I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here! This is like a blank book sold for 20 bucks where you write your own story.
So, I haven't actually played this game. Instead, I watched several full walkthroughs... since they were only about 50 minutes each. But being the type of game this is, is there even a difference between "playing" it and "watching" it? This isn't even a game. There are no character models, a small single level design, and no soundtrack except for what sounds like the intro to Deadmau5's Strobe set to Rainymood dot com on a loop.
This game is Slender without the Slender. It's Sam & Max without all that pesky humor, plot, or character interaction. Actually when I think about it, this is like lesbian Myst. I have to believe on some level that the ONLY reason people are praising it is because of the (NOT REALLY A SPOILER) lesbian aspect. Imagine a lesbian-free Gone Home. Are you still "blown away" with how bold and creative it is?
There is no "game" here. This is essentially a series of quicktime videos activated by clicking on letters - quicktime videos of you walking to other letters. I would love to see the promotional trailer for this game. "Turn on lights! Read words! Walk around!" If you took Wolfenstein 3D straight from 1992, kept the same graphics but replaced all the Nazis with reading material and replaced Hitler with a book in an attic, you've just made Gone Home. It even has secret wall passages.
Any critics of this game are met with cries of, "Not all games have to have zombies and shooting! You just don't appreciate it's beauty!" Here's the thing, I hate zombie games. Unless you mean The Walking Dead. There's a quality game that made several Youtubers cry through emotional attachment and dynamite writing. I also have logged several hundreds of hours on games like FF7 and wept like a child when Aeris died. One of my favorite games is Heavy Rain and it's one giant story with slight interaction. So I'm not an emotionless child. And I care so little about a person's sexual orientation that it's humorous to be called a homophobe. Maybe that's why I wasn't blown away. Everyone else must have been so touched and shocked by something that isn't even news worthy in my mind.
Gamespot and IGN both gave this game a 9.5. Do you know what that means? That means that these people consider this 1 hour side project that could have been a final project in someone's senior year at a Computer Science degree on par with the following 9.5 games: Starcraft 2, World of Warcraft, Red Dead Redemption, Dragon Age, Final Fantasy 7, and better than games like God of War and Battlefield 2. Do you know the sheer scale of skilled people that came together for years to make these universally loved classics? They pushed boundaries, they took risks, they set new standards that new games would be judged by. WoW is still played by millions 9 years later. Do you think this game will be played or even remember a month from now? Did it push and boundaries or set any standards?
If this is the new standard of 9.5, then Farmville and Candy Crush are set to score perfect 10's.
Someone had to say it. Now let the spam begin about "how I just don't get it."