Jurassic Park came out when I was 6 years old. I was obsessed with dinosaurs. And space still fascinates me to this day. Especially if I’m having a bad day, I watch a video about the vastness of space, and how insignificant we all are. It’s comforting in an odd way.
8:31 The reason why there is so much coffee is actually really simple. Alan Wake is a Finnish game and one weird think about Finland is that it's the world's largest coffee consumer country. Literally, Fins typically consume 3-5 cups of coffee per day. It's a really weird part of our culture.
Yeah I see it almost as an unintentional way of creating small mysteries in AW2 which shows how you could actually do it *intentionally* if you wanted. Definitely threw me for a loop when I first played. AW2 is the best Game I've played in years
About outer wilds vs clear goals - the game actually goes out of it's way to guide you. You know what the questions are. It's built around the idea of "whoa, this is cool, but why..." => "oh, I see, but why..." => "oh, IDK" => an hour later, on other part of the world => "oh, now I get it, lemme go back there"... What you've described in Elden Ring with that wind rock thingy is the whole of Outer Wilds. So yeah, it has quite clear goals. There wasn't a spot in which I didn't have anything to solve. There were spots where I was stuck. But always clear goals. Always obvious that my knowledge gets larger. Always progressing. It's very gamey game in that regard. Impressively so, given it's genre.
Definitely, the game is paced really well for what it is. But you definitely still need to develop a trust in the game to push yourself forward. I understand why someone wouldn't fall in love with it despite its many positive elements
I'm a simple man. I see Hollow Knight in the thumbnail: I click. But, seriously, Hollow Knight is my favorite game simply for many of the reasons you brought up. But, also, for the cohesion between aspects. I've yet to find another game that is so good at combining art design, music, tone, themes, lore, and even gameplay into one specific experience. That feeling of tragedy and loss, yet mixed perfectly with wonder and beauty. That sense of woeful insignificance as you realize how huge and old this fallen kingdom is, only to have that dawning sense of "Wait. I may be of great importance." The world feels completely organic, with seemingly meaningless background details adding to the ambiguity that makes every room a new discovery waiting to be made. NPCs add some much-needed levity amidst the harshest of difficulty curves but also provide some of the most emotionally devastating moments. Couple all of this with an almost open-world amount of exploration freedom and you somehow have a metroidvania with no two identical playthroughs on RU-vid. This freedom, combined with the cohesion mentioned earlier and the insane attention to detail culminates in a world that stops feeling like a game, because everything feels organic and purposeful. I love this game and its community so much, and I can't wait to see the explosion of fan theories, art pieces, and speedruns online once Silksong finally comes out. Here's hoping for 2025. Best wishes, Asad, from the entire hollow head fanbase, and may your every journey be meandering and wondrous.
i love the concept of ambiguous games, and have a huge respect for them. unfortunately my brain is NOT wired for most of them, and i have a short fuse when hitting obstacles that lack a clear solution so i end up rage-quitting embarrassingly quickly. tears of the kingdom is perfect for my adhd brain; it has general directions for what you should do eventually whenever you get around to it, in a world FULL of things to explore. also, i really want to finish outer wilds one day, bc the time i spent with it was wonderful! but the movement mechanics and my terrible spatial awareness makes it impossible to get in a flow state. it's like i'm chasing a carrot on a stick, and boy am i getting tired. one day, though! one day!
I'm still very curious about space, but the difference from when I was a kid is that I now understand how much I don't understand about it, and I understand how much work it would take for me to just begin to scratch the surface of understanding space.
I don't get why some people have difficulty with finding out where to go next in Nine Sols. There is almost always just 1 new path that you unlock with new abilities and you can always talk to Abacus if the game doesn't straight up tell you where to go. I found Hollow Knight way more confusing until I unlocked all the movement abilities
Idk, maybe it's partially because that game has a LOT of dialogue and I admittedly struggled to pay attention to it all. There may be hints that im missing cause if that. There's usually only 1 path like you mentioned but there's not a ton of indications of where that path actually is, and the collapsible map design is a little flat which makes it even harder to figure out what's now opened up for you. It was the most I struggled with a metroidvania map in a long time, I can't quite put my finger on why but there's definitely something missing. HK can be a little confusing too so I get that
Incredible video. Seriously, I’m glad that there is so much talent on this platform. The editing is fantastic, the script was really well written and presented, you should have 10x the amount of subs you do
The term weanie came from walt disney and theme parks. To lure people deeper into areas so they know there is more to an area so people dont clog up opening areas. He said it came from him training his dog with hot dogs (aka weanies)
I totally get the feeling that you’ve been having with nine sols. However I can’t be sure but as someone who probably spends less time playing games overall and sit down with one game till I’m done I feel like it’s not as big of an issue. I could usually remember what I was doing as soon as I looked at the amount of the map I had discovered. Also because of how much I enjoyed the game I pretty much forgave all the little problems it had and I would hope anyone who enjoyed it that much wouldn’t put it down for that reason. Genuinely one of my favourite little worlds and the story building is wonderfully done
