A: you're talking art on system wars
B: if it needs to be pointed how douchy it sounds when you say "good art doesn't have to be easily digestible" or "i feel so limited on this board confined", then you need some perspective. Especially since you sound like a whiny little brat because someone didn't agree with you.
Now as for remake v RE4, my beef with Remake has nothing to do with its perceived complexity or any of that. The game is just more tedious, it gives the illusion of a marriage between setting/context and gameplay, but ultimately creates an experience that isn't tense (you know something you want from a horror game) or all that exciting. Metroid does a whole lot of back tracking, Metroid is also far more sophisticated as a game in building it's world and playing to the players genuine reactions/emotions as opposed to the ones perceived by Samus. REmake is built around the struggle for Jill/Chris, but the player? all they are going to get is running through a bunch of empty halls, running back and forth to their item crate box, so they can arbitrarily put two pieces together that the game thinks are a puzzle.
Alien Isolation (a game i know you dick ride) does the whole using the setting/context to justify backtracking significantly better, it doesn't become tedious until the game goes for an entire second half where the game no longer had a new idea to show for its mechanics. Isolation's failure is that of poor pacing from going on way longer than they should have, REmake is inherently a design decision. One of its best strengths also happens to be one of it's biggest short comings. That's the catch 22 with making a game like RE1.
Resident Evil 4 isn't apologetic about what it is. A straight forward action game with a horror paint job for the sake of adding atmosphere and justifying it's white knuckle action. It's artistry comes from sheer craftsmenship. Any superficial knock- such inability to move n shoot is entirely overruled by the fact that every idea in that game is built around this limitation, and every scenario tests the player to handle this limitation and work with the tools given to them. As an action game few games would be worthy enough for Resident Evil 4 to spit on them in terms of how many gameplay ideas Mikami and his team came up with for those mechanics, or how well paced it is from start to finish.
Resident Evil 4 doesn't have anything to say, nor should it necessarily. But it's about as much as deserving of being called art in this medium, as something like Super Mario Galaxy 2 or Super Metroid. Because the sheer craftsmenship of a game and how a game plays to player expectations is just as effective as some lame attempt at trying to tell some third rate film plot that intrudes on a video game.
Plus I sure as hell don't subscribe to the notion that a video game needs to tell a story to be considered art.
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