12/16/2023 0 Comments Super hot win using only hotswitchSaving and reloading is crucial to Undertale, resetting the worldline is core to Bastion‘s everything, and Spec Ops: The Line forces you to make the decisions that damn you in-game, without much in the way of external prompting. Nothing about SUPERHOT‘s narrative is in any way connected to anything about SUPERHOT‘s gameplay. Partially, it’s ludonarrative dissonance. I don’t need this baby’s first meta-player-interaction. Game, don’t give me that garbage! I know there’s like two dozen more levels to you. And then it spins it as some big moment of manipulation on its part. It actually doesn’t let you proceed until you manually quit the game, then restart. But SUPERHOT puts a big ‘YOU SHOULD STOP PLAYING’ moment right in the middle of the game. Accept the insult or decline, quit or no, restart or delete? The game at large is over anyway. The examples I mentioned all put their meta-behaviour player payoff near the end of the game, giving you some freedom in your choice of how to deal with it. This doesn’t work equally well for everyone my Bluesian cohort Ninjustin in particular has strong opinions on why this sort of thing is ‘bullshit’. And both Pony Island and Undertale have endings where the game characters explicitly ask the player to stop playing. Bastion bakes a mechanical justification for playing New Game+ into the world and narrative, with all the shitty consequences that entails. Spec Ops: The Line famously counters the player’s ‘I had no choice but to commit all those atrocities’ with ‘you could have just not done them‘. Regular readers and friends might know that I’m something of a fan of games that use basic gameplay to try and say something about the player. Kinda spilled the narrative beans a little early, there. You already had me find myself and punch myself in the head, SUPERHOT. This dramatic reveal moment - it’s all real, everything you’ve been doing and everyone you’ve been killing, it’s all real, and you just killed yourself - would probably have worked better if the game hadn’t played almost exactly the same scene halfway through the game. If you really want to preserve your spoiler-free SUPERHOT experience, skip ahead to the screenshot that reads ‘CONTROL’, white text on red. Makes it easier to talk about, and you’re genuinely not impacted much. No, you know what? I’m just going to spoil the whole thing flat-out. To give you an example of how this works… I don’t think SUPERHOT would have been better without the story, but I do think the story is in need of some serious editing. It just fails at it so poorly, so flailingly. Still, I personally think SUPERHOT‘s story at least makes the attempt to provide us with a better experience than ‘just shoot a bunch of red dudes in slow-mo without context’. You never ‘want’ it, because the story’s not very good. I see where the flow complaint is coming from, because yes, SUPERHOT has a tendency of drop-kicking you into the narrative when you least want it. The story does nothing but distract from the gameplay, is the claim, and it intrudes on your flow often and at the worst possible times. I’ve heard people say that SUPERHOT would have been better without its story.
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