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neon_git

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Everything posted by neon_git

  1. With so much already said that hits the nail on the head, it's hard to find something worthwhile to contribute here. I finished the game last night and I can add my voice to the chorus of those who absolutely loved it. It's pretty much the perfect ending to Monkey Island and I can't imagine how another MI game could be made that doesn't diminish the potency of the ending (although I would love to be proved wrong). I have several minor gripes, but my only major one is that none of the solutions to puzzles made me feel smart – which is one of the main things I love about adventure games. It's interesting to me how polarising the ending has turned out to be. Through the lens of my day job, I'd say that this is at least partly down to expectation management. My feeling has always been that there's an unspoken exchange between author and audience at the start of any story where the author says "if you can suspend your disbelief for these specific things, put your trust in me and invest your time in this story. In return I will reward you with a compelling narrative.", and if the rules of what I need to suspend my disbelief for change part way through I'll feel cheated because that wasn't the deal I agreed to. This is particularly bad when it happens at the end of the story after I’ve already invested my time and emotions in it. The end of Thimbleweed Park felt like a fuck you for exactly this reason, I put my trust in the game to tell me a story after it set my expectations and then it turned around and required a completely different set of expectations. I think what’s interesting about RtMI is that it somehow managed to gently change my expectations over the course of the game, without me really even noticing, to the point that ending didn’t feel like a cheat. I’m not really sure how the game pulled this off, or why it worked better for some people than others.
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