I don’t know, slight spoilers for the general mood, but, outer wilds is that, but it’s more like… wistful, or melancholic, or bittersweet. It’s sad, but it’s a good sad. It’s emotional, and emotions feel good.
I feel like, if I were in a bad place when playing that, I don’t think it would have made it worse. It might have made it more meaningful, and be kinda… nice, in a sense. But I also feel like art like that help me a lot when I am in bad places. It’s kinda like seeing beauty in sadness, right?
It kinda sucks honestly, because I think if they literally got one or two more weeks, and disabled the offending settings such as depth of field, they would have received far less flak. I feel like a good 70% of the complaints are due to bad defaults.
Like, sure, they probably still would have gotten some justified criticism for it, but I don’t really think the game deserved as harsh criticism as it got, or at least, the problems are all very surface level, and underneath what is there actually works well.
Traditional roguelikes tend to do NPCs/enemies which often have comparable stats to the player. With the benefit the player has is a “better AI” aka, an intelligent human behind them.
Path of exile is great because it doesn’t shy away from complexity at all, instead it does the exact opposite, it just goes balls deep. It really make for a very refreshing change to typical AAA games where your intelligence as a player doesn’t feel insulted.
In the end, it’s personal preference, and so both play styles should ideally be supported.
I love a challenge, it’s how I relax. If something isn’t challenging for me I quickly get bored and stop playing. I basically need my brain to be stimulated and thinking and trying to properly relax. Which is why I often trend towards “hardcore” or difficult/brutal games.
Making the boss easier after I die to it would frustrate the hell out of me unless it was optional. I want it to be a challenge, not just something I can beat if I die enough times.
Yeah, honestly, the state of the game is fine. Yes, they should have taken a couple of more weeks to fix up the performance, and they definitively should have chosen more sane default settings…
But, other than that, the launch state is fine. There are no major bugs, and there is nothing too major missing. A lot of things are done and designed quite well actually, I’d say.
Just give it a month or two and then look again. There’s no rush, it’s not a story game. But I’ve been enjoying my time so far.