- 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 ![strangelove-wow strangelove-wow](https://www.hexbear.net/pictrs/image/e3150db5-ea36-436b-a481-c4ddcb046d91.png)
realizing this technically describes stardew valley and getting upset
i mean that's the one that really inspired the trend, right? and i do think you could make the argument that, like most video games, it takes an essentially petty bourgeois perspective on the world. but at least it's fundamentally well designed and imaginative, and succeeds where a lot of its copycats fail at providing a full world for the player to exist in.
i'm not even opposed to games that are about chilling out, but i think the perception is that these games take less effort from a developer than an action-oriented game, when i think doing them well actually requires a greater quantity and quality of writing, system design, and visual assets, otherwise you end up with number-go-up-simulators with tacked-on dating sim mechanics that let you romance playmobil toys.