idle thought #716

I haven’t watched a playthrough of the new Silent Hill 2 yet (that might have changed by the time I post this) but everything I’ve seen says it is surprisingly good and Bloober didn’t mess it up. I would like to point out that that doesn’t mean we were wrong about Bloober before, merely that people and teams have the capacity to change and listen to criticism. I am not just parroting statements I’ve heard elsewhere. I liked Layers of Fear the first time I saw it, but on a rewatch I did notice a lot of the ableism (I’d been previously oblivious to it and still overuse a lot of ableism to this day but am trying to improve). I watched several playthroughs of Blair Witch (unfamiliar with original movie) and was bored enough that the only thing that kept me going was that I was trying to watch all of Mark’s and MrKravin’s work, right up until the end in which I went “you are the monster, the only way to stop it is to kill yourself” and went ‘wait huh??’ Every character and the plot was really judgmental and not very sympathetic to PTSD sufferers. The Medium was boring enough I didn’t even make it through the first episode of Gab Smolder’s playthrough, so I’m sure I’m missing some context. I did watch the entire part with the, uh. Was it called Child-Eater? And the flashback, and then the ending, and went ‘this is telling the same message as Blair Witch’. I came to those conclusions independently and also it killed any drive to go back and actually finish watching Observer. After hearing they did well on two of the games in their library, maybe I’ll actually go back and finish that one too. I also saw some ‘this is exactly like DmC’ comments by the usual suspects and just had to roll my eyes. Yes, the bugbear that people can’t let go of ‘customers not spending money on something that wasn’t made appealing to them based on marketing’. DmC turned out to be a decent game, but the issue there was that it wasn’t made for fans of the original as the endless mockery from the PR team made clear and wasn’t meant to be. You could like both, but in the same way you can like both thrillers and romance novels or both vanilla and chocolate or strawberry. Fundamentally, the flavor is just different. You cannot and should not attempt to make something that appeals to every single person in the world, because you have a target audience (of people who like vanilla or chocolate or strawberry, for instance). Here, SH2R is turning out to be a very good game that appeals to the fans, and the criticism might have been a good thing because it seems like they were actually humble enough and cared about reception enough to listen—to the remaining members of Team Silent, to the fans—when crafting their game and did, in fact, want the original fans as their target audience.