Lets get this out of the way first, supermassive do not make games, they make interactive movies. A few hour long experience where your only input is a handul of QTE's and a few dialogue trees that ultimately make zero difference do not constitute "gameplay"
That could be fine, the problem is that the companies current staff are literally incapable of writing or telling competent stories. They made their name with until dawn and it is by an incredibly wide margin the best thing still to this day.
It combined real world danger with supernatural elements.
It combined 80's slasher campiness with genuine atmosphere.
It made our choices feel like they carried weight, even though we know these games never have any real "choices". You can take path A or path B, but both of them lead to path C in the end.
All 3 games in the dark pictures anthology have the laziest, sloppiest, most nonsensicle writing I have ever had the misfortune of experiencing. A toddler could write a "story" if all they had to do was cram as many over the top, flashy, cheap, fantasitcal things as they wanted in and then simply drop the entirety of the "story" without explaining a single thing. In fact it is generous to even say these 3 games have a "story" because saying that implies they have beginnings, middles and ends, it implies there is a plot and structure, it implies that events happen and the storyis then brough to a conclusion. None of these things happen in any of these 3 games. They bombard you with advert friendly flashy images, loud noises, seemingly supernatural things, but there is nothing, literally nothing beneath the surface, there is zero substance in these games.
Let me give an example without spoiling this game.: Imagine you watched the first 2 matrix movies, that is over 4 hours of runtime. Imagine if over those 4 hours you saw all the flashy stuff, the time dilating, the agent smith cloning, the superhuman abilities, all that stuff but you did not get the morpheus tablet speech, you did not see the real world, you did not see neo taken out of the matrix, you did not see the plugs in peoples heads, you did not see the human batteries, there was not a single second of screentime that so much as hinted at virtual reality. Imagine seeing ONLY the over the top, impossible feats and then the reason for all that stuff being explained to you is done in a single throwaway sentence, from a minor character, who extrapolates something to a stupid degree, for example, maybe a minor character see's an extension lead and says something like " this isnt the real world, we are being harvested by machines, we dont belong here".......
That would be awful and would justifiablly be universally panned as pathetic story telling, yet that is exactly what supermassive have done here. There is a lot going on in this game yet the story behind all of it happens in just 2 moments.
1 is a missable, findable object that triggers a 2 line exchange where 2 characters make obscene extrapolations about topics they cant possibly have any understanding of and they draw those conclusions based on an object that they have never seen before in their entire lives.
The other is in a cutscene that contains a massive exposition dump, curtesy of some notes, but this takes place in a location where it does not make any sense for said information to be, nor does it make sense how it is still intact and again the information being relayed to us the players comes from the mouth of a character who suddenly has a 50000IQ and is expertly talking about a subject in which he cannot conceivably have any comprehension of and on top of that this new character with zero prior knowledge is suddenly such an expert they not only understand the notes in front of them but they are instentasouly smarter and more informed than the person who wrote the notes and carried out the research in the first place, plus these new characters suddenly have all the understanding and all the answers that alluded people who had spent infintely more time studying the subject then they have.
Every single line of dialogue you hear, every single note you read, every single object you examine, every single place you see, every single "choice" you make, every single thing these characters go through, it all happens *because* of the information from ^ those 2 moments, yet as I said, even during those moments none of it, from the location to the delivery to the characters comprehension makes any sense at all. People can drop acid and they would still be able to create a more coherent and consistent story than supermassive can manage these days.
It is so poorly executed and it truly boggles my mind that a company whose success is owed entirely to until dawn have becaoe so crap, until dawn for all its flaws was ultimately very fun and told an interesting story that left players with a satisfying conclusion to draw that also felt like our decisions had some lasting effects. Since then supermassive have relied 100% on the same cheap, lazy, cop out, again I cant be specific but if you have played any of these games you know what I mean, they always cop out at the end and do so in such a manner that everything you experienced before the end is rendered utterly pointless and it rounds out the games on the most flaccid and boring endings it is humanly possible to conceive. The devs for street fighter put more effort into their story lines than supemassive and with only 1 exception street fighter games dont even have story modes, they are just straight fighters.
This deserves to be its own point because rachels "story" is so pathetically written that without even exageratting I can say that a blind , spyhilis riddled gibbon could have a crayon taped to its palm and it could write more beleivable dialogue and more competent story than the writers currently being paid by supermassive. It doesnt matter who survives, it doesn tmatter what choices you make, ALL of rachels possible outcomes are horrendous, not in the sense that I personally dont like them, I mean they are god awful, they make no sense, the things she says are directly contradicted by her actions, how she treats other people is completely contradictory to every single previous scene she has been in and you choose a choice that seems like it will lead to one outcome but instead rachel implodes and makes a choice that was in no way,shape or form even close to what the conversation was leading towards.
