ITT we tell the poster above us why their favorite game sucks (479)

437 Name: Anonymous Gamer : 2016-03-29 15:18 ID:gNnLnp78

Initially I planned to give somewhat of a tentative recommendation based almost entirely on the game's gorgeous environments and striking atmosphere, but as I went on playing I found that beyond that there was nothing there for it. The writing is abysmal, and even if I tried to look at it through a more tongue-in-cheek lens so much of it is just empty. It’s not an amusing kind of bad either (like “Rise of the Dragon”, which is another point-and-click game that puts style over substance). There’s no sense of weight to this world that ironically enough fleshes itself out only visually, but has absolutely no other substance to it. It’s completely hollow of personality, of characters, of emotion or of any real world. It’s a beautiful backdrop of nothing.

The biggest question I had while playing was “Why should I care about what’s going on?” And the only answer I had was “to see what backgrounds I get to see next”.

It seems the game itself too, works in a similar sense. Rather than the story painting and weaving together the backgrounds, it's vice versa.

The protagonist has virtually no personality, never acts on his own behalf, and the character we portray onto him fails to convey any realism because he doesn’t talk like a normal human being would. With whiny dialogue choices that essentially all boil down to “I’m the hero, you should listen to me”, the cardboard-cutout cast just eventually plays into it and he gets to play the hero like he wants. Maybe this is all some depressive fantasy of his -- this lonely, abandoned middle-aged geek who retreats to his comic books for comfort, and dreams he’s the hero. He’s wanted, he’s loved, and he gets exactly what he wants in a Total Recall all-goes-right kind of adventure. But even if it were the case (and it’s not, unfortunately), it wouldn’t forgive the extremely unfulfilling game experience.

The problem is, in the context of Noctropolis, the "silent protagonist" trope doesn't work. There's a reason adventure games almost never have silent protagonists, and this is because they're entirely narrative-driven. For a narrative to work, it needs to have a pivotal main character we can relate to. Games like HL2, Zelda, Dead Space, etc -- the story is not the primary focus, it is the gameplay that drives the story forward, whereas it's vice-versa in point-and-clicks. In a genre with this amount of focus on narrative, it's just not suited for a silent protagonist, especially with one as poorly done as the one in Noctropolis.

Sonic 3 & Knuckles

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