I like your emphasis on having trust both ways. When the vast majority of games do things a certain way, the vast majority of players will expect that - and vice versa. It's a tall ask for developers to bank on players changing their usual behavior, just like it's a tall ask for players to trust that changing their mindset and playing an unusual way will actually lead to a fun and unique experience. I'm not sure how a game can manage to earn that trust in its early hours though, for me, Outer Wilds clicked immediately, even though I had played nothing like it before. It's clear you need a base level of trust and open-mindedness from the player, as well as a buttload of validation from the game to confirm that yes, this is how you're expected to play, continue like that please. The OW devs had to iterate on the first few hours a lot according to the various talks they've given. Personally, though, I don't have such trust with games like TOTK. Now to be clear I had a ton of fun with the game, but some aspects frustrated me, such as the fact that I felt there were certain places I couldn't go to because the game clearly wasn't expecting me to. That distrust was largely justified: If you go explore the big mysterious hole, the game thrusts you into the final battle even though you aren't even supposed to know there is a boss there. If you reach a dungeon out of curiosity without doing every single step of the associated story segment, well you can't do anything there, not even activate the teleporter. Getting too curious about that foggy island in the sky? Well if you explore it too much you may accidentally skip 2/3rds of a lategame quest. If you happen to read the glyphs in the wrong order, you'll get a random, potentially very spoilery piece of a story that was clearly written linearly and not supposed to be randomized (unlike the one in BOTW). It feels like the developers wanted to give me a lot of freedom with its systems, but then expected me to still follow a certain linear structure to the story that wasn't even clearly laid out. Like they wanted me to not sequence break their story, but still kinda let me because absolute freedom, but also there are parts where they go "no actually nevermind do the story first please". It feels like a lack of trust in me, and in turn, I don't trust them which means I restrict myself from visiting certain places or doing certain things, because I don't want to ruin my own fun by skipping it. Which paradoxically, makes me feel *less* freedom.
Kid me: so much stuff is so cool. Science did you know a black hole is an inescapable void of blackness and you'd instantly start freezing or boiling in the vacuum of space? Did you also know that you're constantly surrounded by space and if you become an astronaut and your ship's controls break you'll never see earth again? I was a Pokemon/Transformers kids growing up.
Haven't caught up since early Capaldi days but I used to be a big fan. A lot of what I see from it nowadays seems super cheap and soulless atp so I'm not too interested in stepping back in, but the Eccleson to Smith era was great imo
@@AsadAnjum Capaldi's era concludes the Time War arc so definitely finish it imo. And yeah there's a bit of a downfall but the new era from the 60th is pretty good & lol the show actually has a good budget for once.
I wholly agree, we need both types of games - the games to just sink hours into for no reason, and the ones that you invest into the worlds of. without both, I don't think games would be where they are now - or something like that i'm just here to have fun
I was extremely excited that you mentioned bloodborne. The from soft games do horror a completely different way but you experienced an uneasy feeling the entire time you play them
interesting! I definitely think this kind of stuff can be individual to a player. i've noticed some care very much about a game "trusting" them and not wanting their intelligent insulted. for me, i've not really found myself concerned with that. my biggest concern is time. I've never had my intelligence insulted by a game, but I have certainly felt my time has been wasted. i dont really care if i have "ownership," i'm totally cool just being here to experience someone else's vision, as long as I can feel that they BELIEVE in that vision.🙂
Spoiler warning: Yeah, I didn't want to reveal if there was any meaning to the coffee because I think its a legitimate theory that people may also have while playing the game, and if I just said "it doesn't lead anywhere" I'd feel like I was ruining the fun. Although interestingly there's some actual coffee shenanigans in the AW2 DLCs that made me feel validated for tweaking out on the whole coffee thing while playing the game lol
@TheGlowingManYT yeah coffee isn't actually part of any main mysteries in AW2 but regardless it shows how something so small can capture your attention and get you to develop theories. Whether that's the intention or not, the game being so secretive about everything is what makes it so effective. And even having an elseworld story with the whole coffee thing was fun enough payoff for me
Very small nitpick, but the game title is just Outer Wilds. You may be getting the The from The Outer Worlds. Anyways, fantastic video, and you pulled from tons of great examples :)
Lmao the main reason coffee is so prevalent in Alan Wake 2 is mainly just because of referencing Twin Peaks, which it is insanely inspired by. I don’t think it’s much more than that
Spoiler-free suggestion for while you're playing Outer Wilds. Near the very end, someone is going to ask you a question. I suggest saying no, as that lead to what, to me, is the most powerful line in the game and perfectly sums up the abstract concepts it's been putting forth.
You didn't watch the video, or else you would've known that he does criticise games that can't be played without an external guide. There is a distinction between a game that has secrets and a game that can't be played at all without an external guide. He also names examples of games doing this poorly. There is no such thing as a video that is simultaneously "unbiased" and giving the creator's opinion on a topic. If you read the title of this video and didn't expect the creator to express their own opinion on this topic, then that's on you, not the video. Your comment would be completely fine if you just removed the last sentence. You are entitled to your own opinion about certain types of games, but your last sentence implied the video said things that it didn't actually say. If you provided an actual critique of what was said in the video, and addressed when the creator acknowledged your complaints (which he did), then you could make an argument about the quality of the arguments in the video. But as it stands, you're just making a fool of yourself because you had some bad experiences with games like this and had a visceral reaction to the idea that someone else actually had a good time in these games.