Or should we talk about the characters that pop in and out of existence because the writers clearly put zero effort into planning ahead for the different combinations of characters that may or may not survive depending on the player? There are entire sequences that involve a number of characters yet 1 or more of them will simply vanish from existence because the writers did not account for their presence, so we will have dialogue, cutscenes and qte's that show lets say 2 characters and the other characters that should be with them have simply been swallowed by the earth, they are nowhere to be seen and play no part in what is going on, yet when the game progresses to the next part all of a sudden the missing character spawns back into existenc and they are right beside the other people and all the characters act like the previous scene never even happened. There is zero continuity, there is zero competence in this game. You can disagree with every single word I write, but you cannot disagree with this paragraph, it is a paid product from a triple A company, one who has made millions by making horror games yet their story telling is arguablly the worst in video game history, there are games just 64 megabytes big, made by solo students during a period of boredom that handles story telling more consistently and competently that this company does.
Also to all the people leaving positive reviews, how can you possible overlook the ending? Every thing that transpires in this game is because the characters are forced to go in a specific direction because there is no possible way for them to anywhere else, yet at the end suddenly they talk about "getting to the exit" as though the exit door was right in front of them the entire time. As is always the case with supermassive these days, the end renders every other second of screen time moot, because it completely retcons the core driving force behind literally everything.
I know he will never see this but I would genuinelly like to dicuss with the person who left a positive review. They say its good game yet are unable to praise a single element of it, their entire justification of it is that the game is short so they personally didnt get bored. That is a completely useless "review", judging somethings worth based solely on the length of it. Giving a piece of media a 10/10 rating when the only positive thing you can say about your time with it is that it didnt last long, that proves the negative reviews right, if even the people singing its praises cant find a single good thing to say about it, what else is there to say?
My tl'dr for this game is identical as those for man of medan and little hope.: if you want cheap scares, 1 dimensional characters, flashy images, a "story" that contains no growth and then ends on the most abrupt, unfulfilling, flat, unrewarding note humanly conceivable, that leaves you with a million questions and zero answers. Then you might like this game If however you want a story that actually has a plot, if you want to see characters with personality, if you want to finish off the experience by seeing/playing a satisfying conclusion, if yuou want anything at all to be explained, if you want a single over the top element to be given rhyume or reason, if you want a story that has some substance beyond flashy scenery and loud noises, then this is not the game for you.
That could be fine, the problem is that the companies current staff are literally incapable of writing or telling competent stories. They made their name with until dawn and it is by an incredibly wide margin the best thing still to this day.
It combined real world danger with supernatural elements.
It combined 80's slasher campiness with genuine atmosphere.
It made our choices feel like they carried weight, even though we know these games never have any real "choices". You can take path A or path B, but both of them lead to path C in the end.
All 3 games in the dark pictures anthology have the laziest, sloppiest, most nonsensicle writing I have ever had the misfortune of experiencing. A toddler could write a "story" if all they had to do was cram as many over the top, flashy, cheap, fantasitcal things as they wanted in and then simply drop the entirety of the "story" without explaining a single thing. In fact it is generous to even say these 3 games have a "story" because saying that implies they have beginnings, middles and ends, it implies there is a plot and structure, it implies that events happen and the storyis then brough to a conclusion. None of these things happen in any of these 3 games. They bombard you with advert friendly flashy images, loud noises, seemingly supernatural things, but there is nothing, literally nothing beneath the surface, there is zero substance in these games.
Let me give an example without spoiling this game.: Imagine you watched the first 2 matrix movies, that is over 4 hours of runtime. Imagine if over those 4 hours you saw all the flashy stuff, the time dilating, the agent smith cloning, the superhuman abilities, all that stuff but you did not get the morpheus tablet speech, you did not see the real world, you did not see neo taken out of the matrix, you did not see the plugs in peoples heads, you did not see the human batteries, there was not a single second of screentime that so much as hinted at virtual reality. Imagine seeing ONLY the over the top, impossible feats and then the reason for all that stuff being explained to you is done in a single throwaway sentence, from a minor character, who extrapolates something to a stupid degree, for example, maybe a minor character see's an extension lead and says something like " this isnt the real world, we are being harvested by machines, we dont belong here".......
That would be awful and would justifiablly be universally panned as pathetic story telling, yet that is exactly what supermassive have done here. There is a lot going on in this game yet the story behind all of it happens in just 2 moments.
1 is a missable, findable object that triggers a 2 line exchange where 2 characters make obscene extrapolations about topics they cant possibly have any understanding of and they draw those conclusions based on an object that they have never seen before in their entire lives.
