body is destroyed and the soul persists, by having the soul destroyed and the body persisting, turning the subject into kind of vegetative post-human (and maybe sort of a god?)
idk, it has a lot of stuff in it that is baffling but makes just enough sense to be interesting, which is just what I like compared to the common fantasy route of, if not being hopelessly paint-by-numbers, doing imaginary particle physics for no reason, like the cosmological equivalent of GoT politics where there is a lot of information but very little of it means anything at all in terms of themes or expressing ideas external to the text.
Elden Ring is way higher fantasy than the previous games (following the trend of escalation), which makes it harder to categorize as grimdark fantasy is usually very deliberately low fantasy for obvious reasons, but idk.
*There are interesting text-dumps in Elder Scrolls books, but that stuff almost never appears anywhere in the actual game, whereas it actually does factor into Elden Ring at least a bit (especially the endings)
Fine, I'll say grimdark signifiers if not a technical adherence to some academic definition, like "hehe this guy strung up and he ate poop thrown at him" details.
I don't care what you call Elden Ring, I was just thinking aloud. As I said, I think it's a bad game, I just like the lore (and also a couple of bosses, like that anime wrestler dude near the end).
Yeah, good, okay.