@Wagomu:
Did anyone else play Dust: An Elysian Tail? Because I want to complain about it.
I bought it among Steam sales, since a few friends had it and it got some really good reviews, praising its gameplay and story and… I don't get it? I had decent enough fun with it, since the game is pretty fast-paced and it succeeded in dragging me through it all, but the combat feels broken, the platforming feels incomplete and the story is just soooooooooooooo bad. The story's what's really bothering me the most. I don't think I've seen any review criticizing it, but it just stays in the range of generic to banal. The characters are cookie cutter from their archetypes and their motivations are rarely discussed, there's hardly any world-building of which to speak, the story as a whole just feels underdeveloped and there are a bunch of threads that are kind of important but completely forgotten. Like the first three bosses are all under the influence of some arbitrary 'darkness' that clears when you beat them within an inch of their lives, but that never goes anywhere. The big bad is a genocidal general who doesn't have any reason to be genocidal and regards his campaign in a sort of matter of fact way, like why wouldn't he be genocidal? There's never any reason of even blind hatred that drives him; he just be genocidin for because. He doesn't even have a king, it doesn't seem like anyone actually likes him (they don't even seem to be aware of the genocide, really, unless they're a plot-relevant character) and it's not like he's even doing anything as a general besides genocide, so it makes me wonder how he rose to power.
The most interesting aspect is that the main character, Dust, is two people, but even though that's the main plot point, it doesn't really get a lot of exploration. He's the combination of the evil general's henchman and friend and some regular joe jesus who was just too nice and good for this world and the only part of him that ever really does anything is the jesus side. Sometimes Dust talks about how he feels pulled to the dark side, but that never gets reflected in his actions or words ever. Worse yet is that every time he discusses his existential dilemma, it never amounts to more than fluctuating between "I AM THESE TWO PEOPLE, BUT I AM ALSO NOT" and "I AM NOT THESE TWO PEOPLE, BUT ALSO I AM." It takes him until the end of the game to realize that he's his own person, after he's already taken down the general's army (which the side of him that used to be a part of that army doesn't seem to give two shits about).
I just had to vent because jesus did this game leave a bad aftertaste.
I though it was a solidly fun game with an amazing art style and music. After a while you really can exploit combat, mostly by flying around constantly, but there are some tricky secrets to find that require you to really master the physics engine. Also one time I got a secret that was supposed to require the double-jump without having it and I felt awesome. One thing I will say is that it plays SO much better on a controller. Like holy shit when I plugged in my DualShock 3 to the PC it made an enormous difference in my enjoyment of the gameplay.
I think I posted about the game here after I played it, and I think I had a lot of the same story complaints. Like yes, the story is absolutely terrible and at times nonsensical, and the character motivations and actions are totally off. It's by far the worst thing about the game. Especially how toward the very end they sort of reveal the "truth" about what's going on, and the genocide, and this whole technology that was lost, and then… the game just ends? What someone told me, though I never fact-checked it, is that basically the game was meant to be roughly twice as long (possibly more), but there were budget or other development problems. Gaius wasn't meant to be anywhere near the final boss. I think he was meant to have been being controlled somehow. So I suppose in the context of "oh this story is actually under 50% developed," it doesn't feel quite as bad.