The other is in a cutscene that contains a massive exposition dump, curtesy of some notes, but this takes place in a location where it does not make any sense for said information to be, nor does it make sense how it is still intact and again the information being relayed to us the players comes from the mouth of a character who suddenly has a 50000IQ and is expertly talking about a subject in which he cannot conceivably have any comprehension of and on top of that this new character with zero prior knowledge is suddenly such an expert they not only understand the notes in front of them but they are instentasouly smarter and more informed than the person who wrote the notes and carried out the research in the first place, plus these new characters suddenly have all the understanding and all the answers that alluded people who had spent infintely more time studying the subject then they have.
Every single line of dialogue you hear, every single note you read, every single object you examine, every single place you see, every single "choice" you make, every single thing these characters go through, it all happens *because* of the information from ^ those 2 moments, yet as I said, even during those moments none of it, from the location to the delivery to the characters comprehension makes any sense at all. People can drop acid and they would still be able to create a more coherent and consistent story than supermassive can manage these days.
It is so poorly executed and it truly boggles my mind that a company whose success is owed entirely to until dawn have becaoe so crap, until dawn for all its flaws was ultimately very fun and told an interesting story that left players with a satisfying conclusion to draw that also felt like our decisions had some lasting effects. Since then supermassive have relied 100% on the same cheap, lazy, cop out, again I cant be specific but if you have played any of these games you know what I mean, they always cop out at the end and do so in such a manner that everything you experienced before the end is rendered utterly pointless and it rounds out the games on the most flaccid and boring endings it is humanly possible to conceive. The devs for street fighter put more effort into their story lines than supemassive and with only 1 exception street fighter games dont even have story modes, they are just straight fighters.
This deserves to be its own point because rachels "story" is so pathetically written that without even exageratting I can say that a blind , spyhilis riddled gibbon could have a crayon taped to its palm and it could write more beleivable dialogue and more competent story than the writers currently being paid by supermassive. It doesnt matter who survives, it doesn tmatter what choices you make, ALL of rachels possible outcomes are horrendous, not in the sense that I personally dont like them, I mean they are god awful, they make no sense, the things she says are directly contradicted by her actions, how she treats other people is completely contradictory to every single previous scene she has been in and you choose a choice that seems like it will lead to one outcome but instead rachel implodes and makes a choice that was in no way,shape or form even close to what the conversation was leading towards.
Or should we talk about the characters that pop in and out of existence because the writers clearly put zero effort into planning ahead for the different combinations of characters that may or may not survive depending on the player? There are entire sequences that involve a number of characters yet 1 or more of them will simply vanish from existence because the writers did not account for their presence, so we will have dialogue, cutscenes and qte's that show lets say 2 characters and the other characters that should be with them have simply been swallowed by the earth, they are nowhere to be seen and play no part in what is going on, yet when the game progresses to the next part all of a sudden the missing character spawns back into existenc and they are right beside the other people and all the characters act like the previous scene never even happened. There is zero continuity, there is zero competence in this game. You can disagree with every single word I write, but you cannot disagree with this paragraph, it is a paid product from a triple A company, one who has made millions by making horror games yet their story telling is arguablly the worst in video game history, there are games just 64 megabytes big, made by solo students during a period of boredom that handles story telling more consistently and competently that this company does.
Also to all the people leaving positive reviews, how can you possible overlook the ending? Every thing that transpires in this game is because the characters are forced to go in a specific direction because there is no possible way for them to anywhere else, yet at the end suddenly they talk about "getting to the exit" as though the exit door was right in front of them the entire time. As is always the case with supermassive these days, the end renders every other second of screen time moot, because it completely retcons the core driving force behind literally everything.
I know he will never see this but I would genuinelly like to dicuss with the person who left a positive review. They say its good game yet are unable to praise a single element of it, their entire justification of it is that the game is short so they personally didnt get bored. That is a completely useless "review", judging somethings worth based solely on the length of it. Giving a piece of media a 10/10 rating when the only positive thing you can say about your time with it is that it didnt last long, that proves the negative reviews right, if even the people singing its praises cant find a single good thing to say about it, what else is there to say?
My tl'dr for this game is identical as those for man of medan and little hope.: if you want cheap scares, 1 dimensional characters, flashy images, a "story" that contains no growth and then ends on the most abrupt, unfulfilling, flat, unrewarding note humanly conceivable, that leaves you with a million questions and zero answers. Then you might like this game If however you want a story that actually has a plot, if you want to see characters with personality, if you want to finish off the experience by seeing/playing a satisfying conclusion, if yuou want anything at all to be explained, if you want a single over the top element to be given rhyume or reason, if you want a story that has some substance beyond flashy scenery and loud noises, then this is not the game for you.