but it is a pity it takes a handful of hours for it to really get going.
i hate seeing this take about one of the only mediums that has the room to do this, apart from maybe a season of tv.
i've played so many games where some narrative beat or supposed payoff felt unearned because everything happened way too fast and didn't give itself time to breathe.
and i've played so many games where a particular beat didn't pay off for hours and hours and hours, and when it did, it hit so hard!
i understand the urge to want games to be bite-sized, and this is without having played the game in question so maybe this particular criticism is earned, but I just feel like we need to let more narratives breathe.
While, starting off, I think we need to acknowledge that gamers generally have extraordinarily low media literacy and so there's a decent chance this is irrelevant critique, I will note that preventing this kind of criticism is one of the core uses of the Prologue in modern genre fiction. The prologue is how we know that, to use the most generally-known example, we're going to be watching a movie about galactic war and laser swords, rather than just a slow-burn film about luke skywalker farming on a desert planet with his aunt and uncle.
To be honest, I feel like games could use Prologue a lot more effectively than they currently do - not just in the narrative sense, but in the gameplay sense. I think back a lot to how Dragon Age 2 specifically used an exaggerated story your character was telling to show you what the endgame version of your character would look like during the class selection process, entirely defeating the classic RPG problem of "blind-picking your class based on a description and then falling out of love with your character build halfway through the game". It's a type of messaging that builds its own unique form of ancitipation, enticing the with player what they could eventually be before they fully understand the complexities of fighting at that level. It's a really smart way to build long-term anticipation and prevent class-choice regrets.
IMO this kind of structure actually creates MORE room for a slow-burn game because players know that they have something to look forward to - I think one of the classic problems with making a really slow paced intro is that you have to pace it really carefully or it can start to feel like "is this all there is to the game"? And obviously there's always validity in making intentionally hostile, secretive, or obfuscated designs, or just being slow because you want to, there's no objectively wrong way to make a game - but I think in many cases there are designers out there who just want to take their time but don't have a good grasp of pacing and could benefit a lot from these kinds of early moments of setting up player expectations.
Just an idle thought, at least!
