Trust Me, You Can Put a Good Book Down

I’ve been keeping a list of every game I played this year. This way, at the end of the year, I can properly keep track of my ‘Games of the Year’. This comes after I entirely forgot I completed Moonlighter last year despite really enjoying it, winding up with me omitting it from my end of year list. I’m running into a problem though: What do I do when I don’t want to finish a game?

At first this wasn’t an issue, every game I finished I put “- completed” next to and everything else I put an estimate of time spent with it. This was fine for games as a service that never end and roguelikes you beat time and time again. 

I’m going to be honest the best part of Resident Evil 6 is that damn hilarious logo.

Then I started Resident Evil 6.

So, yes, this issue is partly my fault for playing what is admittedly a bad video game. And while I enjoyed Leon’s campaign, it felt like catching up with an old friend after playing Resi 4 and 2 in the past year. I slogged my way through Chris’ Campaign with only the faintest of interest. By the time I reached the Sherry campaign though, I couldn’t keep going. I gave up after two chapters. It took me 10 hours to walk away from a game which, from the beginning, I wasn’t enjoying. Some of this may be my anal need to play as many of the mainline games in a series I can when I start one. But I think I’ve realised it's something else, something much more frustrating.

I came to this realisation when I tried to be a swashbuckling pirate. I really should like Assassin Creed IV: Black Flag, but I don’t. I wanted to buy it when it first released but I was saving up for a PS4, not to mind games for the damn thing. By time I did get into the then next generation of consoles, Unity had just released and enthusiasm for the franchise had nosedived, so I just never did. 

This year though, I’ve slowly been exploring The Witcher 3 and with the amount of comparisons the AC franchise now draws to that game and the excitement around Valhalla I decided to jump in. Where better than what many consider the peak of the traditional Assassin’s Creed franchise. It made perfect sense, the game is a soft reboot of the modern story, I’d get a grounding for the feel of the traditional AC games so I could appreciate changes and it was developed by Ubisoft Montreal, the team behind other high points in the series like AC 2 and Origins. But nothing clicked.

The movement which is so often praised feels incredibly restrictive today, with only obvious mantling and grapple points being viable routes. This was fine during the 6th generation of consoles, but since then I’ve spent time playing games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. In BOTW and even more traditional open-world adventures like Horizon: Zero Dawn the ability to climb any cliff face, entirely freeform, is liberating. Having a free-running assassin jump backwards because he couldn’t find a foothold in a cobbled brick wall most certainly isn’t. 

The ship combat, which I was promised was the standout feature of this game, was probably the biggest disappointment. While I loved sailing the open seas with my crew singing shanties, everytime fine control was required or I was thrust into combat it became a hassle of dizzying strafing and unresponsive controls. 

This is cool. But boat stealth is just the worst.

So, I disliked both core mechanics of the game instantly and the modern-day sections, while amusingly self-aware at first, are somehow less engaging than anything I’ve seen of Desmond’s story. I should have dropped Black Flag after 30 minutes.  But I didn’t. I played for almost 10 hours. Why? Because I should like it. 

Much118x’s gifs are excellent but they do illustrate a point.

We like to think that any game can be good and any game can be bad. It is why Minecraft is the single most bought game in history and E.T.  is maligned despite its licence, because we know what is good. But in recent years this has changed. There is an assumption of quality that goes with a certain look. Resident Evil 6 has it, Black Flag has it, Detroit: Become Human and Days Gone both have it. The look of AAA quality. The multitude of assets, the cleanliness of character models. All of these games look like blockbusters and at some point it was decided this was the look of quality. At some point these games got an inherent leg up when it comes to critical judgment. It’s the reason I played 10 hours of the dullest Resident Evil, it’s the reason I failed boat stealth missions over and over.

At some point certain games gain more than the benefit of the doubt, but the assumption of being good. At some point this nebulous look of goodness, turned into a pressure on players to enjoy these games.  Every time a AAA game comes out and a cohort of people say they don’t like it, we wind up with comment sections and timelines abuzz with how impossible this is. This is what happens when a game’s style becomes its seal of quality, the chance for nuanced criticism, positive or negative, evaporates. 

When I put down Black Flag I felt guilty. I felt guilty for not liking something I wasn’t enjoying. But then, a little while later, I felt relief. I didn’t have to justify stopping playing this game to anyone, I simply didn’t enjoy the act of playing it. If you’re not enjoying reading 1984, stop forcing it, it’ll make you hate reading, if you’re not enjoying Final Fantasy VII, maybe it’s OK to leave it, you don’t owe a piece of media anything.

“tHiS mOvIe Is So GoOd, LoOk At It’S gRaPhIcS!” - Noboby, 2017

Why does this reasoning apply to games? Yes, Valerian and The City of a Thousand Planets looked a million bucks (or 209 million), but that didn’t result in people saying “You can’t not like this, look at it!”, even people that like that movie accept that there are many who don’t. The tribalistic video game fandoms we create damn actual criticism. Games are a strange form of media where hype and build-up are as much part of the product as the end result, and when so much of the perceived quality of a piece of entertainment is based on expectations, of course we feel like we have to like something… at least a certain amount.

This phenomenon is most prevalent in games but it’s not exclusive to them, look at those who demand you enjoy Joker or Batman vs Superman. These were movies with the look, expectation and the built-in fanbase that somehow guaranteed them a certain level of critical acclaim before anyone had seen them. Reviewers get harangued for 6-out-of-10s and social media accounts get harassed for being ‘contrarian’. So over time we bottle up our actual feelings about the highest tier products and everything boils down to being “Fine, I guess” when we’re asked.

Putting down a good game shouldn’t be hard but it is. Because when it comes to video games, you don’t get to decide what good is anymore.