I legitimately do not understand what people like about the dark pictures games. I get that Until Dawn was silly fun in a bad movie kind of way but everything they've made since is just so dull. Characters constantly wandering around and bickering for hours over literally nothing until sometimes a jumpscare happens. Should we wait for the bus driver? No we should go to town to find help. But what if we waited for the bus driver though. But we should find help. Anyway I hate you because my character profile has the "bitch" trait.
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in reply to @Pauline-Ragny's post:
I watched two different people play all of House of Ashes and I also don't get it. It's also just so, like, stream-of-consciousness? Where that game starts and where it ends are lightyears apart, and it's all due to twists that don't feel organic in the slightest. The whole game is like a first draft script created by asking a 7 year old "and then what happens?"
At least we got The Quarry out of it, which is at least as good as Until Dawn, if not better. But even then, it has elements that don't fit together super well.
House of Ashes is the worst for me mostly because of how racist and war apologist it is. They invade an Iraqi village, gun down a villager for daring to defend himself with a knife and then the story pulls out of its ass that they were drug traffickers so it's fine that the village got invaded actually. But hey there's one token Iraqi character who's portrayed sympathetically and becomes friends with the Americans heroes so it's fine actually. Problematic story solved.
Didn't care for the Quarry personally. The dialogue felt more natural than dark pictures but the story still felt like it was padding for time a lot. It's so obvious when a character survives their death flag because suddenly they stop having any presence in the story until the last two chapters when they get to do exactly one thing. And then they just re-skinned the monsters from until dawn!? I'm all for recycling assets and props normally but like, the monster is the one thing where they should have spend ressources making something new. The transformation is so cheap too. Just pop them into the monster and cover it with a lot of blood splashing. That'll do it.
I dunno maybe I'm jaded but I'm so tired of those "interactive cinematic experiences" that focus on photo realism over everything else and coast on being categorized as games because if they were regular movies they would get eviscerated by critics for their awful writing.